The Commencement Address I didn't give

Congrats to all those students who are graduating from universities and high schools during this season, and to the parents who have supported them, and sometimes coddled them

I have given three commencement addresses in my life, and like all the students who were subjected to them, I have, by now, completely forgotten their content. I do remember that after the fact I wished each had been shorter than it was.

I was often tempted to begin with the introductory lines from my favorite such address, anonymously attributed, and perhaps apocryphal, although many think it was due to Kurt Vonnegut, who denied it:

“The future is going to get unimaginably worse and it is never ever going to get better again”.

That would have grabbed the attention of an otherwise likely bored and distracted audience. But, while tempting, it didn’t seem fair to the poor parents who had come to the event hoping that the investment they had made in their children’s future wasn’t wasted. That, and the fact that, while seemingly likely, categorical statements about the future are almost always wrong.

Four years ago a west-coast university in Canada was kind enough to offer me an honorary degree and asked me to give another commencement speech. I demurred, however. I would like to say that my reasoning was as noble as that of an idol, the physicist Richard Feynman, who decided while in college that he would never accept an honorary degree if one was so offered (and he never did) because when he graduated and received his degree he felt he had worked hard for it and didn’t think it was right for people who hadn’t so earned one to be awarded a degree. Rather, I was in the midst of a difficult time and I didn't want the university to have to deal with any extra hassles on my account.

I thought about that opportunity again this year as I reflected on this current graduation season, and what I might say today, were I to give such a speech. It might go like this:

Dear Graduates:

Congratulations on reaching this point in your educational journey. If you have been lucky, you have been challenged, offended, provoked, or uncomfortably stretched at various times during your past four or more years at this institution. I worry, however, that if your experience was more typical, you haven’t.

I have often stated that the purpose of science is to make you uncomfortable, but, more generally, that is the purpose of education itself. If you are never intellectually uncomfortable then you haven’t expanded your sphere of experience and understanding, and you haven’t had your biases challenged. Science, through experimentation and constant testing and retesting, challenges every theoretical postulate we make on a daily basis, and the great thing is that we are often surprised. The same is true for any other sphere of human activity that is tied to the real world.

Unless this institution sits far outside the norm, during your university years, an outside speaker’s lecture was cancelled, or a beloved faculty member or student was disciplined, removed, or otherwise ostracized for statements they made, views they held, or actions they took without intent to do harm. Every time that has happened the value of a university education has been diminished, and opportunities for growth have been squandered.

The problem is that as much as I might admonish you to remember the imperative for free inquiry and open questioning, too many of your professors, and worse still, university administrators, have forgotten them. They take the easy route, and cut and run, reasoning that it is more convenient to violate academic freedom, due process, or free speech than to deal with the possible media, and social media, backlash associated with doing the right thing. Worse still, they do this while pandering to online mobs by virtue signaling to demonstrate their own moral fitness.

So if you missed out on the most valuable components of what should be a post-secondary education—being provoked to re-examine your own a priori beliefs by responding to an argument that you disagree with, or an explanation that seems contrived or unintelligible, or coexisting as an adult with an individual you dislike, or grappling with the inherent unfairness of life and moving on—then the fault is as likely to lie with your peers or your instructors as it is in yourself. But don’t think you are a victim. You are not. That’s life. You can choose to wallow, or you can use these missed opportunities as valuable life lessons to make sure other future such opportunities are not squandered. You can hope for the best in yourself and others, but you can only ensure the best in yourself.

Ask yourself how many times you took the time to listen to someone whose ideas you disagreed with or despised. My late friend, the brilliant writer and lecturer, Christopher Hitchens used to say that infringing on freedom of speech restricts not only on the speaker, but also the potential listener, who misses out on the possibility of discovering that they might have been wrong in their thinking.

So, of all the lessons I hope you carry with you outside of these walls of privilege it is this one that is most important: Do not promote, in your future workplace, or social space, or family, the ethos you may have experienced here. Instead, rise above it, through kindness, and the willingness to change your mind. Give others the benefit of the doubt, don’t rush to judgement, don’t pretend the world divides neatly into good and evil, and most important, do not assume your own views are correct, however dear they may seem to you. In so doing you will not only raise yourselves up, but you may just help preserve the social fabric and create an environment for the next generation to better address the ills of the world that we have all helped contribute to here and now.

It is possible that the future will become unimaginably worse, and never ever get better again, as one commencement speaker was alleged to have said, but life gives you no choice but to confront that real possibility head on, and work to make the best of things, for yourself and those around you. And you won’t do that if you never leave your comfort zone.

And finally, don’t take admonitions like those I am expounding here on faith. Do your own research, even if it risks leading to different conclusions than the ones that are fashionable at the time. There are no sacred truths, and no one is unimpeachable, including yourself.