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Charge to the Graduates
by Leon Botstein, Bard College
May 26, 2007

The following is the text of Leon Botstein's Commencement speech:

Many of you know that Bard College was started as an Episcopalian institution, and the graduation was really a quasi-religious service in which the pastor, whose role I now illegitimately assume, had the last word with a sermon, the charge to the class. So, to the Class of 2007:

The traditions so visible in today’s ceremony—the march, the elaborate attire, (notably, the all-too-resplendent gowns on this platform), the granting of degrees with their Latin citations—are residues of an institutional history that we celebrate with nostalgia once a year. That institutional history extends back to the Middle Ages. Universities survived only to be reinvented in the 19th and 20th centuries, all in the context of radically divergent social and political circumstances ranging from famine to world war. Nonetheless, commencements are somewhat akin to Christmas—on its eve, and on the day itself, we suddenly feel generous and filled with good cheer, only to return the next day to our ordinary competitive and mistrustful routines. Do we actually live in a culture where the aims and power of education are truly part of our lives before and after such annual commencements?

Academic rituals are fragments, rare signs of continuity with past generations. They are preserved, in part, to lessen our sense of vulnerability, our recognition of how fragile what each of us does is, and our own fondest hopes are. Our fear of vulnerability is a reflexive response to the inexorable passage of time that brings the new, the unanticipated, the familiar—aging and death, as well as the ravages of political and economic crises and political conflict. To combat and resist this fear, we hold fast to tradition in colleges and universities, from the system of courses, examinations, senior theses—here we call them Senior Projects—to the organization of faculty by rank and fields of expertise, to libraries and databases, and ultimately to our annual rituals. By so doing, the academy seeks to assert a sharp dichotomy. That dichotomy places matters of lasting value, primarily the critical pursuit of knowledge and a dynamic, expanding legacy in literature, the arts, and social sciences—achievements that can be described as having withstood repeated scrutiny and, therefore, the proverbial test of time—against a perceived enemy. That enemy is fashion, passing fads, ephemeral enthusiasms, mere style.

A college and university education, when it prepares young people properly, actually equips them with instruments of resistance against the trivial and ephemeral, so that succeeding generations might preserve and conserve the best of the human imagination against destruction and oblivion. That act of conservation and memory resists our desperate need to survive by forgetting. You members of the Class of 2007 are taking leave of an institution whose central purpose is to arm your conscience with the ethical obligation to remember, against willful absentmindedness, the pursuit of the life of the mind.

Looking out at this energetic and utterly charming and delightful class, one is inspired to ask, What is it that we seek, through the years of learning in college, to fight for through our traditions of remembrance? What are the continuities we wish to protect? What are the dangers we seek to counter?

At the core of our conceit, that the journey taken by today’s graduates is of indispensable value, is the belief in the connection between education and democracy. An educated citizenry is better prepared to preserve freedom, to protect dissent, individuality, and free expression in the arts against the threat of tyranny and censorship by the state and the pressure on each of us to adapt, to compromise too far, and to conform to habits and norms propped up by public opinion, commercial popular culture, and (at times) mass hysteria.

The conventions and clichés to which we are asked to adapt, even though they are accepted by an overwhelming majority, are often based on prejudice and ignorance. Consider, for example, a recent spectacle, nearly 150 years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species and decades after the discoveries of modern molecular and cell biology, where candidates for the American presidency declared, with either pride or cynicism, their rejection of the findings of evolutionary science.

Indeed, the daunting history of modern times readily makes a mockery of the central conceit that there is a link between education and democracy, between learning and freedom. Through the end of the 19th century and the century that has recently passed, the tyranny of government and the assent by majorities to cruelty, slaughter, and prejudice against dissent and individual freedom of expression have enjoyed rare success. The architects, the leaders, and the passive followers of oppression increasingly have had the experience of a college and university education. Under fascism and communism, the authority, tradition, and continuity implied by today’s ceremony were manipulated against the very ideals that, for us, define the justifying rhetoric of this College and all nonsectarian colleges and universities.

