Commencement Address
by Henry S. Bienen
President of Northwestern University
June 17, 1995
Members of the Board of Trustees, honorary degree recipients, members of the class of 1945, graduates of the distinguished class of 1995, family and friends, I am very pleased to have the honor to speak with you today.
Presidents often seek the opportunity to speak to graduating classes; and this class is special to me, as it is the first class that will graduate from Northwestern while I am president.
For graduating students, this is a marvelous occasion, the culmination of years of hard work. Parents and family have inevitably been partners with the new graduates in the days of joy as well as disappointment that led to the happy occasion bringing us together this morning; for many, these years often have also meant considerable sacrifice. Today, family and students should congratulate each other and give each other well-deserved tribute and thanks. Let me convey thanks to parents, relatives, and friends.
It is worth noting that the ceremony we celebrate today is called a "commencement." It marks the successful conclusion of a course of study at Northwestern University; it also marks a beginning for those who embark on new enterprises--often in distant places.
For me, my recent arrival at Northwestern was also a new beginning. One theme of my remarks today is new beginnings, and here I may speak from the advantage of a six-month head start on those who are graduating today. My new beginning and the many issues associated with starting in a new place were made much easier through the warm welcome extended to me by faculty, staff, and students when I came to Northwestern. I will always remember the "Party with the President" as one of the highlights of the inauguration festivities. And, since my arrival, I have appreciated the many invitations to talk with and be with students. I thank all of you for those opportunities.
Nearly three decades ago, I received my doctoral degree at the University of Chicago. When I left the Midwest at that time, I never dreamt that I might return three decades later as president of this great University. Indeed, I never thought of university administration as a career. I wanted to be a professor and hoped that, if circumstances allowed, I might supplement my academic career with experience in the U.S. government.
I did those things. But, almost as if by happenstance, I also unexpectedly found myself engaged in various aspects of academic administration. I discovered that I enjoyed these new challenges. And, following a course that I had never anticipated as I sat like you in my doctoral commencement exercises, I find myself now in a city that I had grown to like very much but did not expect to return to, in a career I never expected to pursue.
My first admonition to you follows from this personal aside. I know that many of you thought that selecting a college, indeed, choosing to come to Northwestern?nd then choosing a major implied a permanent life track. However, life has many twists and turns, and more surprises are in store for you. All these choices, which university to attend, which school to enter, which specialty to pursue within a school are important. But they do not, or at least should not, determine your future. Decisions can be made but also unmade, crafted, and reshaped. Paths turn, and real opportunities usually involve the challenge of the unknown. Sometimes reshaping is hard and other times not so difficult. But, if we remain open to the surprising, there will always be choices. The wonderful thing about learning, acquiring skills, having a broad education is that this gives us the ability to act and to make decisions affirmatively. Learning is good in itself, and it provides us with the intellectual and moral strength to seize the unexpected and to find opportunity where it has been all along, right in front of us.
We cannot say, with any confidence, what the future will be. Today there are careers and worlds that most of my generation could never have anticipated. There is a demand for skills, for new jobs, that no university provided training for when I was a recent graduate. The information technology revolution is very recent. The worlds of banking, finance, science, and the arts"even universities" have changed dramatically. Who among us is so prescient as to predict with certainty where the future will lead, what the new institutions will be and who will lead them?
Just as the world of work, and the range of careers available, has changed dramatically in the course of my professional life, so too has the greater world in which we live.
Who would have predicted in 1960, when I graduated from college, not just that Japan would become a great economic power, but the huge growth in other East and Southeast Asian economies? The Republic of Korea is today one of the leading steel exporters and shipbuilders. It challenges the U.S. and Japan in making sophisticated electronics. In 1960 it was still recovering from the Korean War. Hong Kong, Thailand, and Malaysia today make and assemble the most sophisticated hardware. Hungary and India create sophisticated software. China has had the most robust growth rates in the world for some years. New international economic relations and institutions have emerged. Indeed, the fusion of new technologies and what have come to be called emerging markets has fundamentally altered the flow of capital and peoples and restructured trade patterns. And those changes have affected our lives in significant, if not always visible, ways.
The second observation I want to share with you is that new endeavors necessarily entail adjustment. For you this will be a time, as the last six months have been for me, of starting over. But as you start over "as you commence today" you do so with a powerful arsenal of resources: You will be building on what you have learned in the classroom and outside it. You will need to adapt to new circumstances. Life at Northwestern, although you may think it is not so, is life in a protected environment. Such times will not come easily again.
I hope that you made the most of your studies and your life here, and that your Northwestern days were rich, intellectually, personally, and culturally; for all that will stand you in good stead.
I hope that what you learned and studied, the friendships you made here, and your interaction with faculty will give you strength and wisdom in the years ahead and solace in tough periods. I hope that the relationships forged with professors and fellow students, the ties with coaches and teammates, the shared membership in organizations and associations, the working together in laboratories, orchestras, and theaters all will have provided you with self-confidence and self-knowledge as well as fond recollections and remembrances that will strengthen you as you make your way in the world.
The world beyond Northwestern that you are about to enter is a world in flux. These are truly revolutionary times.
