James F. Jones, Jr.
Convocation Address
Trinity College
September 3, 2009
Thoreau’s Toolbox For Your One Season of Youth
Consider this, members of the Class of 2013. Here you are sitting in this majestic quadrangle on this most special September afternoon of your young lives. Your class flag flies from the flag pole. Adrenalin is racing through your veins. Your four years at Trinity College officially start with this ceremony. For 186 years, students just like you longed for it all to get started. Finally, you have arrived. You are the most excited you probably have ever been, and you should be since today marks the beginning of one of the most important journeys of your entire life. You are the most excited people gathered here today. The person most thankful that you are sitting here today is your mail carrier, who had to carry all those viewbooks and brochures and information packets and letters and notices of all kinds. The most bewildered persons right now are your parents. They are sitting there proudly looking at all 574 of you, trying to find their daughter or their son in the lines that just processed through the faculty ranks as you took the first of two processional walks onto this quadrangle: the second being your own Commencement, which will occur more quickly than you can possibly imagine. Bewildered your parents are. They are trying to figure out how you could possibly be starting your college years at Trinity when a week or so ago, you were three or four, and they were holding your hand trying to teach you how to cross the street with the light. How can you possibly be starting college, your parents are wondering, when they are not certain that you ever really learned when you should cross the street with the light? Be gentle with your parents when you take your leave of them in a few minutes: you will understand when you are they. Right now they are wondering where the years of their children’s youth have fled, having disappeared with the snows of yesteryear, and they are so very proud that you have been accepted to one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country, but still concerned, yes worried—let’s be frank—that somehow all the great lessons that brought you where you are today may not have sunk in properly.
Consider this, from a video shown at the executive conference of Sony this past year and now available on YouTube. If you are one in a million in China, there are 1,300 people just like you. China will soon be the number one English-speaking country in the world. Of the top ten most sought-after jobs next year, in 2010, when you will be sophomores, none existed in 2004. One in four workers today has been in his or her current job less than one year. The first commercial text message was sent in December 1992. Today the number of text messages that are sent every day is greater than the number of human beings on the face of this globe. (Some of you are probably text messaging others right now in hopes that this speech will not in fact drone on too long.) In Shakespeare’s time, there were fewer than 30,000 words in the English language. Today there are 540,000 words in the English language. The amount of technical information is doubling now every year. The twenty-five percent of the inhabitants of India with the highest IQ is greater than the entire population of the United States. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that an individual will have ten to fourteen jobs before the age of thirty-eight. If MySpace were a country, it would be the fifth largest country in the world. One of every eight couples who marry today met online. So what, we might ask, does it all mean?
Lady Alford, my eighth-grade English master in military school another lifetime ago, used to quote over and again: “Youth hath but one season.” Think of all the thousands upon thousands of your predecessors here who walked down the Long Walk on their first day at Trinity, culminating the last years of their own youth’s one season in this cherished place. But I would suggest to you that given the intricacies and rapidity of massive, seismic change that defines the world you are going to have to lead and the reality with which you must cope to find your way, your own Convocation may be remarkably different. You are coming of age, stepping out across that swaying bridge between adolescence and adulthood, at a most complicated, and yes bewildering, moment in the history of humankind. How are you supposed to make sense of it all?
Change on such a scale as you have witnessed just in the last several months alone: seemingly unending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a global recession the likes of which we have not seen since the Great Depression, the financial disaster for which the Madoff Ponzi scheme is responsible, bailout becomes one of the most utilized words in the English language, collapses of historic household names like Lehman Brothers, the world’s applause at the inauguration of the first biracial individual ever elected president of this country, the current controversy about where to find solutions, any solutions, to improve the health care system in this country, the damage global warming is doing to the planet about which all of you read in Elizabeth Kolbert’s book for our common reading this year, and on and on the list might go.
So, to return to the YouTube video, what does it all mean? I just hope to live long enough to read studies by expert scholars, even if on my Kindle (and yes, I do have one), that will explain the myriad changes that have affected each of us in the span of only the past eighteen or so months during which you started your initial college search: massive global change in the blink of the proverbial eye that occurred while you were seeking the right college home.
Another of the striking images from the video is a simple, declarative sentence that flashes across the screen: to wit, in schools like Trinity all across the country, we are currently preparing our students for jobs that do not exist that will use technologies that have not yet been invented, preparing our students to solve problems that have not as yet even been imagined. Now, there is an all but daunting thought for a college or university president to ponder!
All of which brings me to Henry David Thoreau. In his own one season of youth, Thoreau started keeping a journal right up the road a piece from this campus in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau wrote in his journal every day, and the pages are still today luminescent and in places transcendent. Thoreau might suggest that you consider following his lead and keeping a journal of your Trinity years. You cannot today imagine what a treasure such a journal of your own one season of youth in this place could possibly mean to you for the rest of your lives. Thoreau’s mind is one of the great wonders of the American nineteenth century, his writing a legacy of invaluable wisdom and unmistakably pristine style. He urges us still today, from his life in the complex throes of the Industrial Revolution, to “Simplify, simplify.”
