Commencement, May 7, 2006

Remarks

Chairman Bates and members of the Board of Trustees, distinguished guests and faculty, parents, family members, friends, and most important of all, our graduating seniors:

This is indeed a glorious day for all of us here. For you graduating seniors, who are about to throw off the last vestiges of adolescence, this is a day of liberation and coming of age. For you parents who have sacrificed mightily for at least the last seventeen years, from Kindergarten on, to make certain that this moment would ever come, the day is at hand when your daughter or son becomes self-sufficient in this world. For the Alumni Office, this is also a glorious day, since we have in the class of 2006 a large and enthusiastic cadre of soon-to-be former students, who show great promise of giving back in time, talent, and treasure to the institution that has nurtured them and watched them grow in mind and spirit over the last few years. It is wholly appropriate, then, that we take this time to celebrate what is universally acknowledged to be one of the great turning points in the lives of our graduating seniors.

Look at yourselves, you graduating seniors. For many of you, this will be the last time that you don a robe and put on a funny hat and march penguin-like with others who are dressed in the same comical manner as you in a formal academic procession. At this moment, you are in a strange state of limbo that was identified a century ago by the Belgian ethnographer Arnold Van Gennep as the condition of liminality. It was Van Gennep who coined the term “rites of passage,” and for him, being in a liminal state meant being between stages of life. In your case, the two important stages are those of studenthood on the one hand and full-fledged adulthood on the other.

When you got up this morning and went to have breakfast with family and friends, you were in most regards still a student. You probably wore flip flops and cut-offs, and a sweatshirt that probably had a hole in it. Yes, everything about you when you got up this morning said that you were still a student, that you still had the habits of mind of a student. But when you leave here today, you will in the eyes of the world have been transformed. You may still dress like a student and you may even still feel like a student, but the expectations that will be laid upon you—by your parents, by your former teachers, by me, and by those whom you meet from here on—will be different, far different from what you have experienced so far in your lives.

Your entrance in the state of liminality occurred when you put on your cap and gown after breakfast this morning. I know the drill. You probably said something like this to your room-mate, “Can you believe the administration makes us still wear this stupid get-up? Why do we put up with this? I know. I’ll wear my cutoffs under my robe, and my sweatshirt with a hole in it. They’ll never know!” To which your room-mate may have replied, “Tell you what. I’m not going to wear anything under my robe. They’ll never know!” Well, let me tell you. It’s been done before. And we do know.

This state of liminality is, for all its brevity, an important one for you, for your parents, and for the whole Lewis & Clark community, if only because commencement is one of a dwindling number of occasions in which we as a society celebrate the transitions in life. As Van Gennep said a century ago, acknowledging the liminal moment is a critical act in consciously accepting and celebrating both what went before and what comes after as distinct and separate stages in human life. So in this liminal moment, let me reflect briefly upon what has gone before in your lives as students and upon what comes after.

As students at Lewis & Clark College, you have been part of a great enterprise in learning, the methods and purposes of which should have become apparent to you by now. Although you already had many years of learning behind you when you first arrived here at Lewis & Clark, the first serious encounter that you had with education as we envision it was in the course “Inventing America.” Inventing America, which was offered for the last time this past year and is being replaced this coming fall by a new “great books” course, “Exploration and Discovery,” provided you with two intense semesters of immersion in many of the ideas that have created our American civilization in the forge of historical experience. Along the way, you became familiar with the great issues that continue to engage us as a social polity. It can not be said of any student who has spent four years on Palatine Hill that she or he has not been introduced, and intimately so, to the seminal ideas and main historical currents that have made us the people we are today.

From your first year of exploring and testing yourself academically, you proceeded to select a major and to chart a course for the remainder of your undergraduate career. So many choices! So little time! You may have gone the conventional route, as I did as an undergraduate, of choosing a single major. Or you may have cobbled together a joint major or a double or even a triple major, or you may have created your very own idiosyncratic major from among the great array of possibilities that are represented among our course offerings. Whatever route you took, you were challenged along the way to confront your intellectual assumptions about the world and about yourself. If we did our job right, you had occasional moments of self-doubt, not to say of despair, at the monumentality of the task you were undertaking, that of becoming an educated human being. But if we did do the job right, you came through the ordeal an improved specimen, aware as never before of the tremendous potential of the human mind, of your mind, and of the great power that knowledge and the capacity to increase in knowledge convey.

Your years at Lewis & Clark have also been a time of personal maturation for each of you. There have been many moments of exuberation, much heartache, many, many hours of laughter, and a few moments of profound grief. Your class experienced the suicide of one of your members, an event that for those of you who here to experience it remains seared in your memory, both collectively and individually, together with the myriad unanswered and unanswerable questions, the great incomprehensibility that accompanies the tragedy of self-destruction. None of us who is not a member of your class can presume to understand the particular mix of joys and sorrows, of gain and loss, of victory and defeat, of coming together and drifting apart that define you as a group, as the Class of 2006. But that you have suffered together and rejoiced together binds you to each other in ways that neither the passage of time nor the separation of miles can ever entirely undo.

As we continue on through your liminal moment, let us contemplate for a moment what comes next. In a few hours, you will finish packing and leave us behind. You will over the course of the next few years begin to find how useful your time here at Lewis & Clark truly has been. For those of you going straight on to graduate school or who have found a job and are set to begin that next stage of your life, the relevance of a Lewis & Clark education will be immediately apparent. You have the skills of discernment, analysis, and communication that you have learned in the classroom and laboratory and in your interactions with your peers and teachers here on Palatine Hill, and you will use them from the first day of your life after graduation. But there are still those among you for whom the future remains a great unknown, and for you in particular, I promise that what you have learned here will stand you in excellent stead.

I predict that not one of you graduating here today will enter a career or a field of work that will exist in anything resembling its current form twenty years from now. I predict that not only will you change your careers several times over the course of your lives, but also that those careers that you do choose will themselves be transformed several times during the next fifty years. Such is the awesome effect of technology on the work that we do. In such a world, the superb liberal education that you have received here at Lewis & Clark will, if you are clever, continue to provide you with the ability to discern, analyze, and communicate as you move through the stages of your life.