From the issue dated May 7, 2004
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Not My Generation
Somewhere on an American campus this month, commencement speaker I.B. Antiquated will warn fledglings about to flap their wings into the brave blue yonder that Fallujah "is not Khe Sanh, Basra is not Long Binh, and Tikrit is not Hue." The students, uncomfortably sweating in their caps and gowns, will yawn and think, "Whatever," and "It's like, what is he talking about?" In other speeches, the "commencement communications gap" -- the exquisite absence of meaning that takes place between well-intentioned middle-aged speakers and slightly drowsy young graduates -- will take similar form. This spring, as images from Iraq lure older folk into historical analogies, the danger will be greater than ever. Senator Partisan will make a passing reference to the unexpected consequences created by Agent Orange, and head-scratchers will muse, "Who?" They'll wonder why the senator fears a return of folks like the Weathermen. Aren't they pretty helpful, despite all those silly maps? And napalm, napalm ... right, I've heard of that. Isn't it a place near Punta Cana? All of us suffer from this in one chronological direction or another. Years ago, in a Philadelphia Inquirer column, I included a snide mention of an old sitcom, My Mother the Car, to indicate prime-time dopiness. My friend David Bianculli, TV critic for the Daily News, in New York, and an NPR commentator, privately notified me that 90 percent of all sentient Americans had never seen or heard of My Mother the Car. "Dear Criticosaurus," he urged, more or less: "Get some new TV examples." Yet some staffers at my paper recently razzed the young cafeteria cashier because she'd never heard of -- truly -- Bob Hope. Presidents and deans everywhere doubtless appreciate that this season's commencement communications gap, mounting antiwar sentiment notwithstanding, almost certainly won't resemble that of 35 years ago. In the late '60s at Harvard, as student protests surged against the Vietnam War (middle-aged person at the keyboard first wrote simply, "the war"), President Nathan M. Pusey spoke of "Walter Mittys of the Left" (Walter Who?). He compounded his appreciation of the class orator's call at the 1968 commencement for "fundamental changes" in society by presiding over an honorary degree to the Shah of Iran. (Shah? Uh, what's a Shah?) By the eve of the 1969 commencement, SDS had voted, Morton and Phyllis Keller recalled in Making Harvard Modern, "to seize the podium microphone" while a popular late-'60s event took place nearby: a countercommencement. And in 1968 at Columbia, recalled Joanne Grant in Confrontation on Campus, students marched on the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (chosen that year as a safer venue than traditional Low Plaza), "carrying a huge red flag and sounding the Arab women's rallying cry (à la The Battle of Algiers)." Protestors loudly played a tape of Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" to signal that a walkout had begun. And SRU (OK, we'll explain -- "Students for a Restructured University") offered this immortal counterconferring of degrees by the educator Harold Taylor: "By virtue of the authority vested in me by the trustees of the human imagination, derived from the just powers of human nature and the constitution of mankind, I hereby confer upon all of you here present, in addition to those not present, a degree of beautification through the arts." Compared to the "liberating" shenanigans of those commencements, what's a little referential disconnect? Aren't traditional commencements consecrated in miscommunication anyway, with all those student speeches in Latin, Hebrew, or Greek that leave most of today's faculty members clueless without their programs? Some wise heads believe the apt time to draw attention to the reference gap between academe's more-senior citizens and the 17-to-21 crew is September. For six years running, Beloit College's information office has been taking that task on its stooped shoulders, issuing a Mindset List of short items to alert faculty members to the telescoped life experience of their charges born in the mid-'80s. Observations from recent lists age you on contact: Atari predates them, as do vinyl albums. Banana Republic has always been a store, not a puppet government in Latin America. The statement "You sound like a broken record" means nothing to them. They do not have a clue how to use a typewriter. They've never heard, "Where's the beef?" Paul Newman has always made salad dressing. Michael Jackson has always been white. But the notion that seniors depart on the same wavelength as their teachers hardly cuts it. Goodwill-bridging matters at commencement, too. Both of academe's key ceremonial moments -- convocations of various kinds in the fall and those goodbyes in the spring -- remind us that narrowing the generational reference gap always involves the teacherly struggle between two aims: sharing wisdom, context, and reference from before one's students kicked in, and talking their language and vocabulary enough to connect without pandering. As Robert L. Simon nicely put it in Neutrality and the Academic Ethic, "the point of a commencement is to honor the graduates, not expound one's views to a captive audience that has no formal means of reply." It's a crucial place, far more than in class, to span the gap from the speaker's side. What's needed, all ye giving commencement talks soon, is a journalistic ear. If you teach regularly, you begin to develop one. But if standing before a thousand 21-year-olds feels most like a safari in Kenya -- a unique moment squinting at lots of sleek flamingos huddled together -- some tips: Jon Stewart, not Dick Cavett. Zooming in on Kill Bill works this month. Whatever "selective service" means to you, to them it's bad waitressing at a dump near campus. "Going postal" means returning to what you dubbed snail mail. A joke on "The Passion of the ... " (insert name of host institution's president) may get a laugh. But no reference to "Peter, Paul & Mary" -- they'll consider it part of the same joke. Sometimes a kind of historic serendipity comes into play. Do a Paris Hilton riff and you've transcended the gap while also pinpointing two important Western institutions your young listeners may later investigate separately, in graduate or business school. Where do you draw the line on slumming? Up to you. A recent student writer for The Daily Pennsylvanian ended a column with a reference to his "favorite political philosopher," Ice-T. He meant it ironically. So there is hope. Is such advice needed by a crew of regulars that last year included Bill Cosby, Ray Bradbury, Michael Dell, Bill Clinton, William Friedkin, Ted Koppel, Jesse Helms, Amy Tan, George W. Bush, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, Queen Noor, Yoko Ono, Meryl Streep, Aharon Barak (the president of the Supreme Court of Israel), and former Chief Justice Roy S. Moore of Alabama (who may know something about the 10 Commandments of commencement speeches)? Maybe not. But every year brings a rash of first-timers and outsiders who wonder why so many monks were invited to sit on stage with those roomy hoods and sleeve bars. To create the proper spirit, as the chaplains bless the throngs during invocations this month, all guests might wear multicolored armbands over their gowns and robes, declaring: "The Generations, United, Will Never Be Defeated." It's only right, in a rite of passage, to use names and language that make sense to those born later, though that's inevitably -- on this occasion certainly -- a matter of degree. Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches literature at Herzen University and philosophy at St. Petersburg State University, both in Russia. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 35, Page B17 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education