VOICES : For the Ages

RIVERSIDE —  All 99 members of the graduating class assembled in the gymnasium of Batavia High School 25 years ago, a then-rural Illinois campus outside Chicago. Seniors and their parents, together with the school board and teachers, awaited the valedictory address. A student rose to speak, nervous yet proud of what he had to say.

Lacking a rhetorical style of his own, he had prepared to speak in imitation of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, remembering J.F.K.’s campaign stop in Batavia when the senior was a sophomore. Jabbing the air with his hand, the valedictorian with a crew cut began, “A man’s philosophy is his way of life, as determined by his patterns of thinking.”

That’s a statement that says less than meets the ear--also the sort of thing you expect to hear at commencement ceremonies. It was received with considerable enthusiasm from the graduating seniors, albeit with some embarrassment from the largely respectable, Republican adult audience. Sometimes, it’s not what you say that matters, but how you say it.

It’s a different America we live in now, and 1987 commencement exercises are different too.

In 1962 the Great Speech had its place embedded in our way of life, to commemorate Great Moments. These were occasions to be listened to. Commencement exercises afforded a special opportunity for advice and inspiration as students left their alma maters, with the distinguished speakers there to show the way.

Wisdom was at a premium and people attended a commencement exercise to savor the sound of it, particularly those parents who had not had the opportunity to finish high school or college because of the Great Depression or World War II. It was a proud moment to see their children graduate and to hear something of the learning their children had received, if only in a single speech.

Surely many speakers in those days hoped that perhaps some pregnant phrase might, years later, prove profound to someone in need of it. So Douglas Knight, then president of Lawrence College, said that a liberal-arts education should leave students between two worlds, one now beneath them and the other one above that they would be forever reaching for, Socrates unsatisfied.

Socrates may be unsatisfied, but that’s a sentiment less commonly expressed today. Some campuses have altogether abandoned the spiritual address, in favor of remarks delivered by honorary degree recipients, as at Occidental College, celebrating its centennial by giving honorary degrees to distinguished alumni, who will return the favor with their own abbreviated observations. Some campuses are even dispensing with commemorative remarks entirely, as at UCLA, where there is no official commencement speaker whatsoever or whomsoever.

Nor is there one at Harvard or at Yale, although this is something of a technicality, since immediately following the Harvard commencement exercises, the alumni have their day, this year to listen to President Richard von Weizsacker of West Germany, while Yale seniors have their invited speaker on Class Day, the day before commencement.

The opportunity for a Great Speech still presents itself to politicians, even if fewer campuses show interest. At Stanford, this year’s commencement speaker will be the recently retired Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., while the University of California at Riverside has Shirley Chisholm, former congresswoman and presidential candidate.

Politicians are people in the news and commencement seems fabricated for them, but now that the medium has become the message, people in the news are the news reporters themselves; many of them now mount the platform to address commencement exercises instead of just reporting on them. Sometimes, it isn’t the substance of the speech that matters as much as the celebrity of the speaker. Mike Wallace spoke on Saturday at the University of Michigan and Ted Koppel will talk at Duke. One wonders whether Koppel will bring someone along to interview or whether Wallace was on the defensive, what with students at Michigan having protested his appearance.

Yale’s seniors selected Strobe Talbott (‘71) of Time magazine and once on the staff of the Yale Daily News. Southern Methodist University, which has itself been prominent in the news lately, selected Leonard Silk of the New York Times, who is not a sports reporter.

Some campus wags call it being mortar-bored and bring in outside politicians or messengers from the media to reveal a preference for what’s outside the ivy-covered walls, suggesting disillusionment with what’s within. Once again the University of Chicago proves exceptional as it continues a tradition of selecting a member of its own faculty to address commencement.

Pomona College is bringing Twyla Tharp back to her former campus to speak and perhaps to dance. Similarly, Reed College has as its commencement speaker an alumna of the college, author Barbara Alexander Ehrenreich. Both Pomona and Reed have chosen people who have made it on the outside, serving as some incentive to those within.

It seems that by turning outward as they have, such campuses made a decision to favor the wisdom of the world over that of their own faculties. Those who have abandoned commencement speakers altogether may have given up entirely the search for wisdom on occasions such as these, when a speech is just a speech and hence a waste of time.

Where has all the wisdom gone since 1962? Nostalgia for skateboards and golden oldies does not seem to have extended to the more serious side of things, or at least to what once passed for such.

Nowadays getting the degree seems much more of an achievement than the education that went into it. Students in the universities are older now when they finally graduate and many have been working all along to put themselves through school. The difference has become obscured between being a student and holding down a job. The Grand Occasion of commencement has been lost, especially when so many college graduates go on for still more schooling while continuing to work full-time.

People often say that today’s college students are similar to their counterparts in the ‘50s and the early ‘60s, but this isn’t really true. While today’s seniors may share nostalgia for their parents’ past, they no longer look to those who teach them for inspiration or for wisdom. On campuses where there still are commencement speakers, most are chosen for their entertainment value or for the cash that they might bring to alumni organizations, as students graduate only to discover that loyalty to the institution calls for a yearly contribution.

Amid the pomp of changing circumstances with different kinds of speakers and an altogether different meaning to commencement, there’s been a new development, harking back to Batavia High School: More colleges and universities are having student speakers address commencement ceremonies.

Princeton has been doing this all along, incorporating a salutatorian and a valedictorian along with the president’s annual remarks. One student speech is delivered in Latin, with the graduating seniors provided crib sheets, cuing them to respond with laughter or with catcalls, giving parents the illusion of a student body versed in Latin and the classics. Harvard has a Latin speaker too, though a translation is provided in the program, but it also has other student speakers, one from the graduate schools and another from the graduating seniors.

Pomona College has student speakers chosen in a competition, as do UCLA, UC Riverside and the University of Chicago.

Although such student speeches are more given to remarks than august, afternoon addresses, they do offer young scholars an opportunity to make statements of summation rather than to hear a final lecture, if there is one. This suggests a real shift in college education; 25 years ago students were in college to receive and not to give. Now it’s a matter of some importance to have something of your own to say.

The wisdom of the commencement speaker may be gone, along with that of revered parents and distinguished faculty, but that doesn’t mean Socrates’ dissatisfaction has been forgotten. It was Socrates who said that he had never met a person who was really wise--and just such skepticism marks commencement ’87.