June 6, 2004
COMMENCEMENT SPEECHES
Threats to Rights and Financial Barriers to Poor Are Cited at Graduations
By SAM DILLON (NY TIMES, June 6, 2004)

Ted Koppel warned of a rising threat to basic constitutional rights. The president of Amherst College decried the increasing financial barriers that the poor face in obtaining a college education. Robert Redford said America was on the brink of a moral crisis comparable to Watergate and the Iran-contra scandal because of the growing "political gains of not telling the truth."

Many commencement speakers brought a somber mood to college campuses this spring, issuing warnings about perils like censorship, worsening inequality and eroding civil liberties.

E. L. Doctorow, the prize-winning novelist, drew boos at Hofstra University on May 23 when he portrayed President Bush as a storyteller specializing in untruths. "I thought it was a matter of urgency and of my own conscience," Mr. Doctorow said. "There's no sense just giving them homilies and pieties about following your star or that kind of stuff. The policies of this administration are things that we should talk and think about."

Several members of the Bush administration told inspirational stories about the American military.

Speaking at West Point, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld hailed the heroics of a 2001 graduate of the academy, Lt. K. C. Hughes, who, after being shot in the shoulder in an insurgent attack last year in Iraq, helped evacuate six members of his platoon.

"The civilized world will win the global war against terror because of people like Lieutenant Hughes," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, seeking to dramatize his call for students at Wake Forest University to "do the right thing," chose a different kind of war hero, the military policeman who blew the whistle on the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The military policeman, whom Mr. Powell did not name, "knew something wrong was happening and he spoke out," he said.

Scores of actors, comedians, athletes, newscasters, authors, executives and other commencement speakers steered clear of politics, focusing instead on words of exhortation, counsel and caution.

At least three speakers quoted Woody Allen's famous advice, "Eighty percent of success is showing up."

Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking at Manhattanville College, quoted Bob Hope, who once told graduates, "Look around this beautiful campus - don't leave!"

Jon Stewart, the comedian, told students at William & Mary that as a college student he had suffered from "terrible acne."

"But what I lacked in looks I made up for with a repugnant personality," he said.

The filmmaker Peter Farrelly returned to Columbia University, where as a student two decades ago he received an interest-free loan after a sympathetic professor noticed that he was working three jobs and was behind in his coursework. In his address this year at Columbia's School of the Arts, Mr. Farrelly had his daughter pick five students' names from a bowl, and each student received a check for $3,600, the value of the loan he received in 1984, adjusted for inflation.

But dozens of speeches centered on explicit or implied criticism of Bush administration policies, in Iraq and elsewhere.

Following are other excerpts:


Toni Morrison
Author
Wellesley, Massachusetts

I'm sure you have been told that this is the best time of your life. It may be. But if it's true that this is the best time of your life, then you have my condolences. Because you'll want to remain here, stuck in these so-called best years, never maturing, wanting only to look, to feel and be the adolescent that whole industries are devoted to forcing you to remain. One more flawless article of clothing, one more elaborate toy, the truly perfect diet, the harmless but necessary drug, the almost final elective surgery, the ultimate cosmetic all designed to maintain hunger for stasis. While children are being eroticized into adults, adults are being exoticized into eternal juvenilia. There is nothing more satisfying, more gratifying than true adulthood. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard-won glory, which commercial forces and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of.


Anthony W. Marx
President, Amherst College
Amherst, Massachusetts


Our great colleges and universities have hit a wall of blocked opportunity. At our top colleges, only one-tenth of our students are drawn from the poorer half of the population, only 3 percent from the bottom quarter. In our society, economic disparities have been growing, not declining. They have grown also in these educational institutions that are supposed to be a source of redress. The assumptions we all once made of steady progress in this country have proven false: Our nation and our colleges are moving toward an inequality not seen since before the Great Depression.


Madeleine K. Albright
Former Secretary of State
Duke, Durham, N.C.


