A WORD TO THE GRADUATES

 

"May you live in interesting times" often referred to as the Chinese curse and quoted to good effect by Robert Kennedy certainly has come true for our recent college graduates.  The class of 2013 has unlimited opportunity to fix what their parents have blown asunder.  I believe with a little help, they will be up for the task and do us all proud.

For the young political science graduate, there is a daily open classroom of American democracy to study and repair.  With gun violence, immigration reform, global warming and unemployment begging for congressional attention, one third of the committees in the House of Representatives are instead, investigating the White House administration.  The opportunity for meaningful legislation is slipping away as the political barricades go up.  The president’s second term is becoming an ongoing battle to defend his legacy from the first term.

It feels like my graduation in 1973, when I was still wondering what a newly minted political science major did for a living.  I spent the summer of 1973 traveling through Mexico and the West Coast, drinking beer and watching congressional hearings from another time and place. After the helicopter took the president away, I was not sure what kind of country my generation was inheriting and whether it was worth fixing.  Like so many of my peers, I shrugged my shoulders and entered law school.

In today’s world there are far too many lawyers out there cannibalizing each other.  I recommend sticking with political science as a career and studying how to make our democracy last another century or two. We boomers, for the most part, became lawyers and look how that turned out.

The graduate with a degree in journalism, who actually wants to report or write about national and world events beyond sound bites, facebook and twitter has some interesting choices to make.  First, where to work?  Print journalism is disappearing faster than the old journalists are hanging up their columns.  Second, do we really need another memoir by a member of the millennial generation or more books about vampires in love?

 I hope that those graduates who are debating whether to stick with the writing profession go see Lucky Guy with Tom Hanks and read the April 29, 2013 piece by NYT columnist David Brooks entitled Engaged or Detached?  I suggest the play, which recently opened in New York, because it shows that good old fashion investigative reporting can make a difference.  I recommend the David Brooks’ article because it struck a chord with me on how the journalist impacts the reader. 

Brooks maintains that the engaged journalist reminds his audience: “of the errors and villainy of the opposing side.”  In short, the engaged journalist aligns with a specific political team.  On the other hand, he suggests that the detached writer has a different worldview.  The goal here is to: “remain mentally independent because {the writer} sees politics as a competition between partial truths, and wants to find the proper balance between them, issue by issue.”  I have a hunch that our newest crop of journalists may make excellent detached writers and give us years of insight that: “spark conversation about underlying concepts, underlying reality and the underlying frame of debate.”

I will lump math and economics majors together because of their affinity for getting MBA’s and going into finance.  We need more math majors to teach math and economics majors to teach economics and go into research. We need to properly compensate them so that they will do so. Goldman Sacks should not be permitted to suck up all of our best and brightest in these fields to produce new algorithms that will hasten the next financial crash.    

You future engineers, teachers and physicians are easy to address.  Simply continue to learn your vocation and begin to practice your professions with all possible haste.  The need for new blood to build and fix infrastructure as well as to manage industrial concerns is paramount.  Government must give engineers the necessary funding to fix a crumbling America.  The same is true with teaching, where the Scandinavian model deserves a close look.  In Northern Europe teachers are paid and valued as top line professionals.  Our future physicians will need to learn the ever changing medical trade within the framework of the ever changing health care environment.

Those graduates who pursue the classics, drama, the fine arts and languages are to be encouraged and supported because our country is not simply a day to day concern, divorced from history.  We are also part of civilization and everything that being “civilized” entails.  A country without these career paths will wither on the vine.  We must remember that saving a place for the classics does not mean that every plumber must read Homer in the original text.

Lastly, a word of apology to all of our graduates. Your elders have saddled you with enormous debt, both personally and as a nation.  Many of us gave up our idealism and our parents’ role modeling to live beyond our means instead of saving and providing for you.  We are now scrambling for the exits with a larger piece of the national pie that we deserve.

Please forgive us and do not totally forsake us.  We have gained a bit of practical wisdom along the way that may be of some assistance. However, in the last analysis, it will be your own enthusiasm and instinct that will save the day.