Multiply What Matters

Graduation Address to the Class of 2003
By Lorene Cary

It is so important that we create ritual to mark the time. These tents and dinners, these newly planted beds of bright pink and red annuals, these vanloads of family members rolling in—wondering what in God’s name would make you pierce a perfectly good tongue; or why it would have been so hard for you to keep kosher, what with Hillel so available and convenient, very nice food, nice people, what’s not to like?; uncles having a few too many at the hotel; diva aunties swishing in late to every ceremony; tired cousins begging for rest and attention; all sorts of family members so proud and so impressed with how you’ve grown that they just can’t get a grip on talking about it. These interactions are no accident. We humans set them up on purpose in an amped-up swivet of swirling activities punctuated by large group assemblies, solemn…slow…very slow—dare I say boring?—moments together. In this way we focus on what matters to us.

At Dartmouth College last year, Fred Rogers slowed the time brilliantly by having the students take a silent moment to think about the teachers and professors who had helped them get to this point. When I read his talk, I thought of my wonderful mentors here—critics Houston Baker and Phyllis Rackin, poet Sonia Sanchez, novelist Kristin Lattany. In honor of Mr. Rogers, who taught us all when we were young, I’d like to ask us to do it, too. These professors who went beyond instruction to connect—you are their legacy. Your work will give their teaching its greatest meaning. Their work and love adds richness to this moment. Let’s take a moment in silence to think of them with gratitude and celebration.

Our ritual today is secular, but we use every trick from every sacred tradition—we use silence, large group meetings, music, incantations, food, movement, art, pomp, standards and banners, colors—and a mace. Can you believe it? Have you ever seen a mace? We wear traditional robes and headgear from the European Middle Ages. We use everything we can steal from the human experience of worship to burrow the significance of this moment down past our conscious minds and into our resistant reptilian brain stem.

Like the teaching, this weekend and tomorrow’s graduation attempt to connect. It’s a wedding, really, and each of you is his or her own bride-and-groom. The rest of us constitute a great wedding party. We delight in your youth and energy and strength and beauty, your inventiveness and wit. We need you to go forth, professionally, intellectually, emotionally, politically, to be fertile and multiply.

Bill Cosby put it succinctly at a commencement he and I shared once at Colby College. There, to the assembled graduates, gathered in the presence of family and friends, he said, with brilliant clarity: “Get a job! Your parents are tired. OK? They’re broke. Just give everybody a break, and please, go out and find yourself some work.”

Let’s acknowledge your families now, with grateful applause, and their work and love and investment to help you get to this moment.

Weddings, as we know, are about love and money, about jobs and kids and building a family legacy. It may seem rather a vulgar note to sound in the sudden shiny blue of tonight’s twilight, but we do sit in Franklin Field, and Ben Franklin—I’m afraid you’re going to hear yet more about him—was a practical guy. Mostly, in fact, we know him from those pesky little aphorisms that are so right and so righteous, so over-used that we can barely hear the wisdom of them.

He tells us not to squander time, because “time’s the stuff life’s made of” and lost time is never found again. He tells us: “Drive thy business, let not that drive thee,” and “early to bed, early to rise,” and yadda-yadda, you know the rest.

But Franklin wasn’t just aphorisms, not just a waistcoated-round-bellied-round-spectacled-greasy-haired-park-bench-statue-photo-op-cliché old guy. He really was real. He was ingenious, cocky, methodical, creative, irreverent, relentlessly self-improving, and endlessly opinionated—the perfect Penn profile. And he’s an ancestor member of this wedding who has helped form our great trail-train
of ritual.

Franklin was a self-taught man, a printer with a grammar school education and a bad record in arithmetic. I feel him in that, and also in his self-taught early opinion columns written under the pen name Silence Dogood, which always sounded to me like an ebonics drag name, but I guess probably wasn’t. Benjamin Franklin put together a philosophical sort of book club, the Junto, in which men who read books together prepared little essays on them to read to each other every few weeks. From that experience came a circulating library that allowed each man access to a costlier collection than any of them could have amassed on his own. From their discussions, Franklin began to get opinions about the education of youth.
He and other trustees established an academy that became the University of Philadelphia and then, of Pennsylvania.

I love to think of this beginning, because it is at once radical and inventive. A secular university education subverted conventions of the former Christian colleges and aimed to put out a different graduate: they/we/you were to become “serviceable in public stations, and ornaments to their country.”

That’s what you have been educated to become: “serviceable in public stations, and ornaments to [your] country.” Not just rich or more competitive. The brilliance
of Franklin’s legacy is the efficiency of common wealth: instead of one fire company letting other fire companies’ houses burn, as was the custom, Franklin, as the head of the Philadelphia Contributionship, proposed that they fight fires together, and by catching fires earlier, keep all fires easier to put out, thus saving insurance pay-outs for property damage—and saving property. It also saved lives. The legacy of this commonwealth is that Philadelphia has never had a major city-wide fire, and our housing, lots of it, is more affordable than in comparable cities.

(That’s one of the things that Philadelphians hope will lure you to stay past the honeymoon, by the way: to live here among us as grown folk, to build legacies of your own. President Rodin has joined with other college heads and public leaders to make our city a professional destination. Think about it. Stay a while. Have kids. Like we said: Get a job.)

In our current political life, filled with real fears and a public discourse that encourages paranoia and isolation, we continue to need that radical vision of the common good and the practical, do-able solutions in my lifetime. Martin King and Malcolm X gave us prophetic vision. Education does not teach us prophecy, but it can school us in compassion and skill. Franklin gave practical fixes.

Franklin, who saved enough to retire at 42, partly by owning enslaved black people, repented of the odious practice and became an abolitionist later in life. He would urge us never to stop learning—about human relations and about the social structures we create to insure and protect our own wealth, including and especially the wealth of resources that make up our Earth.

This education, if it’s worth anything like the $100,000 invested in you, has got to make you question the social structures we’ve been born into and change them when they fail to promote justice.

No justice, no peace.

We deny it, our American comfort making us logy like after a rich meal. And yet, it’s still true: No justice, no peace.

We need alternatives to a public education system that leaves 40 million people unable to comprehend a newspaper. We need alternatives to a so-called justice system that imprisons one out of 32 Americans and controls more young black men than we have enrolled in higher education institutions. Franklin, who helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris to end the French Revolution, would tell us that if we are to sustain civilization and survive as a race, we need alternatives to war.

Historically, that work begins way before graduation. Student involvement has done everything here at Penn from helping to start the Korean language and literature program to convincing trustees to divest holdings in apartheid-era South Africa.

Just this term, I personally have benefited from the precocious professional help of two of you who are here today. As a requirement for his course but also as a service to Art Sanctuary, our not-for-profit arts organization in North Philadelphia, George Scheer wrote an excellent marketing plan that we will implement this summer. Now he’s off to North Carolina to turn an old store into a retreat center for young artists. Mirenda Watkins, who’s worked at Art Sanctuary as an intern, has recently made innovations in our bookkeeping system that allow us more efficiently to deliver fine arts programming in the inner city.

More justice means more peace and a legacy of common wealth.

Maazel tov and big ups to Mirenda and George and to you all; and congratulations and blessings to your families and friends and everyone who shares this day. Be fruitful with this education and multiply its use among us. The world is created new each day, and we are called to assist in its recreation. Please take the weekend to kiss someone who has helped you get here, and vow with the rest of us to make this wedding feast possible for someone else.