One of the most moving stories to come out of Sept. 11, 2001, involved a passenger on United Flight 93, which went down in Pennsylvania. That passenger, Tom Burnett, called his wife from the hijacked plane, having realized by then that two other planes had crashed into the World Trade Center.

"I know we're going to die," he said. "But some of us are going to do something about it." And because they did, many other lives were saved. Since that awful morning, the memory of their heroism has inspired us. It should also instruct us. Because when you think about it, "I know we're going to die," is a wholly unremarkable statement. Each of us here this morning could say the same. It is Burnett's next words that were both matter-of-fact and electrifying: "Some of us are going to do something about it."

Those words, it seems to me, convey the fundamental challenge put to us by life. We are all mortal. What divides us is the use we make of the time and opportunities we have.


Dick Cheney
Vice President
Florida State, Tallahassee, Fla.


I know it's the custom for graduation speakers to draw from their experiences. There's one very practical lesson that comes immediately to mind. I learned that in the year 2000, when President Bush called to ask if I would help him find a running mate for vice president. The lesson is: If you're ever asked to head up an important search committee, say yes.


Bill Cosby
Actor
Wilkes, Wilkes-Barre, Pa.


Many of you have not thought about paying bills. You have thought about making bills and you've thought about contributing to some bills you want to make: $200 on a $23,000 car. That's your contribution. Your parents will pick up the tab and your parents are confused, really. All they thought was they would get married, have you, help you to get through high school and then into college and then you would graduate, get married, have grandchildren and they could die. They're still alive and you're still going to school. And what's even worse, they can't die, because they have to stay around another 30 years and co-sign for you. I know you sound pitiful, but that's the way you look to me.

David E. Davis Jr.
Founder, Automotive Magazine
Michigan, Ann Arbor


In October of 1955, when I was 24 years old, and quite pleased with myself, I managed to get my race car upside down during a national championship race at Sacramento, Calif. My head was caught between the back of the seat and the pavement, and I was dragged along that way for about thirty yards, until the car struck another obstacle and flipped back onto its wheels. When the car finally came to a stop, I had lost the eyelids on my left eye, the bridge of my nose, the roof of my mouth, and all but a half-dozen of my teeth. I had 130 compound fractures of my upper and lower jaws. It took a team of reconstructive surgeons and dentists 18 months to rebuild my face. I was uglier than a mud fence. I actually frightened children and caused traffic accidents. I had come as close to death as one can be, and I had survived. I understood with great clarity that nothing in life - except death itself - could ever kill me. No meeting could ever go that badly. No client would ever be that angry. No business error would ever bring me as close to the brink as I had already been. With that knowledge, I was not only born again, I was bulletproof. I could do anything, and if I failed, I failed.


Barbara Ehrenreich
Author
Barnard, Manhattan


You saw them, too, the photos of American soldiers humiliating and abusing detainees in Iraq. These photos turned my stomach - yours too, I'm sure. But they did something else to me: They broke my heart. I had no illusions about the U.S. mission in Iraq, but it turns out that I did have some illusions about women.

All we had to do to make the world a better place - kinder, less violent, more just - was to assimilate into what had been, for so many centuries, the world of men. We would fight so that women could become the generals, the C.E.O.'s, the senators, the judges and opinion-makers and that was really the only fight we had to undertake. Because once they gained power and authority, once they had achieved a critical mass within the institutions of society, women would naturally work for change. What I have finally come to understand, sadly and irreversibly, is that the kind of feminism based on an assumption of female moral superiority is a lazy and self-indulgent form of feminism. It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like beasts. It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.


Jon Stewart
Comedian
William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va.


Lets talk about the real world for a moment. I wanted to bring this up to you earlier about the real world, and this is, I guess, as good a time as any. I don't really know how to put this, so I'll be blunt. We broke it. Please don't be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry. I don't know if you've been following the news lately, but it just kind of got away from us. Somewhere between the gold rush of easy Internet profits and an arrogant sense of endless empire, we heard kind of a pinging noise, and uh, then the thing just died on us. So I apologize.

