One of the most difficult art forms I know is the commencement address. I have now given several, and each one seems a huge challenge — how to say something both interesting and uplifting without coming across as an insufferable prig and/or bore. Last Thursday I gave the convocation address for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences of George Mason University, at the invitation of my friend Jack Censer, the distinguished historian who is the dean of the college. GMU is a rapidly growing public institution in the metropolitan District of Columbia area, and this convocation was for all the M.A. and Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences.
The first draft of my talk was directed at what I assumed would be degree candidates who had fairly narrow professional training and career trajectories. But when Jack reviewed my first draft, he straightened me out. It turns out that a high proportion of his M.A. students are in fact in the traditional letters and sciences fields. Some of them are preparing to go on to doctoral work, but most seek either to extend their liberal educations or to secure a master’s degree simply as a generalized work credential. Coming from an elite university background in which the master’s degree (except for the master’s in public administration at my own Woodrow Wilson School) has fallen almost entirely into abeyance, I had not realized how much the M.A. has experienced a renewal.
I was intrigued and heartened to think that so many of the candidates had broadly educational goals, and it was a pleasure to see the 400 or so happy degree candidates tramp across the stage to receive their diplomas — well, the blank piece of paper that was handed to them by the dean of their school. (I trust that somewhere along the line they were given an actual parchment.) As one would expect, quite a few of the candidates were older, a few considerably older. But in fact most of them appeared to be not long out of college. Since I have been so worried about the fate of liberal education in the collegiate curriculum, I was very pleased to see it alive and well in graduate education at a large public institution.
My talk was entitled “Graduate Education and the Real World: Doing Good by Doing Well.” Later this week it will be posted on my Princeton Web page, though I doubt that any reader of this blog will learn much from it. I did a riff on Tom Lehrer’s “The Old Dope Peddler” (I even sang a few bars, if you can believe that), “doing well by doing good.” Nothing wrong with using education to find a good job and earn a good living, but, as Howard Gardner and his colleagues have reminded us, “good work” has many meanings. One of them, I urged the GMU graduates, is to use your job to do good for others. It was probably boring, but the audience cheered. After all, the next item on the program was the conferral of degrees!
