Trinity College

Members of the Class of 2008, in the scant four years since you and I began our association with Trinity College, all of us—my colleagues on the faculty and staff, our trustees, and each of you—have experienced a remarkable array of events. Now, you are sitting there, wanting me to get on with this ceremony, almost panting for the rest of your lives to begin unfolding. One of my editors suggested, not altogether facetiously, that I should just text message my remarks to you and proceed directly to the awarding of your diplomas.

We who are older know how critical this one moment is in your lives. In four short years, you have crossed the swaying bridge from late adolescence to early adulthood, and you are now ready—impatiently so—to make your way in the world as capable, liberally educated men and women.

Commencement addresses are a dime a dozen, but compelling commencement addresses are rare indeed. If we were to take a poll of the faculty here, I imagine that they, like I, can count on two fingers the memorable commencement addresses they have heard. Most are, to use a Dean Spencerish term, platitudinous, filled with clichés and bromides, always too long, rambling all over the oratorical map. And probably for good reason, since few of us are really wise enough to know exactly what to say to you at this singular juncture in your journey to the future. You are sitting there this lovely spring Sunday morning, on your quadrangle, by the Long Walk, which has been reopened so that you, like thousands of Trinity alumni before you, may traverse it on your way to graduation. Your families are proud of what you have accomplished. Some of you in the graduating class have adventurous jobs to start tomorrow or the day after. Others of you are still contemplating, as one of you wrote to me in an e-mail last week, what will come A/T: after Trinity. Some of you are confident about what your futures will bring, others of you less certain.

Many years ago now, I heard a commencement speech by Bill Cosby. He told his audience that the brightest in the class were going to graduate “Summa Cum Laude,” others “Magna Cum Laude”, and yet others “Cum Laude.” But, he quipped, most of the class was going to graduate “Thank you Lordy.” I suspect that at least a few of you are, in like manner, just thankful that, mirabile dictu, you are about to receive your degrees—and under the benign gaze of the recently spruced up statue of Bishop Brownell no less!

In speeches I have been asked to give this spring, I have returned time and again to one theme: to the myriad differences between knowledge and wisdom. Perhaps this is because our turbulent, fractured, and media-deafened world, the world you have to navigate and, more importantly, to lead, seems to me badly out of kilter: fifty percent of American teenagers can identify neither Churchill nor Stalin; two-thirds of American seventeen year olds do not know that the Civil War took place at some time between 1850 and 1900, let alone that its dates are 1861 to 1865;¹ we have a controversial war in the Middle East, a political culture characterized by relentless nastiness and negativity, serious economic concerns on the horizon, an almost tactile loss of civility in nearly every aspect of modern life. I have of late been haunted by the vast difference between knowledge and wisdom, since that difference seems paramount all around us today.

The engineers who built the crematoria as part of the Nazi atrocities in the 1930s and 1940s had degrees from some of the best universities in Europe. They were certainly knowledgeable. They knew about steam pressures and concrete mixtures and oven temperatures and the dispersion rate of hydrogen cyanide in enclosed spaces. They knew how to organize the railway system in Germany and in Eastern Europe so boxcars full of innocent human beings could be efficiently shuttled to destinations such as Auschwitz, with its welcoming gate hideously announcing “Work Makes You Free.” They were knowledgeable in their science but barbaric in their mission. Their knowledge made possible the deaths of more than six million people, most of them Jews, whose only crime was to have been born.

In our own country’s history, as the late David Halberstam wrote in his book The Best and the Brightest, the Vietnam debacle was the product of Washington policymakers who possessed abundant knowledge but who had lost sight of the crucial difference between that knowledge and wisdom. The cost? All those columns of names now hallowed on the silent monument created by artist Maya Lin there in our nation’s capital. If you have not yet read Halberstam’s masterpiece, I commend it to you. There you will find powerful lessons to be pondered, especially today by you, our best, our brightest, who are receiving one of the signal honors of your life by graduating today from this college. Will you undertake to use your knowledge wisely, the knowledge that you have learned here under the dedicated tutelage of your faculty mentors?

The wisest person I have ever known barely had a second-grade education. After our father’s death in 1951, there in the segregated South, our Black housekeeper took care of my kid brother and me. She always called us her “two White sons.” In our earliest years in elementary school, we would come home and then never be allowed to go out to play until we had done our homework to her satisfaction. In phrases that were right out of the nineteenth century, Ruby Lee Trice would authoritatively order, day after day, “Now you little tykes march right back to your desks and do your sums. Those spelling columns of yours had better look tidy to these tired old eyes of mine.” My brother and I would march back to our desks, work some more, and then back to the kitchen we would trudge with our sums and our spelling columns. Ruby would inspect them intently and tell us, at long last, “This homework finally looks passable to me,” after which, and only after which, would she allow us to go out and play, our homework done correctly, her demandingly high standards met, our assignments having finally been blessed by her gaze of approval. When in 1961 we read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, we just knew that Miss Lee had somehow actually known Ruby and had modeled the sainted and ever so wise Calpurnia after her.

I was eleven, my kid brother nine, before it dawned on us that Ruby could not read. She had had us buffaloed all those years. She lived to be 87, and not once over the course of those ensuing decades did my brother and I ever let on that we knew she could not read.

