It’s graduation season again, and The Chronicle of Higher Education muses on the “commencement communications gap,” offering some advice to this year’s speakers in “Not My Generation” (link via Arts & Letters Daily).
Somewhere on an American campus this month, commencement speaker I. B. Antiquated will warn fledglings about to flap their wings into the brave blue yonder that Fallujah “is not Khe Sanh, Basra is not Long Binh, and Tikrit is not Hue.”
The students, uncomfortably sweating in their caps and gowns, will yawn and think, “Whatever,” and “It’s like, what is he talking about?”
If I settle back in the Bay Area, I think I’d like to make a regular thing of attending commencement at Stanford. Sure, there is sometimes an interesting luminary to give the commencement address, but true entertainment comes in the form of the Wacky Walk. For the degree candidates, there’s no stuffy procession; that’s usually left to the faculty. At the main ceremony in the stadium, the graduating class struts onto the field wearing caps and gowns, yes, but also any assortment of costumes, signs, balloons, you name it–the bolder the better, partly just to be identifiable to one’s family sitting high up in the stands. My friends and I all wore bright orange lifevests over our gowns. (We told people “we’re all in the same boat.” Given more time and resources, we might’ve been able to create some kind of tangible boat out of cardboard. It’s all very Bay to Breakers.) The departmental ceremonies, which take place afterwards, are smaller, usually more decorous affairs; I took off my lifevest and placed it under my seat.
But back to speeches, our speaker that year was former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky (MA, PhD, 1966). In an address I remember fondly, he basically took on the task of deconstructing the ceremony we call commencement, asking the very blunt question, “What are we doing here?” When you have a few minutes, check it out. It’s a good read. An excerpt:
On some deeper level, I think that what we see today is the celebration here of the two great obligations or standards, the two great tests that apply to every tribe and culture on earth, the two values by which any human society must be judged. These two measures of any people, of any nation, challenge us Americans at the end of what has been called “the American century” in special ways. These secular rituals and extraordinary gowns and processions invoke those two monumental standards and propose that on this splendid campus in the midst of a prosperous, technologically sophisticated society, which this is in some ways the center, in a richly burgeoning mass culture, we do continue, so these exercises are meant to assert, to fulfill the ancient fundamental purposes of community.
I mean the two great requirements of the human animal, without which human community is corrupt or useless, namely, caring for the young ones and honoring the wisdom of the old ones, including the ways and wisdom of the dead. The tribe or community or nation that fails at either of these missions brings woe and destruction on itself. Today the graduates pass symbolically from being the objects of the first concern, young ones who have been nurtured, to bearing the responsibilities of the second, those who are supposed to care for the young and who will preserve and extend the wisdom of the dead.
Wow. Sure gives a sense of purpose to sitting out there in a silly get-up surrounded by thousands of people for a couple of hours on a hot Sunday morning.