2009 commencement speakers offer wide-ranging advice
Macalester College President Brian Rosenberg (left) and 2009 commencement speaker, Tonderai Chikuhwa '96
Although official counts aren’t tallied until late summer, about 9,000 Minnesota private college students earned bachelors degrees this spring. As usual, their sendoffs were accompanied by words of wisdom from an eclectic group of commencement speakers. They included a college president, a congressman, a theater director and a United Nations staffer. Here is a sampling of the advice they shared.
St. Olaf College — Congressman Erik Paulsen ’87
"I’m not standing up here because I’m a congressman. I am a congressman because of what I learned here. What I learned here about faith, family and service has made all the difference. Just last Wednesday I was meeting with President Obama. I told him I was giving this speech. I asked him for his wisdom for the occasion and he said, 'Keep it short.' I will.
"What you have gotten here is a liberal arts education — which is neither conservative nor progressive. It’s a way of learning that helps you see the world from multiple angles. And that’s why students from St. Olaf could change a light bulb in 239 steps better than students from the best engineering schools in America [a reference to St. Olaf College students winning this year's national Rube Goldberg competition]. You have received a form of learning that makes you fantastic problem solvers. Among your peers, you are like gazelles that can outrun any lion. Be thankful for that.
"I urge you to embrace risk and dive into adventure. And make the most of your one brief but powerful life by listening, learning, serving and leading."
St. Catherine University — Jane Dammen McAuliffe, President, Bryn Mawr College
“In your years at St. Kate’s you’ve lived the reality of Catholic pluralism. You know, from the inside, that religions are not monolithic; they don’t speak with a single voice. They are inherently a chorus of voices, a profusion of perspectives. As you meet other religious traditions, then, you won’t make the mistake of forcing a false univocality upon them. Yours won’t be the voice that emphatically asserts, for example, that all Buddhists are one thing and all Muslims are another. Yours will be the voice that recognizes nuance, that understands heterogeneity, that moves the conversation beyond dismissive and uninformed generalizations.
“Right now, more than ever, our nation and our globe need you and need your sensitive leadership as we struggle to live with the challenges that our new-found proximities present."
Macalester College — Tonderai Chikuhwa ’96, Senior Program Officer, United Nations Office for Children and Armed Conflict
“In your lives now and into the future, you will always have opportunities to contribute to fundamental change to improve the human condition. It is a battle that must be joined at all levels, and relentlessly pursued. ...it must be a determination to do whatever one is able in the here-and-now, in our immediate lives, in our immediate circle.”
University of St. Thomas — Joe Dowling, Artistic Director, Guthrie Theater
“From William Shakespeare — when Polonius in Hamlet offers his advice to his son Laertes before his departure into the world, he urges him ‘To thine own self be true and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.’ I can offer you no better advice as you set out to live your dreams and your ambitions. Stay true to the principles that have motivated you here at this great college, and recognize that the world needs people like you to make changes that are essential to us all as a society. And do your best to ignore the critics and the naysayers who will urge you to do nothing and will will you to fail.”
Saint John’s University — Sharon Daloz Parks, Director, Leadership for the New Commons, Whidbey Institute
“We are, all of us, men and women together, young and older, now being asked in this threshold time to create a new collective intelligence that will yield a more sustainable, just, and prosperous future for all. In this threshold time, may we who are touched — directly or indirectly — by the distinctive life of this university manifest in our wider world an alternative imagination of time, a fidelity to the power of place, and the capacity to truly belong in a world that needs us.”
Augsburg College — Kerry Emanuel, Professor of Meteorology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“We should together insist that henceforth every high school student be exposed to 20th century science, to the full power and implications of quantum physics and chaos theory. Physics is far too important to be left to physicists. The only prayer we have of uniting the two cultures is to see to it that every educated person’s understanding of science is updated to at least 1961. We will then be able to fully appreciate Albert Einstein’s point that science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”