The English word magisterial comes from the Latin noun magister which means teacher. Ruby Lee Trice was the wisest person I have ever known, a magisterial teacher, the greatest of all my teachers, teacher being the noblest word in any language. She taught us that under the color of our skin, we all had the same physical body and that we all had a heart and soul to which we had better always listen. She taught us that schooling, as she called it in her nineteenth-century diction, was critically important. And she taught us life’s most crucial, most enduring, lesson: that love is the only thing that can ever triumph over the finality of death.

The scientifically knowledgeable engineers who built the gates of hell in the 1930s and 1940s could have been taught some significant lessons from this saint, who finished only the second grade and never had had the opportunity to learn to read.

Long after you have forgotten who gave the address on your Commencement day from Trinity, remember this: knowledge yields good only when wisdom is paramount. Knowledge alone is a very dangerous thing. Always set sail for the farthest of shores, and seek wisdom to fill your sails.

At the risk of seeming too much the sentimentalist, I admit that today my consciousness is full of memories, most of them involving you, the class of 2008. We all start our years together in the fall of 2004, which seems to me no further back than last Tuesday or so. With your class flag then flying from the flag pole as it is today, you and your parents and your soon to be faculty mentors are sitting right in this very quadrangle at a revival of convocation. You are eager to begin your college educations. We discover that our financial house needs urgent repair. We get word that Trinity is one of just three liberal arts colleges receiving three-million-dollar endowment grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to establish our Center for Urban and Global Studies. You send me e-mails. The months move by. We launch the first Quest Leadership program, with many of you as the first peer leaders in Killarney Provincial Park in Canada. Some of you enroll in my seminar “The Emergence of the Modern Mind,” offered each fall. A routine inspection reveals that some of the roof dormers on Jarvis and Seabury, the oldest buildings on campus, are in danger of crashing down. This leads to emergency repairs and then to the most extensive restoration project in Trinity history. We lose Fred Pfeil to brain cancer. The campus mourns. The students, three of you in particular, act: The Fred is born in Summit Hall to commemorate our lost exemplar and friend. David Calder writes a play. One of the greatest voices of our time, Metropolitan Opera star Christine Brewer, sings an unforgettable Lessons and Carols service in the Chapel with you. You send me more e-mails. Kristina Miner goes out running one morning in December of 2005 and is hit by a car, the accident almost taking her life. She breaks both legs and her collarbone and suffers traumatic injuries to her head. Kristina is hospitalized for weeks. She is told that she might not walk ever again. But up Kristina gets, enduring hundreds of hours on treadmills and hundreds of hours in physical therapy. She never once gives up. She is going to run again, and run again Kristina does, teaching all of us important lessons about conquering adversity. We lose Hugh Ogden, who falls through the ice and drowns a few days after Christmas 2006, after having left on my voice mail on Christmas Eve a message in which he reads a poem one of you has written for his creative writing seminar and tells me what a privilege it has been to teach at Trinity for three decades. That voice mail will be there unerased on my answering machine for the rest of my life. You send me more e-mails. Near the base camp in the Himalayas, with Mount Everest looming above, some of you join me in a memorial service for Hugh Ogden at which we read his poem about teaching, wondrously entitled “We Never Tire but Flourish.” You send me more e-mails. We lose Lisa Nestor to cancer, and three Saturdays ago, several of you organize the third Relay for Life on campus. Hundreds of people turn out to honor Lisa’s memory. You send me more e-mails. David Calder writes another play. Our squash team wins every match, a decade’s worth. No one has ever seen anything like it. We attend your athletic contests, your theatre productions, your musical concerts. Women’s rowing sets a record. Baseball sets a national record, and The New York Times publishes a wonderful article about the team. The International Herald Tribune picks up the story, and people all over the world read about Trinity. You send me more e-mails. You start your final year here, and Andrew Pedro, the SGA president and a member of this class, learns during Thanksgiving vacation that his biological father had been one of the most important people in the history of Portugal in the twentieth century. And so in a few minutes, Andrew Pedro will graduate as Andrew Salgueiro Maia, his diploma bearing the name of his illustrious father, who helped topple by peaceful means Salazar’s disastrous dictatorship in 1974. Andrew’s father proved, at the age of 29, only some seven years older than you are today, that knowledge must always be led by wisdom. You send me more e-mails, but, this time, you try to say good-bye, a word whose connotations I have never been able to abide.

No one, no one, could have possibly dreamt or imagined such a script of the past four years at Trinity, but that history is very real. And somehow, we arrive, breathlessly and a little incredulously, at today. Who really knows where our four years together in this place have actually fled, if not to wherever it is that the snows of yesteryear have disappeared?

Since words, frail vehicles though they are, offer all we have at our disposal, I close with words from Walt Whitman, from his magisterial “Passage to India,” words that so moved the brilliantly talented English composer Ralph Vaughn Williams that he composed his Sea Symphony about them.

Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only…
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go.
And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all.
O my brave soul!
O farther, farther sail.
O daring joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God?
O farther, farther, farther sail!

Thank you, so many of you in the class of 2008, for your abiding friendship these past, unbelievable, four years. You will always be one of the most cherished classes of my career.

And do farther sail for the deep waters only. We are counting on it, and we are counting on you.

¹ See George Steiner, "Little Read Schoolhouse," The New Yorker, June 1, 1987, p, 106.