As if to add insult to injury, the Class of 2007 is graduating at a moment when a burgeoning movement is visible, within the university, against the centrality of nonutilitarian disciplines—abstract mathematics, literature, history, the arts, and the liberal arts—in favor of preprofessional practical courses of undergraduate study. With these enrollment trends comes a threat to the funding of scholarship and research in the pure and nonapplied sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Furthermore, the federal government, with the enthusiastic endorsement of legislators from both political parties, seeks to enforce a culture of conformity on our colleges and universities by advocating the imposition of standardized tests and measures, all seemingly justified by the rhetoric of so-called accountability and assessment.

The enthusiasts of conformity and uniformity are not all publicity-seeking bureaucrats and politicians. We ourselves are less than totally courageous in protecting dissent on our campuses. We concede all too readily to restrictions to free expression that are based on facile accusations cast in the form of moral outrage, the accusation of prejudice and insult directed against those who think differently. Self-censorship, motivated by the fear of social ostracism and personal embarrassment, follows. We live in a culture in which dissent and contrariness are deemed offenses, assaults on our dignity that challenge our constructed identities and values. With puritan zeal, we defend orthodoxies whose legitimacy we accept with little scrutiny and whose rejection is met with isolation and humiliation.

All this would be of little interest were not so much at stake. The link between education and democracy, learning and freedom, may not be vindicated by history; but it is justified by hope—renewable hope in individuals within each generation—by the very possibility of human progress and invention, which are dependent on individual achievement.

Consider today’s graduates, born in the late 1980s. They grew up without memories of the Cold War. They were young children during that brief euphoric moment of optimism about the spread of peace and freedom throughout the world after the fall of communism. Yet, as the 1990s progressed, for all the advances in science, notably in biomedical science and technologies of convenience—from the Internet, to cell phones, to iPods—as these graduates came of age, they witnessed a rise in religious and cultural intolerance, tyranny, greed, corruption, cynicism, terror, and war. This generation has witnessed more incidents of killings in schools and colleges than any previous generation. Despite the enormous economic prosperity and growth that has surrounded their lives, little progress has been made to alleviate radical inequality, human suffering, and the degradation of the environment.

Yet this class has shown its resistance. It has distinguished itself in public service, in schools and prisons, in New Orleans after Katrina, in research and scholarship, in the arts and letters. It, in the best of Bard’s traditions, has been fearless in its willingness to dissent and gracious in its acceptance of disagreement. Optimism and energy were undeterred as these students pursued interests and passions, both popular and obscure. The possibilities you, today’s degree candidates, have shown redeem our faith in the potential link between education and democracy.

As you rise to receive your diplomas, remember the intense faith in study and learning as the means to preserve freedom and individuality that is expressed by your fellow alumni from the prisons of New York, recipients of Bard degrees in the liberal arts. Those condemned to incarceration cherish the opportunity to engage in the traditions of critical inquiry, to dedicate themselves to the life of the mind, to the freedom of the spirit in the absence of physical liberty.

But the dangers of forgetting and adapting lie before you. The seductions of practicality and routine are genuine; for the search for comfort, ease, and privacy is no sin. Therefore, remember this day, this evocation of your years of studying—or, as the case may be, feeling guilty about not studying quite hard enough—for learning’s sake, perhaps without regard to utility. In judging the concessions and compromises you will have to make in your daily lives, do not forget the symbols of today’s ceremony and the ideals of the College’s course of study.

To decline engagement with the world because compromise and concession are inevitable is to reject the responsibilities of citizenship. By remembering the resistant and stable traditions of education, each of you can forge a link between learning and freedom by acting independently but effectively in the world. Embrace the cause of free expression without fear. Defend the singularity of the artistic imagination and protect dissent against conformity and tyranny, in the service of individuals and our institutions of culture, our colleges, our universities, museums and libraries, and, therefore, in the service of the first among them, Bard, your alma mater. Congratulations to you all.

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