But here's the good news. You fix this thing, you're the next greatest generation, people. And even if you don't, you're not going to have much trouble surpassing my generation. If you end up getting your picture taken next to a naked guy pile of enemy prisoners and don't give the thumbs up, you've outdid us.


Julius L. Chambers
Director, Center for Civil Rights
North Carolina, Chapel Hill


If you were black, living in Mount Gilead, your parents would not be hired in any position at the local mill, and if they were fortunate enough to land a job at the local lumber company, they could rise no higher than the lowest-paying and most menial jobs. You could not travel far from home unless you had family and friends along the way because you could not be accommodated in public accommodations; you could not count on being able to buy gas; and if you used public transportation you would be segregated in an undesirable space and could be put off the bus along the way as I was in traveling from Durham, from North Carolina Central, to my hometown in Mount Gilead. You probably went to the county's own black public schools; your textbooks had been used. If you had a dream, as I did, of attending the university in 1954, you were turned down solely because of your race. I grew up in this segregated environment.


Robert Redford
Actor
Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Years ago I had the advantage of making a film that dealt with Watergate. And I spent four years. because I thought it was important to illustrate investigative journalism. It had not been done on film yet, and I thought that was new territory to explore. I just happened to inherit a pretty great platform dramatically. But it was also about how close we came to losing First Amendment rights. And now I realize that many of the systems of checks and balances that were in place then, now have been infected by everything from media consolidation, to greed, to limited ideologies and the worst of all, apathy.

Walter Isaacson
Author, "Benjamin Franklin"
Tufts, Medford, Mass.


We had to get France in on our side in the Revolution. Even back then the French were a little bit of a handful. So they sent old Dr. Franklin, now in his 70's, over to France to try to woo them. He built a printing press at his house near Paris, and printed the Declaration of Independence so that all the people in France could see what we were fighting for; the idea of liberty, and an aversion to tyranny and inequality. France ended up being caught up in the appeal of America's values. and they joined our cause. And without them, we would not have won the Revolution. They supplied 90 percent of the gunpowder, the Marquis de Lafayette had as many troops at Yorktown as General Washington did. It is the appeal of America's values and the vision of statesmen like Jefferson and Franklin who were willing to engage in a war of ideas that won our freedom. They realized that ideas had power, and that the power of America's ideals and values would prove stronger even than our weapons.

George Soros
Investor
Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, Manhattan


By succumbing to fear we are doing the terrorists' bidding: we are unleashing a vicious circle of violence. If we go on like this, we may find ourselves in a permanent state of war. The war on terror need never end because the terrorists are invisible, therefore they will never disappear. And if we are in a permanent state of war we cannot remain an open society.

Samuel L. Jackson
Actor
Vassar, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.


You will, undoubtedly, meet people who will try to shut you up or entice you to compromise your principles in any number of ways. They'll try to seduce you and distract you with money, power, security and perhaps, most dangerously, a sense of belonging. Don't let them; it's just not worth it. One of the biggest threats to our world is the culture of silence and compromise - politicians who compromise their beliefs because they're scared they'll piss off their voters and won't get re-elected, corporate executives who put profits above principles. You can have a conscience and still make money. You can have genuine values and still get elected. You can even make movies that do well at the box office without playing to the lowest common denominator.

Ted Koppel
News Commentator
California, Berkeley


More than likely, the use of a chemical or biological weapon in a terrorist attack against the U.S. homeland would lead to the imposition of martial law. There is a direct correlation between the perception of threats to America's security and the contraction of our rights and freedoms. We need to critically examine the nature and scope of those threats; and where they exist, we must be prepared to calibrate our rights and freedoms. If we fail to do that now, at a time of relative sanity then we will have condemned ourselves to having those choices made in a climate of national hysteria.