Abroad, the last of the great territorial empires, the Soviet Union, collapsed in the early 1990s, and its remnants are struggling to redefine themselves. We hope that Russia will emerge as a new democratic state rather than return to authoritarianism and hostility. But we do not know with certainty whether this will occur or whether the successor states of the former Soviet Union will war with each other or be consumed by internal strife.
Eastern Europe, too, has undergone remarkable transformations. Mostly these have been peaceful. But ethnic tensions remain powerful in many countries, and we have seen what ugly nationalisms can bring in the former Yugoslavia. Will new nationalisms and old ethnic tensions tear apart countries in central Europe and central Asia? These possibilities may not seem of great relevance to you, but they are. A world of conflict in central Europe and central Asia will have a significant impact on U.S. defense budgets. A friendly Russia will open vast trade and investment opportunities for the U.S.
The last of a generation of revolutionary leaders is fading in China. That great state has had remarkable rates of growth, and it has altered significantly in the last few years. But will it become an open, a semiopen, or a closed society? Here, too, trade and investment opportunities for the U.S. will depend on change in China. And China, as a great power, will significantly affect U.S. domestic concerns.
A remarkable transformation has occurred in South Africa, one for the most part peaceful. Can South Africa help move Africa towards growth and positive transformation? Race relations in the United States will not be impervious to events in Africa, specifically in southern Africa.
On the southern borders of the United States, we have recently seen how fragile economic reform and political transformation can be. The attempt to create the North American Free Trade Association will not end with Canada, the United States, and Mexico as partners but will extend south over time. Nor will the crisis in Mexico end that association. However, what the Mexican crisis does show us is the speed with which capital can move into and away from a country and the shattering effects this can have on a domestic economy that does not generate sufficient internal savings. Again, events south of the United States will affect migration and domestic politics. Matters of illegal immigration, bilingual education, and trade will affect you as citizens.
The movements of capital, people, goods, and ideas have accelerated. The development of new technologies of information processing and communications, and of weaponry, proceeds apace. These new technologies have great capacity for good. But they have great capacity for the proliferation of powerful weapons. Perhaps the greatest international challenge for the future will be the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Many countries will soon be able to deliver such weapons by intermediate- range missiles.
New technologies can also be utilized for energy savings. Others will be used in ways that damage and degrade the environment. And relatively simple technologies, as we have seen in Oklahoma City and in Tokyo's subways, can be harnessed to do vast damage. Your physical security and sense of well-being will depend on the use of and control of both new and old technologies.
You enter a world where there will be less, not more, margin for error in policy-making.
The United States has an economy more, not less, dependent on trade than has been the case since the 1930's. The dominant position of the United States in world trade and world capital, a position that after World War II was ahistorical, has now ended. But the United States remains the only Western power with both the military might and political will to move troops to far places in defense of both national and global interests. Yet this same United States has not adjusted to its changed role in the world.
We have not yet had a full-scale debate on America? place in the world. That debate started in the primaries before the last presidential election. But it was submerged, and it has remained submerged, by the focus on American domestic issues. The upcoming election, too, will be fought on the domestic issues of the budget, health care, affirmative action, crime, and welfare. One way or the other, the United States will have to adjust to its new role in the world.
Perhaps the domestic debate on deficits and the speed and scope of dealing with them must precede a thoughtful consideration of America's role in the world. How the United States wishes to relate to the post Bretton Woods institutions, the United Nations, and its affiliated organizations, the IMF and the World Bank will be shaped by domestic forces contending on a multitude of domestic and foreign policy issues. While the United States, as the most powerful country in the world, will still shape and influence international relations, the outside world will affect the welfare of the United States even more. Yet events beyond our borders do not wait until we have provisionally settled our own concern with our roles in the world and the ways that citizens want their government to influence their lives and fortunes. You move beyond Northwestern at a time of international and domestic upheaval. At such times, the race goes to those who are able to adapt to the new. Being fleet of foot means being able to understand the implications of change and to weigh responses in the light of changed circumstances. This is true both for institutions and for individuals. I have an abiding faith that human reason will prevail and that by reason we will understand and adapt to change.
I hope that, as you move beyond Northwestern physically, you will not leave behind you this wonderful place that I have grown so fond of in such a short time. I hope you will keep Northwestern in your minds and hearts?nd will find that what you learned here, both in classrooms and in your lives beyond the classroom, provides a fund of human and intellectual capital on which to draw throughout your lives. The Rock, SPAC, your residence hall or residential college, student organizations, events, concerts, plays, lectures, and your classroom and laboratory experiences should become important parts of your memories of Northwestern. I hope that you will return to find old virtues remaining: a commitment to reason and moral values, to seeking the truth, to fair play and civility of discourse, and to tolerance of differences and the value of the individual. For institutions like Northwestern, just as for each of us, adjustment to change need not?ndeed, must not?ead to abandonment of strongly held principles and moral values.
I would like to end by reading a poem by the Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, recently the subject of discussion in Northwestern's TriQuarterly. The poem is called "Incantation."
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
The celebration and examination of human reason are two of the reasons that Northwestern exists. We value and celebrate reason and hope that you will do so as you embrace the challenges of your new life. Your presence here has enriched this institution, and I am confident that you will enrich the greater world, your local communities, and the lives of others as you leave Northwestern.
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