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

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)

Use What You’ve Learned: It was not supposed to be like this.

This day was supposed to be different, a day that marked your readiness to journey into the world, a day called commencement because it was all about beginnings, all about starting over and defeating death with what you had learned.

Instead death came to you.

Many say that you were unprepared for the devastation that visited your lives so suddenly. In one sense, they are, of course, right. How to plan for an intrusion of such unexpected violence, how to deal with the contamination of your everyday space and the betrayal of your everyday trust? I understand the shock and the pain. When I was not much older than you are now, I also suffered the unpredictable destruction of my life the day a military coup savaged democracy in my country, Chile. On that September 11, 1973, I watched thousands hunted down, not by a lone gunman but by soldiers with orders to kill and colonels with orders to torture. So I know what it is like to be stalked day after day, year after year, with nowhere to hide. And I also know how hard it is to be healed, how haunted one can still be many decades later.

And yet allow me to suggest that those who think you, the Class of 2007, have not been prepared for this tragedy because you did not anticipate it are also mistaken. What have you been doing at this institution but precisely engaging in the very issues that now threaten to infect and sully your existence? You have studied how the science that brings us so many wonders is nevertheless unable to give us final responses to a number of fundamental questions. You have been challenged by philosophy, by psychology, by history to examine what is different, what is not easily explained, what is doubtful. You have been shaken by knowledge, broken out of the conventions you believed in, made uncomfortable with lies, forced to look into the mirror of yourselves. You have been shaken by beauty, interrogated by atrocity, exploded by languages from faraway places where death comes more easily to the inhabitants and just as unpredictably. If all through these university years you have not learned to ask the right questions about grief and community, if all this time you have not been made wary of the false answers, then I would advise you not to graduate, I would beg you to go back into the classroom and get yourselves an education.

But I don’t think your alma mater — the mother of your soul from now on — has failed you, that you lack the maturity, discovered in books and professors and above all in one another, to survive terror.

And yet the question remains. Did not the murderer among you also come to this place to learn and, specifically, to study and practice literature, a form of humanity that is supposed to arm us, not with weapons of destruction but with the marvelous weapon of the compassionate imagination? Of what use were all the books he read, the stories and plays he wrote, if they did not tame his inner demons?

For me the question is particularly painful because literature has been my calling and my inseparable companion, has helped me to grow into someone more fully human all through the best and worst years of my life.

This, then, is your final assignment, this day when you graduate. Spend time with the literature, the books, the learning, which could not save your tormentor, lost as he was in his ferocious loneliness. Use the wonders of your own intelligence and the rivers of your empathy to become, each of you, the sort of humans who ride into the world determined to create conditions where fewer of your fellows have to face the daily possibility of premature death descending upon them.

Tell the dead you leave behind that you will not be engulfed by fear.

I wager you are more than prepared to face the future.

Posted on Monday April 23, 2007 | Permalink |

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Next: Michael Eric Dyson, professor of humanities and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of 'Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster' (Basic Civitas, 2006)