Use Your Moral GPS - 2024 Commencement Address
May 18, 2024
Good morning graduates, and a big special thank you to all your friends and family who have been with you for the long haul and are now here to cheer your splendid accomplishment!
In keeping with one of our traditions, I want our graduates and all our assembled guests to acknowledge our wonderful faculty. If my colleagues behind me will rise for a moment… THANK YOU!!
Graduates, a bit of data for you to keep handy. You are about to join a very special group: according to the US Census bureau, about 10% of the 24 million Americans aged 25 and older hold master’s degrees. WOW… nice going!
AND – get this – just TWO percent have doctoral degrees! Doctoral candidates, please stand so we can give you a special round of bravos!
To all of you, welcome to the club, in which membership is based on intellectual achievement and, as you know from your time in higher education, great tolerance for bureaucracy!
OK, onto “other business,” as it often says on meeting agendas. Here’s a bit of understatement: you’ve completed this chapter of your academic careers in difficult times, what with biological catastrophe of COVID, political and economic disruption, long overdue racial reawakening, climate and environmental disasters, and global violence and suffering at a scale and intensity not seen in decades.
Those are not just “outside” events, either. They affect us in our daily lives, as we dress the kids for school and care for our loved ones at home; in some cases, the problems are literally in our backyards and university yards.
And if that’s not enough, you’ve had to endure a dean with his corny jokes and attempts to reduce everything to baseball.
Watching you navigate your professional aspirations amid what we economists would call these “exogenous shocks” has been truly inspiring, and for that inspiration I know my faculty and staff colleagues here salute and thank you.
On this theme of navigation, by which I mean keeping our eyes on a hopefully sunny future while we cope with clouds of ugliness and suffering that surround us, a few reflections. I am drawn to one of America’s great scholars of education and racial justice, Professor James Banks, who reminded us through autobiography of what he called “the citizenship education dilemma.” From his childhood in segregated Marianna, Arkansas, Banks recalls the tension: education on the inside aimed at motivating democratic values, competing with realities on the outside that inherently contradict those values.
From Jim (and John Dewey and others) we learn that education is a lived experience, not a delivery service. Put differently, the three R’s of education are relevance, relevance, relevance.
It’s hard to turn theories and slogans into practice. But we must keep aspiring: as you all know, one of our guiding principles here in GSEHD is to connect what we do in our classrooms and clinics and boardrooms to the world around us.
But that path from aspiration to reality is full of obstacles. To help us navigate, then, we need a “moral compass,” by which I mean a set of rules or norms that help us make sense of a chaotic world and give us the courage and clarity to keep moving.
Bringing this into the modern digital era, we need to think of our compass as a functioning GPS – showing routes to guide us through uncertain terrain, warning us of hazards, estimating arrival time.
And just as a good GPS is programmed with dynamic evidence about the condition of roads and the behavior of other drivers, our moral GPS – as educators – has an equally vital role: it must enable us to formulate, test, and amend our narratives with data. We may imagine we’re on a smooth and scenic route, but we need to deal with dangerous potholes, reckless drivers, and other surprises.
In other words, our GPS must encourage us to challenge ourselves (and others) with objective truth. That’s the American way. As the great writer Jill Lepore noted in her history of the United States, our revolution was not only about liberal governance, but as significantly about the virtues of inquiry. We declared a grand aspiration, that “these truths are self-evident…” With those words we enshrined evidence, fact-finding, and healthy argumentation as pillars of our great republic.
I wish I had the wiring diagram for that GPS. Meanwhile, I’ll settle for what I hope won’t be a cop-out. For me the process – the pursuit of knowledge and the respect for evidence even when it seems to contradict our deeply held beliefs – can be more interesting and more valuable than the product.
What might help us in that process? Again, no quick answers, but rather I’ll share a few nuggets of inspiration borrowed from others, some wisdom that I try to remember as I navigate through risky and uncertain choices:
1) If you see something, or hear something, say something. That’s a good bit of advice that we hear from our friends in homeland security, and it is worth applying in other contexts: Is someone you know advocating violence or preaching hate or otherwise violating basic human decency? Are words causing emotional pain or inciting physical harm? Call it out, demand the evidence, fight ignorance with facts. Your moral compass, your GPS, should be programmed to steer you from the greatest threat to civilized society – the complicity of silence.
2) I used to think and now I think. That was the title for a volume of papers edited by the late Richard Elmore, in which scholars were asked to describe if and how ideas they once held dear were changed by new evidence. Try it on your own or with your friends. What have you learned that gives you an even slightly different outlook on things? If nothing else, it will promote humility, something in short supply these days.
3) Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Voltaire was onto something, and his advice was validated by scientists of rationality centuries later. Celebrate progress by perpetuating it; don’t scoff at small gains that are not yet “at scale.” As the rabbis taught in the 2nd century, to save one soul is to save the universe. Pursue noble dreams – even if they are hard to catch and you only get part way there.
4) Speaking of dreams, I borrow from Amos Oz, the great Israeli novelist and peace activist: Everything that is born of a dream is destined to feel like a slight disappointment… the only way to keep a dream perfect … is to never try to live it out. Want a good example? Think of our namesake, President George Washington, and his promise to the Jewish community of Newport, RI, back in 1790, that “the US gives to bigotry no sanction…” Now there is a dream we all need to keep going after!
5) Finally, on that business of inquiry and evidence, I’ll paraphrase Vaclav Havel, the great Czech statesman and dissident, a leader who knew tyranny and fought it: Keep the company of those who seek the truth – run from those who say they have found it.
I’ll close with a joke you’ve heard me use before. What’s the difference between optimists and pessimists? The pessimists just have more data! Maybe so, but here today I see solid evidence that validates my optimism. I see a racial, ethnic, gender, religious, national, and chronological mosaic that is the essence of the American experiment. You are the data that give us hope. Especially in these challenging times, I can’t thank you enough for providing me and my colleagues the evidence we need to bolster confidence in our collective future. Thank you for your contribution to GW – we are a better place because of you. Please keep in touch as you chase your dreams; please keep making a difference. And as Lester Holt reminds us every night, “take care of yourselves – and each other.”