(Editor’s note: The following is Chancellor Gordon Gee’s Commencement address, as prepared for delivery at May 12 Commencement exercises.)
Download a .pdf of the address.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Our grand Commencement ceremony today gives a new perspective – quite literally.
Traditionally, Vanderbilt University Commencements have always been on a north-south axis (rather like the history of our university), but this year, we spun the compass to a diagonal. Contrary to any conspiracy theories, this change of scenery was not brought at the urging of the McGill Project, so that everyone could get one last good look at their residence hall.
New seasons of life demand a different focus, a slight shift. At certain times, nothing should seem habituated, or overly sure; especially when you enter into a new relationship with your alma mater (for now you have an alma mater) and new relationships with each other.
Today is another rite of passage – another, your parents and families can attest, in a seemingly unending series of rites of passage – for you, our young people, our loved ones, keep insisting on doing this to us; insisting that as you go through your rites of passage, we go through our own rites of passage, too.
This year marks another such passage for me. Some of you, before, have heard me talk about my daughter Rebekah, who has appeared as a character in many of my Commencement speeches. Rebekah is getting married in the fall and I have already begun to stockpile tissues, and prepare myself for the sodden emotional heap to which I will be reduced on that day.
But even that auspicious day will be only the second rite of passage Rebekah has forced me to undergo this year.
From prior commencement speeches, some of you may already know that my daughter is an obstetrics and gynecology resident at the Harvard Medical School. Early this year, Rebekah and some colleagues of hers took part in a sting operation in which they would try to buy emergency contraception medication from Wal-Mart, which had been denying the medication to women who had prescriptions for it – some of whom were my daughter’s patients.
When the pharmacists denied them, my daughter and her colleagues brought a suit against Wal-Mart, based on the fact that what the chain was doing was a violation of the Consumer Protection Act. And it was shown to be, and Rebekah won. And, I cannot resist mentioning, the New England Journal of Medicine just invited her to write an article about the episode.
So you may wonder why I begin my commencement address with such talk as this, on such a beautiful blue sky day in May?
Why, on a day of such celebration, would I ever tell a story like this one, especially knowing that some of you may disagree with what Rebekah did for her patients?
Because I realized that what Rebekah was going through, (and what I was going through with all the heartburn she gave me), pointed to something very important for me to say. I realized in the midst of all that storm how much it takes guts, nowadays, to act with integrity, to stand like that in the public’s judgmental eye.
I realized how rare integrity has become. For we live in an ornery age, encrustated with bad habits in our ways of doing business, in our ways of writing books, in our ways of doing politics, in our ways of conveying news that people need. And, just like the sightline on Alumni Lawn, maybe we all need a good jostling so that we can see clearly again.
I am an old Eagle Scout, acculturated and adapted to scouting ethic. (That on top of being a Mormon. Could anyone be more square?) So you can imagine the alternating amusement and dismay I feel – as I suspect you have felt it too – at the spectacle of elected officials and their staffs, and of corporate officers, mostly contemporaries of mine, indicted for systemic corruption, for sweetheart deals and graft, and for lying to grand juries.
You can imagine my alarm as a university chancellor at the prospect of promising young writers appropriating wholesale the work of others and passing it off as their own.
You can imagine my discomfort, as a rabid and inveterate fact addict, at the changing marketplace of the news, where preemptive protestations of fairness and balance really cover up a skew and a slant; where declarations of “all the news that’s fit to print,” leave you wondering what was unfit; where quotations and bites can be presented without full context; where feature writing can be plagiarized; where sources can be invented; where reporters might work under aliases; where matters of fact are presented as matters of perspective; and where matters of perspective are presented as matters of fact.
I find myself in a perilous place to be for an American who desires to stay informed and engaged. For how do I gain a toehold, in anything, when I do not know where to put my foot?
These times are hard for us, as Americans, when the trust we place in the public officials whom we elect to represent us is increasingly shaken by faulty integrity; when the trust that we place in the Fourth Estate is shaken by our suspicion that what they report may not be everything we need to know; when the trust we place in corporate officers is damaged; when white-collar crime has gained acceptance as business as usual; when the trust we place even in the integrity of art is shaken by occurrences of misrepresentation; when even the validity of sports records is subject to “enhancement.”
But for all of my discomfort, dismay, amusement and alarm, I have to acknowledge that all of the people I have mentioned are only us, not someone else. We have allowed this erosion to happen: we, in this audience, and we, on this stage. So what then has happened in our psyche to make deceit the norm, and integrity such a surprise and truth such a risk? And why has it become an odd act of courage now to be honest?