So back to the YouTube video. How are you, in whom we have placed such confidence and trust by admitting you, to make sense of such a world which you are going to have to lead? Back to Thoreau. “Simplify, simplify.” If we strip away all the seminars, all the essays, all the examinations, all those books, all those hours spent on the playing fields or in artistic rehearsals, all those hours you will spend in the laboratories and in the Raether Library, what will Trinity’s most lasting legacy be to your lives when you are as old as I am today?
I think that at the end of the day, Trinity’s legacy is a simple one. If you are but responsible enough, you are going to take advantage of the tools that will allow you to evolve into adult human beings who will assume your own responsibilities as enlightened citizens, not just of the United States but of the globe. Think of our young president, who used some version of the word responsible forty-four times in his inaugural address. And our alumnus David Molner’s wonderful welcoming letter to each of you sent earlier this summer touches the same theme exactly. You and you alone will be responsible for the choices you are going to make over the next four years: not your proud parents, not your distinguished professors, not the members of our dedicated staff. You and you alone. Who at the end of the day is ultimately responsible for the meltdown of the financial institutions? Who, in addition to Mr. Madoff, now serving a 150-year sentence for his sins, is responsible for the years of fraud perpetrated by his Ponzi scheme? I am not smart enough to know the answers to those questions, but I do know from watching thousands of students like you in the past thirty-five or so years that you, and only you, are ultimately responsible for the choices you are going to make on this campus over the course of the next four years, years that will shoot past you more quickly than you can imagine sitting here today.
Like Thoreau and the YouTube video, President Obama was speaking to you when he wove the notion of being responsible for one’s own actions into his inaugural speech. You are going to spend four of the most transformative years of your life in this place: and if Trinity works its magic upon you as it has upon thousands of others like you who sat in their own convocations, you will take away habits of mind that will last you forever and friendships that will form the cement that will hold you together when the slings and arrows of life come your way in an oftimes unruly and bewildering world. You will hear lines in your head from your professors for decades to come, conversations that you shared with your roommates and teammates and fellow students, memories of those privileged moments of eerie quiet when you came out alone on the quad on a winter’s night to commune with Bishop Brownell, who looms up behind me on Convocation and then again on Commencement Day, when you were perplexed or anguished or just wanted a few minutes alone communing with his spirit.
Trinity will change your life in ways you cannot imagine, and now the time has come for you to leave your own mark on Trinity. I travel all over the country on behalf of the College. I hear story after story after story: alumni who will relate to me verbatim some conversation they had decades ago with a faculty member in their own one season of youth on this campus, something a wizened dean remarked, the way the quad’s aesthetic beauty changed as the seasons of the year ebbed and flowed. The members of the Trinity extended family represent this College in courtrooms, in corporations, in the arts, in the sciences, and in every other facet of society, and they give generously of their time as trustees, fellows, alumni interviewers, and supportive friends. They never tire of telling me how much Trinity has meant in their lives. To illustrate the enduring affection they have for their alma mater, for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2009, the Trinity College Fund raised more money for the support of this College than in any single year in Trinity’s history, over against a context of the worst year in philanthropic giving in the United States in eighty years. And for the fourth consecutive year, members of the senior class had a startling participation rate of more than ninety-one percent of the class making a contribution to the Trinity College Fund to support student scholarships. And more than fifty-four percent of the faculty made voluntary contributions this past year to an emergency financial aid fund, to which then members of the staff contributed themselves, so that no student would have to leave the College for having been a victim of the financial maelstroms of our time. And you today join such a place as this, a school that cares so profoundly about what happens to each of you in your one season of youth in this place.
Back to our old friend Thoreau. He writes in his journal about the young man who goes out at your age, your very age today as you sit in this quadrangle this beautiful September afternoon. The young man could be any one of you right this very minute. Thoreau tells us that the young man confidently goes out into his back yard with his tool box to build a bridge to the moon. One can almost see the great man smile knowingly when he continues to write that when the young man reaches middle-age, he is content merely to use the same tool box to repair the coal shed. “Youth hath but one season,” Lady Alford repeated to us time and again: her point was to make us aware that we should not waste a second, that we should not take one single second of our youth’s one season for granted. So here you are, your tool boxes are going to be filled by your professors, by those on the staff here who will come to know you, and by your fellow classmates. The tools Trinity will place in your tool box will mold the rest of your adult lives, will equip you to face the bewildering array of jolting facts from the YouTube video and all those other aspects of the reality that is your time and that will define your futures. Thoreau one final time: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
Don’t let Trinity down for having allowed you the chance of a lifetime in the four years to come. If you take advantage of all the myriad opportunities Trinity has to provide, and you do so with decency and respect for others and with gratitude to your parents for having sacrificed for you to be in this place and to those who have made contributions because they believed in what Trinity stands for, then your horizons will expand exponentially. The only other period of your entire lives when your horizons could expand so exponentially were the years between birth and five. Consider that as this Convocation comes to an end and your college years begin.
Finally, I have my own, perhaps eccentric, Convocation tradition that I have followed at the conclusion of the scores of similar addresses I have been privileged to give over the past thirty-five or so years. Decades ago, long before you were conceived, a student of mine wrote some lines in his journal for our seminar at Washington University. Wrote my young student friend: