School of Arts and Sciences
Graduation Ceremony Address for PhD and MS & MA students (2009)
May 18, 2009
I am so grateful for this opportunity to share some thoughts with you as we gather today – as families, as friends, as teachers, as colleagues – to honor those of you who have worked so hard in your chosen courses of study. You now sit before us having completed and achieved what you set out to do some years ago, in some cases, some many years ago. So there is much to celebrate – and I am not going to stand here any longer than necessary. I certainly do not want to become remembered only as the last person standing between you and the actual bestowal of the degrees that you have earned.
At this stage in your educational careers – and if you are here, you have gone to school long enough to think of it as a career (albeit not a particularly well paying one yet, or ever depending on your field) – you have sat in numerous ceremonies like this one. At all the earlier stages of your life – you have walked to the strains of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstances – you have dressed up in black, had your hair done or cut, bought new shoes or suits. You have done this all before, and yet we sit here again, embracing a very familiar set of rituals. Elgar’s music, which evokes a mood that mixes triumph and nostalgia, excitement and contentment – strikes me as an especially fitting evocation at gatherings like this – gatherings that mark this time of passageways and transitions, of promise and trepidation.
So what makes this time different, what makes this re-enactment of the rituals of completion and commencement especially worth celebrating and commemorating? Each of you has your own answer to that question. Each of your stories would present a far more compelling speech than anything I can say here to you. Each of you came to sit and take your rest in one of these chairs at the end of a journey that began in a place far from here, both in time and in space. You came with different goals and aims, different motivations. You came from families where education was valued either because everyone in your family is well-educated, or from families – like my own – where everyone values education because so few have been privileged to have it.
Whatever your own story, it seems to me that this graduation is different because you actually choose to pursue this degree. Unlike our kindergarten or middle school or high school or even college graduations – the pursuit of a master’s or a Ph.D. in the arts and sciences – is not a conscripted activity, but a voluntary one. At some point, as a thinking and feeling adult, you actually decided to do this intellectual work and to do it at Penn and here in Philadelphia. I am sure that there have been many times when you have questioned that choice – in the lonely sleepless unshaven unbathed midnight hours of writing papers or finishing projects or prepping for exams – times where you may have questioned yourself deeply – as in by asking “what was I thinking.”
And yet, as there is often joy in the morning after a long night’s struggle – you all also have felt the exhilaration of work well done, of that adrenaline rush that comes from raw creativity and discovery, from the mastery of new skills. You have felt the sheer fun and pleasures of learning, of teaching, of doing more than you ever imagined that you could. And that is why this particular graduation is or should be so different, and so special for each of you and for those of us who celebrate it with you today.
When I sat where you now sit – some 14 years ago – I had taken what should have been an illegal u-turn to do graduate work in history after a detour through law school and a decade of work in the real world. So I felt acutely the emotions that I have been trying to describe today – the sense that this degree, this pursuit, this work – that this one was chosen with my eyes wide-open and that this graduation was for ME, not in a selfish way, and not in a “this Bud’s for you” kind of way, but for me in the sense of volition and chosen purpose and a sense of call.
You may not feel that as strongly today as I did, or as deeply as you might feel it in years to come, but I do trust that even now you know what I mean and that your own sense of drive to completion rests on some deeply held motivations within you. That is to me the very essence of work at the graduate level in the arts and sciences, that is what I look for and try to foster in my own graduate students, and that is the internal drive that will carry you forward as you leave this place and this period in your personal and your professional lives.
Even in all of our excitement, I ask us to pause and think of all of those today and before us who never had the choices that we have or the opportunities that we have to follow our dreams. Because it is true that there are so many, too many of those thwarted by circumstance or raw injustice, but who are or were smarter, more driven, more creative, harder working than we are, and who would have done much better work than we have done or will ever do – there are so many, too many who never had and never will have the opportunities that we share - and that is our great loss.
When I think of the aching disparities that history so well reminds us of, I think often of a man named George Washington Williams who was born in 1849, luckily for him in Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania. Had he been born two states south of here or in my native state of Virginia, he would most likely been born a slave because he was a black man. Born free in this state, Williams put his freedom to good use – at age 14 but with virtually no formal education, he ran away from home in 1864, joined the Union Army (like over 185,000 other black men), and saw action in various battles of our bloody civil war. After the war, still in uniform, he went to Mexico and fought with the forces that overthrew Maximilian.
Returning to the United States, he enlisted in the Tenth Calvary, one of four all-black units – the so-called Buffalo soldiers - who served in the westward expansion campaign. Increasingly morally repulsed with the work of warfare against Native Americans, Williams took his discharge from the Army in 1868 (at the ripe old age of 19). He then became a Baptist minister and, having taught himself to read and write, he entered Newton Theological Institution in Massachusetts, became the pastor of a prominent black church in Boston. Later settling in Ohio, he pursued a varied career as a journalist, a lawyer, a member of the state legislature – and then – spurred on by the paucity of printed materials about the long history of African Americans in this country, he decided that what he most wanted to do was to devote himself to researching and writing that history.
With great fortitude and persistence, he did just that, publishing in 1881 his two-volume 600-page tome History of the Negro Race in America: 1619-1880, the first book of its kind. His work met critical acclaim not only because of its high quality, but because of the fact that a black man had exhibited the keen intellect and skills needed to produce it. Not yet done, Williams soon published his second book, A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-65, another groundbreaking work. In 1891, Williams died at age 41 from an illness contracted during an investigatory tour of the wretched conditions of the Belgian Congo under the reign of King Leopold the II. It would be another five years before W. E. B. Du Bois, whom we often associate with the founding of the field of African American studies, would become the first black Ph. D. at Harvard in 1896.
This is not a tragic story, and I do not present it that way (even though Williams’ shortened life haunts its telling and leaves us to wonder what else he might have done had he lived another fifty years into his 90s as did Du Bois). Rather I offer Williams up as an example to all of us for other reasons. During a period that also witnessed the shift toward the professionalization of academic professions, Williams had pursued his own dreams and his own work, propelled by an internal drive and commitment, and a sense of call to the work of historical recuperation and writing, of producing and promulgating knowledge, working on his own.
His scholarly pursuits yielded work that still stands the tests of time and that continues to inspire me and many others to sustain our own commitments to the history that he made, through the history that we now write and teach. Indeed, we would know little about Washington, who was lost to obscurity for a century, without the decades of detective work of another giant in our field, the recently deceased historian John Hope Franklin whose biography of Washington was a labor of love.
As Washington set about his chosen life’s work as a scholar and a writer, he wrote a letter to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in which he spoke of the conditions of their time, in the age of emancipation and of the aftermath of great social, economic, and political upheaval. He spoke of that time as a “plastic period” in history. His late 19th-century use of the word “plastic” (when I first read it) was jarring to my 21st century sensibilities, where the word “plastic” has come to mean lots of things that Washington could not have meant. He could not have been referring to those cards in your wallet that you maxed out in order to get through graduate school; he could not be referring to the kind of work that was done before there was botox; and he could not mean those bags that we now scorn as a toxic threat to the life of our planet.
Those of you who are students and scholars of art and of Latin and Greek would recognize the root meaning of the word, referring to materials used in molding in the work of sculpture. But Washington meant its usage in other ways more prevalent and more pertinent to his life and time. He meant of course that his period in history, not unlike our own, was a time of great fluidity and flexibility and change, and that it was a time especially susceptible to and open to new ideas and new influences. For him that brought an excitement to the air, charging it with potential and promise and ennobling him to simply refuse to accept the limitations of his own times. But he also meant that his times, like ours, was an era full of the plastic energy of creativity and of the imagination, a usage of the word “plastic” that sadly has been cheapened and abandoned in the post-modern age in which we live.
And it is that creative energy that we celebrate here today: the urge to write, to think about things differently, to do new work, to teach, to keep on learning – to use our minds in our work in ways that leave some imprint on the world as we find it, work that will defy the limitations around us, work that will make this a better place. So it is fitting that we pause here today to enjoy ourselves before you move into the wider world that awaits you, where your own histories will be exacted. Your choices and your opportunities are many, but so too are the obligations which you now assume. It will give all of us great joy to see where you go and what you do.
Thank you for all you have done already, and we know that you will continue to surprise and delight us in the days ahead. Often in life, there is too little pomp, and all too much circumstance – so celebrate today, but do take care as you move from this place - and may the force be with you.
BDS
Philadelphia, May 18, 2009