What may have happened to us, when we no longer demand to hear the truth; from our representatives, from those who are responsible for delivering information to us, and from all of us who bear responsibility for the daily life, and quality of life, of our democracy?
Perhaps we have slid into cynicism, or perhaps, because of superstition and magical thinking we have convinced ourselves that something is not a lie if we believe it, or if it is popular, or makes our lives easy, or if we stand to gain by it.
But to allow ourselves to think in these ways is to allow ourselves to live a life based on credit and speculation.
Ladies and gentlemen, the only real currency we have, the only currency whose value does not fluctuate, is the truth, and is our ability to seek it out.
At this university, you learn that quickly. Graduates, you know this. Over the years of your study at Vanderbilt you have learned that experiments will not play out, that theorems will not test, that arguments will not hold; if parts are faulty, or if all facts that can be known are not known.
Everyone at the Medical Center knows a patient’s life cannot be sustained through spin or politics or “truthiness,” but only through observable facts that certain combinations of treatments are known to produce certain results.
Universities, by their nature, by our nature, have to be places of truth and light, of fact and not fiction, of clarity that is not clouded.
So why should we not have the same expectations for the greater culture in which we live, for the world outside of the university? Has truth become that rare and fantastical?
You may remember that in Gulliver’s Travels on the last island he visits, Lemuel Gulliver encounters a race of horses, who are supremely rational and ethical and capable of speech, who call themselves Houynhnhnms. The Houynhnhnms do not know how to lie, do not understand what a lie is, and so are easily taken in when Gulliver deceives them.
When they discover Gulliver’s deceit, having no word for a lie, the Hounyhnhnms can only call it “the thing which is not.”
The master Houynhnhnm explains to Gulliver that if the use of speech is to make us understand one another, to be given instead the thing which is not, is to be left worse than in ignorance.
The closer the description is to the object, the farther we all are from ignorance. The greater the integrity of symbol with fact, the more accurately we are able to communicate. The more faithful you are to the words that you give, the more worthy you are of trust. I feel like these things are so basic, so Cub Scout, that they are not even worth my saying. But apparently, they are not basic anymore, so I say them now to save you mandatory ethics training later.
There is a place, a thing, a state of being, which is called in Sanskrit sat, which means actually “being itself”; a place where there is no gap between what is said and what is meant.
Sat has nothing to hide, and nothing colors it. It is empty of complication, and pure and safe. And refreshingly, it is totally apolitical. Sat simply means being, and its quality – satya – means truthfulness.
Now, universities are not metaphysical, and I would be presumptuous to say that we can approximate such a pure state of being. It may not be possible to tell absolute truth with the tongues of men or of horses; but it is possible, and imperative, for us to try, because the more and more we do not, either by design or by mistake, we take ourselves further and farther from that state of being that is sat, and further and farther from our own capability, further and farther from being the best people we can be, the best civilization we can be.
We owe it to ourselves at least to try, because if we continue to say “the thing which is not,” we miss our potential entirely, and have to live in a mire of miscommunication and ignorance and all of the consequences that are brought with those.
Maybe the best we can do, as universities, as humans, working with human knowledge and demonstrable hypotheses and facts, is to see that there is as little a gap as possible between word and thing – such vigilance, by the way, is the very meaning of integrity, and it is the basis of all trust between human people, that allows democracy to function.
Universities were evolved by humans for the benefit of other humans, to dispel ignorance, to train humans to think critically, to bring humans to the capability of skilled discernment, so that they would be less susceptible to being misled or being the marks of opportunists and propagandists.
Universities were created by humans to make ourselves free.
Many have found it the fashion lately to accuse universities of having a cultural or political bias. Ladies and gentlemen, I will admit to all of you today that it is so. I am going to tell you that accusation is true. We do have a cultural bias. Vanderbilt does, and we always have had. We are biased: toward the search for verifiable truth, toward ideas and their free exchange.
And may I submit to you also: our entire culture should have such a bias in all of its public life, and public discourse; and that I dearly hope every single student in cap and gown today leaves Vanderbilt University a partisan of fact, and free communication and clarity.
For universities should not be islands of truth. Truth is not an island. It should not have to be sought out as a quiet, calm refuge amid churning seas of chatter, chat and propaganda. It should be a continent; a whole planet.