Barry Meyer
Chairman and C.E.O., Warner Brothers
Rochester, New York


What happened at the Super Bowl half-time show was inappropriate and should be deemed such. It must not be used as an excuse to launch us down the slippery slope of restricting legitimate expression. And neither should political expedience. Somewhere it has been decided that the public's tender eyes must be shielded from the sight of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq. And now there's talk of controlling the public's right to see graphic evidence of atrocities in Iraq. Why? Is it too depressing? Too sad and emotional? Too inflammatory? Doesn't the American public have the right to have its emotions stirred by words and pictures, and isn't limiting that right in any way a very risky and dangerous proposition?


Colin L. Powell
Secretary of State
Wake Forest, Winston-Salem, N.C.


Do the right thing, even when you get no credit for it. Do the right thing when no one is watching or will ever know about it. You will always know. Our nation is now going through a period of deep disappointment, a period of deep pain over some of our soldiers not doing the right thing at a place called Abu Ghraib. I spent a good part of my time in Jordan this past weekend dealing with this problem and the terrible impact it has had on our image in the world. I told the audiences that I spoke to over the weekend that all Americans deplored what happened there and there could be no excuse. But I also told them that one soldier had done the right thing. He knew something wrong was happening and he spoke out. He told his commanders, who immediately began an investigation.

Condoleezza Rice
National Security Adviser
Vanderbilt, Nashville


If you've not yet found your passion, keep searching. You never know when it will find you. The chancellor was nice enough to say that I once had a chance at a great career in concert music. Well, of a sort. I was pretty good, but I realized I wasn't great. And I thought, I'm going to end up teaching 13-year-olds to murder Beethoven, or playing piano bars someplace or playing at Nordstrom - I'm not going to play Carnegie Hall. And I did find a passion, and it happened to be Russia. What was a nice girl from Birmingham doing studying Russia? Well, it has changed my life.

William Schulz
Executive Director, Amnesty International USA
Grinnell, Iowa

You need not love your enemies. You certainly ought not allow them to harm you. But you risk your own destruction if you deprive them of their most basic dignity. We've learned that all too well in the last two weeks with the reports of the torture of the Iraqi prisoners. What could possess young Americans to hold someone under water until he almost drowned? To sic dogs on naked, cowering prisoners? The soldiers had no training, we are told, but what training ought we need to reject such behavior other than the training we ought to have received at our mothers' or fathers' knees?

Vicki Escarra
Executive Vice President, Delta Airlines
Agnes Scott, Decatur, Ga.


When I was tapped by Ron Allen to run Delta's 315 airports around the world, I walked into a work group that was more than 80 percent male. I was replacing a much-revered man named Marty Brams. I remember my first week on the job, as I was getting acclimated, a guy named Dave Huss approached me and said, "You can't even carry Marty Brams's jockstrap!" To which I replied, "This may surprise you, but I don't want to!"

I can tell you this story now because Dave Huss later became one of my greatest supporters. But, I had to earn his respect through hard work, an open mind and good listening skills. Remember that respect is a two-way street. You cannot expect to become a leader worth following if you don't respect those around you.

David Halberstam
Author
Skidmore, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.


I suspect that you in the audience may look at us upon the stage and see people who seem like we have always succeeded. Would that that were true. What you do not see is our own anxieties. You do not see me, at the moment a few days short of my 22nd birthday, when the editor of the smallest daily in Mississippi came and told me that it was time for me to leave, that in fact he would pay me for the last day and that he wanted me to be gone from the office and from the town by the next morning. He had already hired my successor who was scheduled to show up the next afternoon and he didn't think it a good idea if we overlapped. Fired, as it were, from the smallest daily in Mississippi after less than a year as a journalist. What an auspicious way to start a career!

David S. Tatel
Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
Macalester, St. Paul, Minn.


Too many Americans seem not even to grasp the bedrock principles of American democracy. Asked in a survey to list the freedoms protected by the First Amendment, 41 percent of adults were unable to identify free speech; 84 percent were unable to identify freedom of religion. In the last presidential election, 40 percent of those eligible to vote did not even bother to do so. And following the tragedy of Sept. 11, too many Americans seem willing to accept the notion that protecting the homeland requires sacrificing the very rights that lie at the heart of our constitutional system - rights that make this nation both unique and worth preserving.



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