In the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech, we asked a number of scholars, college presidents, and writers to answer this question: If you were giving the commencement address at Virginia Tech this year, what is the core of the message you would like to leave with the graduates?

Amy Gutmann | Michael Eric Dyson |Ariel Dorfman | Lionel Shriver | Edward J.W. Park | Donna E. Shalala | Barry R. Glassner | Sissela Bok | Robert Coles | Karla Jay | Bobby Fong

April 23, 2007

Lionel Shriver, author of 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' (Counterpoint, 2003) and 'The Post-Birthday World' (HarperCollins, 2007)

Question Your Certitudes: Class of 2007, you have learned at least one lesson in your senior year: that there is such a thing as bad publicity.

The eyes of the world have been unpleasantly upon you, yet not for a reason that any of you would have chosen. Do not, therefore, allow the forces of malice and random misfortune to rule your futures or dictate who you are to yourselves. Hold tight to the aspirations you conceived previous to that fateful Monday — to distinguish yourselves in engineering, or architecture, or the arts. To allow your identity or your ambitions to be fatally broadsided by this calamity would hand victory to both a man and a manifestation of nihilism that deserve only decisive defeat.

Some will claim that your university has fallen prey to a wholly modern malady. Those of you who have paid attention in your literature and history classes know better. The sanity of our species has been forever fragile; for millennia, not only individuals but whole nations have descended into madness. Moreover, the history of our race has engendered a constant contest between malevolence and benevolence, between brutality and gentleness. That contest has been close and bitter from the moment your distant ancestors climbed down from trees.

Use your pain as an occasion to choose up sides — to opt for kindness over cruelty, for gratitude for what you have over resentment of what you don’t, for hard-earned recognition for achievement over the cheap celebrity of destruction. Further use your pain to understand the pain of others. For your experience — like that of your friends and teachers who are not, sorrowfully, with us today — is not exceptional. Our world would be so much easier a place to live in if it were.

You are wiser now, and wisdom is a burden. One that education willingly levies, although it was never our intention to make you quite so wise so fast. You will be leery now — of the enigmatic, the strange, the suspiciously quiet. Some measure of leeriness in relation to all others who have not proven themselves worthy of your trust may stand you in good stead

But best to use that leeriness first and foremost on yourselves. Direct your distrust inward. Question your certitudes. Be vigilant for the first signs of vengefulness, envy, grandiosity, self-righteousness, and cravings for the raw, indiscriminate attentions of others in your own thoughts. Never forget that the more fiercely you believe a thing, the more likely it is that you are wrong. The mind is a cave. Yet its powers are only mighty when you crawl out.

Previous: Edward J.W. Park, associate professor of Asian-Pacific-American studies at Loyola Marymount University
Next: Ariel Dorfman, professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University and author of ‘Other Septembers, Many Americas’ (Pluto Press, 2004) and ‘Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet’ (Open Media, 2002)