The dream of Vanderbilt University is this: to find out, preserve and further elaborate knowledge for the elevation of all people; to bring more knowledge into our world, and to make it available for all, for the benefit of all.
Every year our graduates disperse, that you may be missionaries and bringers of light, and conveyors of truth; that you may act with integrity in a culture that is being pulled toward disintegration.
And what you have to know also is this: that sometimes speaking the truth can scorch the inside of your mouth, and acting with integrity can bring the angry gaze of those who oppose you to sear your skin.
The prospect of plunging into such an ornery world headlong can bring apprehension, not only from within yourself, but from those who love you, and who know the world and who want to protect you from it.
So, I say to the parents and families, if I may speak to you for a moment: at this time, we know that, through their efforts, our children have achieved adulthood, and our loved ones have achieved independence. We see them doing something on their own, that we cannot do for them, could not do for them.
That was where I was with my own Rebekah, for during everything, and no matter how much I had done for her in the past, now I could only watch: my daughter, my dearest, on national television and with her name in all the papers; my daughter, my darling little girl, with Rush Limbaugh speculating about her personal life; my daughter, willingly putting herself into an ongoing circumstance of confrontation for the good of her patients – but did she have to do it for the world to see?
My heart was torn between wanting to call her back into the house, wanting her to be safe – and at the same time, knowing that this is what I had waited for all along, that this is what I wanted for her: to admire my child, for her to be a heroine, even whether or not I would have chosen to do as she did.
But for any feelings I might have had, Rebekah did not do what she did to impress me, or to impress any of those whose approval she might seek.
When I caught myself in that realization, I knew that it was safe to let her loose. Because when I stand at Rebekah’s side at her wedding, I will know that I am standing next to a woman who has tested me, who has tested herself, and whom I cannot entirely presume to understand; but whom, because I have seen her act with integrity, I can feel confident about letting her go.
I know that you feel a similar confidence today, as you relinquish an old way of relating to your loved ones – just like shifting the sightlines on Alumni Lawn – in the light of all their accomplishments and the adults they have become.
I can speak with certainty when I say that your confidence is amply merited. For the root of the word “confidence” is the same as the root of fidelity. Confidence means fidelity of heart, with your own heart and with the hearts of others. It means worthiness of trust.
As Vanderbilt , this day, this hour, this minute, returns your graduates to you, after the promise we made to you years ago that they would become excellent adults, and worthy of trust, we can say with confidence that our promise is fulfilled.
Graduates, if I were to want nothing else for you I would want this: that you continue to be heirs to the legacy of universities. That you be conduits for truth; that you be a culture of clarity; that you be, as Maya Angelou called Vanderbilt this year, a “rainbow in a cloud.”
If I did not know you to be capable of great things, we would not expect such great things of you. I know that you can mount relief trips to Pass Christian and to Washington Parish. I know that you can build robotic micromice. I know that you can play Hamlet. I know that you can overcome the effects of debilitating disease. And I know that you can beat the University of Tennessee in football.
I know your powers because I have seen them. I have seen how empowered you are when you work for something larger than yourself. There is a power that comes in the service of a greater good, in the service of those who depend on you.
Each one of you is a force for renewal, and all of you together are a powerful force. So as you have renewed this University, so you are capable of renewing democracies – democracies which are only stable when people have access to knowledge that allows them to employ their powers of reason toward their own self-determination and toward the long-term interests of their communities.
And compared to all you have accomplished, is the truth, then, even so great, or difficult a thing? Is trust? Is the free conveyance of ideas? These are only the first things, from which all successful democracy and all enlightenment descend.
And maybe, after all we might say about them, truth-telling and trust and ideas are little things. May this graduating class be as capable of little things as you are of great. May you be capable of the first things. May you love others enough to speak the truth. May you be worthy of trust. May you be on the side of ideas.
Vanderbilt Class of 2006, please know that every moment of your life, you are capable of bringing the values of Vanderbilt University – which are honor, which are integrity, which are speech and action that have nothing to hide, which are pure facts that can stand the light of day, and free thought upon those facts – which are the values of all universities back into our world. May this day, and all the days and years of study which it represents, invest you with the courage that it takes to do so.
My dear graduates: today I get the stage, but please know that throughout your whole career at this university you have been speaking to me, about your capabilities and your capacities and your ardent hearts.
Your voices, which you have activated here, and your words are instruments. Let your voices and words be endowed with satya, seamless and strong. Let them be the thing which is.
And may you be, through your words and actions, heroes and heroines to everyone you know.