Blenda J. Wilson's Commencement Address

Bard College at Simon’s Rock
Great Barrington, Massachusetts
May 17, 2008

Provost Marcy, distinguished platform party, families, friends, and, especially, graduates, please know how honored I am to join you for this wonderful celebration of achievement and promise.

My heartiest congratulations to the graduates of the class of 2008! And my personal thanks to Mary Marcy and my colleague, Ellen Lagemann, for the honor of their invitation.

Having worked in academic institutions for a long time, I have organized most of my adult life around the seasons of the academy. So May is always a special time of the year, signaling completion, pride, looking forward to renewal, and the leisure of summer.

I really like commencements! The newest crop of graduates represents another chance for us to get it right, to do better as a society, to truly live up to our ideals. The pride we share in the promise of this class is a collective celebration of hope renewed.

As wonderful as the commencement ceremony is for the graduates and gathered celebrants, however, I must tell you that, for the speaker, it is a very humbling experience. The commencement speaker is supposed to expound profound wisdom and inspiration so that the graduates will go forth and pursue the bright futures they have earned through their hard work and considerable talents.

But I also know that, while most people retain vivid memories of the day they graduated, they could not tell you who the commencement speaker was, or what she said, if their lives depended upon it.

Some years ago I asked the senior class president at the university I worked at to tell me what the graduates most wanted in a commencement speech. He took a few minutes to think before answering, “short.” Now you understand what I mean by humbling. I’ll do my best to heed his advice so I won’t have to feel bad if you don’t remember anything I say either.

Everyone’s view of education is autobiographical. Our image of school or college is based on what it was like years ago when we were students. And the advice we’re inclined to give at a ceremony like this is based on the life experiences we’ve had since.

I might tell you, for instance, that I was the first in my family to go to college. We were a working class family, meaning that both of my parents worked in blue and white collar jobs, and as long as we could look forward to payday, we didn’t consider ourselves poor. When I was a child, I don’t recall there being a term like working poor. The more operative phrase was making ends meet. In those days, if you worked hard and managed well, you could make ends meet. With five children in our family, my mother was gifted at making ends meet.

When it came time for me to go to college, my three younger siblings were in high school and my older sister was in nursing school. What could not be accommodated in my parents’ salaries was tuition for me to go to a private residential college, which was my desire.

I wanted to be a teacher. So, I applied to women’s colleges, which I was told were providing generous scholarships to “Negro girls” with good grades. With those good grades and considerable chutzpah, I enrolled in Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on an academic scholarship and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and secondary education four years later.

Today I am the acting president of Cedar Crest College and the most profound lesson of my lifetime, which I therefore pass on to you today, is that unlike a race, which has a beginning, a course, and an end, life is truly a journey—some parts are planned and work according to plan; many parts are accidental, including accidents; and with the benefit of a good education, good health, ample love, and the grace of God, you can end up in totally unexpected places that make for a great and rewarding journey.

That was my experience and the experience of many of my contemporaries who grew up in the remarkable transformative movements of the 1960s and 70s. The spirit of optimism and idealism that forced open the doors of opportunity to young people, women, minorities, and the poor provided both the pathway and the passion that shaped me and my generation.

We fought poverty, challenged segregation, expanded higher education and financial aid. We joined the Peace Corps and challenged convention in all forms, sometimes just for practice.

In fact, one of the reasons I was so excited about coming to Simon’s Rock is that this college is of my generation. The bodacious idea that young people of 15 or 16 could pursue college-level work, and, better yet, that college work could defy convention and be truly integrative, rigorous, and transformative—Simon’s Rock is a 1960s invention. You’re not lying when you say, “No other college in the country does what we do.”

That Rockers enter college after 10th or 11th grade is distinctive enough. But that you have already attained a remarkable record of intellectual engagement, leadership, exploration, creativity, and original scholarship is commendable, to say the least, and astounding. You are pioneers and you have every right to be proud.

As I think about your future, it occurs to me that your biggest challenge may not be whether you will be successful in pursuing additional study or a career—it’s pretty much a given that you will be—but how those environments you will encounter outside of Simon’s Rock may affect you. That’s what I want to talk about today.

Do you remember the Lewis Carroll poem, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”?

 “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things:
 Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings,
 And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.”

A colleague of mine, inspired by the Walrus’s unconventional spirit, penned two additional lines:

“The time has come,” he also said, “for newer ways of thinking,
So that my spirit, every year, will grow instead of shrinking.”
His lines triggered my thinking about you.

I’ll come back to those lines later.

Because of the wonderful education you have received here, it is inevitable that you will have the opportunity to join the ranks of the successful and powerful in our society. Indeed this is the time of the year when our media persistently chronicles the facts about the difference in earning power between college graduates and individuals who are not fortunate enough to complete college. Over an adult lifetime a college graduate earns twice as much as a person who only completes high school, more than $2 million as a matter of fact. And while I understand that money is not a prime motivator for Rockers, some parents may be pleased to hear that figure. And it’s certainly better than making ends meet.

