in last year's Baccalaureate address, President Drew Faust urged graduating seniors to make career choices for love rather than money; she began this year’s address by noting just how much has changed since then.
Alluding to bank failures, financial fraud, and the swine flu, she deemed this “the year when the world shifted.”
Last year, Faust had to prompt students to look beyond financial-sector jobs; this year, she said, “the world has changed that for you.”
Her advice for the class of 2009: view the uncertain climate not as reason for caution but as opportunity. “It may not seem like a gift now,” she said, “but it is. Instead of waking up when you are 45 suddenly wondering what your life means, you get to try something adventurous and uncertain while you are young and resilient.”
Looking back to her own graduation year, 1968, Faust saw a similar crossroads: “My class believed we would do nothing less than end racism, poverty, and war. The only question in our minds was whether we’d get it done by the time of our fifth reunion.”
But gradually, she said, “I watched that sense of possibility…erode, as later graduates retreated into the private sphere, into adults making the best life they could for themselves.”
Now, she said, “you have been given that world back—the world of the possible—in a way that hasn’t been true since my generation.”
Uncertainty “demands new things from us,” she said: “not just going through the motions, in default mode, but improvising our way to new solutions.”
Faust considered the nature of improvisation, noting that the word itself comes from the Latin “not foreseen.” She quoted jazz musician Charlie Parker—“Master your instrument, master the music, and then forget all that…and just play”—and Paul Simon: “Improvisation is too good to leave to chance.” She challenged students to find “that magical crossroads of rigor and ease, structure and freedom, reason and intuition”—even if it is within the financial sector, which, she said, “needs fresh eyes and strong constitutions.”
The whole world, she said, “needs good improvisers.”
in what is perhaps Harvard’s oldest public ceremony besides Commencement itself, Faust kept her own references modern. Besides Parker and Simon, she quoted writer Joan Didion, physicist David Bohm, physician and Harvard Medical School professor Atul Gawande, film director Mike Leigh, TV host Stephen Colbert, and President Obama.
Keeping in mind that the audience for the address changes from one year to the next, she used some familiar jokes:
Last year was my first Harvard baccalaureate, and I marveled at the thought I was standing in a pulpit dressed in the garb of a Puritan minister. I was sure that the very thought would have prompted the likes of Increase and Cotton Mather into the first Mather Lather. They might even have renewed calls for the extirpation of witches.
Her reduce-reuse-recycle approach apparently worked: laughs could be heard over the speakers in Tercentenary Theatre, where the service was being simulcast for relatives because the limited seating in Memorial Church accommodates only the graduating class.
And there were also new jokes: “In keeping with other reductions of the times, I have cut my remarks by 30 percent.”
The service, a Harvard tradition since the seventeenth century, also included remarks from Peter J. Gomes, Plummer professor of Christian morals and Pusey minister in the Memorial Church. It included readings from the Analects of Confucius, the Hebrew Bible, Hindu scriptures, the Quran, and the New Testament, and the singing of Psalm 78 to the tune of St. Martin’s, a Baccalaureate tradition since at least 1806.
As Gomes’s message in the program said, “the occasion is both joyful and solemn, intimate and public, filled with the exuberance of youth and sustained by venerable and weighty tradition.”
It is meant, Gomes said, to imbue seniors with “a few last bits of godly advice” before they are “thrust” forth into a world “little prepared for you, and you perhaps less prepared for it.”
Harvard, Gomes reassured them, “nevertheless maintains high hopes for you.”
listen to the 2008 Baccalaureate address (Faust's first) here, and the 2007 address by interim president (and president emeritus) Derek Bok here.
See the full schedule of Commencement week events here.