It is indisputable that there is a considerable payoff in today’s society for those with more years of education, even beyond money, because we rightly equate more education with more knowledge and greater ability. And as I said earlier, graduation symbolizes our collective hope that your generation will in fact make a better world. Or as the Walrus would say, provide better ways of thinking.

We are living, however, in a post-Enron, post-Tyco, post-Elliot Spitzer society. One in which dishonesty and lack of integrity have reached into the World Bank, the White House, and even the hallowed halls of higher education with the revelations about conflicts of interest in the student loan industry.

But let us be clear that these transgressions are not the result of lack of knowledge or lack of education. I would wager that many of the individuals involved were educated in what we might consider our finest colleges and universities.

No, these failures are not from ignorance or not having learned right from wrong. They are the result of greed and the habits that accompany unchallenged privilege. By that I mean the habits of entitlement that privileged individuals in exclusive settings consider their due.

Every one of the scandals we’ve witnessed took place in organizations that celebrate privilege and exclusivity.

Let’s talk about wealth in this country and the gap between rich and poor. Forbes magazine’s annual list of the wealthiest people in the United States in 1998 included 200 people whose aggregate wealth was more than $1 trillion, an average of $5 billion apiece. Their personal wealth was roughly equal to the Gross Domestic Product of France and greater than the GDP of the entire continent of Africa, home to 600 million people.

This was true at the same time that 50 million Americans lived below or near the poverty line; at the same time that 1 billion people in the world suffered from chronic hunger and 40,000 people died each day because they were sickened and weak from hunger. Every day we have a net global increase of 203,510 people and 96 percent of this increase is in the poorest nations of the world. We need better ways of thinking about a society that tolerates, even celebrates, such levels of individual wealth alongside such appalling human suffering.

What has happened to the American ideal of a meritocracy that promises social and economic mobility? The Benjamin Franklin story of the child of a candle and soap maker, starting out as a penniless printer’s apprentice, rising to wealth and international prominence is a part of our national self-portrait.

With the improvement of living standards after World War II and the subsequent premium on completing high school and college, the children and grandchildren of immigrants prospered, as did the cultural belief. But the Chicago Fed economist Bhashkar Mazumder wrote in 2005, “The apple falls even closer to the tree than we thought.”

Education plays an important role in increasing mobility, but at the same time, race plays a strong role in limiting mobility. According to the University of Michigan’s long-running survey on economic success, 17 percent of whites born to the bottom 10 percent of families remained there as adults, but 42 percent of blacks born to the bottom remained at the bottom.

Despite the expansion of education, the growth of community colleges, attempts at affirmative action, and other efforts to give disadvantaged groups a better chance, the promise of social and economic mobility has essentially stalled. And 70 percent of the world’s people maintain an ethnocentric worldview. We need better ways of thinking about how we can become a country of unbounded opportunity.

Perhaps we’ve done better with gender equity! Yes, and no. If we look at the increased numbers of women in public life, which has its own form of status and privilege, there has been considerable, measurable progress. Today, there are 13 female senators and 61 women in the House of Representatives, for example. But in corporate America, which represents the greatest opportunity for both privilege and wealth, women represent half of the workforce, but only eight Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Over two thirds of those Fortune 500 companies have no female corporate officers. It is estimated that at the current rate of improvement in gender equity, it will take 40 years for the number of female corporate officers to equal the number of men. We need better ways of thinking about fully utilizing the abilities and talents of girls and women in our country.

I didn’t choose poverty, the rich-poor gap, stalled social mobility, and gender inequality because there aren’t other areas of need and concern in our world that merit your attention. And I hope and trust that you will devote your considerable talent to whatever cause ignites your passion.

I chose those issues because, unlike Simon’s Rock, where important and noble values are in the DNA, you are likely to make your living in organizations of privilege where the habits of entitlement prevail.

Robert Kennedy once said, “Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.”

That has been my experience, too. I’ve known people of good will, people who have been raised with good values and in integrated environments, people who believe themselves to be leaders who, nevertheless, find themselves working in corporations with a homogeneous workforce or living in an exclusive, gated community, or attending a segregated church or golf clubs, perhaps accidentally.

So I ask you to take some time today to reflect on how your college experience helped you locate within yourself the passion, values, and courage to use your education not merely for personal gain and reward, but for noble purpose.

You have participated in volunteer and community service activities to create ways for diverse people to celebrate their commonality as well as their differences.

You have learned to provide leadership that resolves the contradictions between our principles and our actions.

You know that we can do more together than each of us can do alone, and that everyone can be understood through the lens of empathy and compassion.

Because the world so badly needs your help and because you are a Rocker, the best of the best, educated for a better world, my hope is that those values will continue to guide you in your future. Choose environments to live in, to work in, to play in where “your spirit, every year, will grow instead of shrinking.”

Thank you for your kind attention. Congratulations, graduates, and Godspeed.