TEXT OF SPRING COMMENCEMENT SPEECH
BY FRED CHAPPELL, MAY 16, 1998

    I count it the grandest of honors to be invited to East Carolina University to address you today. Poets are not often entrusted with such august responsibilities. If honored at all in this manner, we are usually given a place on the platform, tucked away in the shadows of more splendid and better known and-one might say-more presentable personages. So I'd like to take this opportunity to make poets look good.

    Unfortunately, I'm the last person to do that. I've been written up more often than is good for me in magazines and newspapers over the years and there is hardly an article that has not mentioned my rumpled, not to say haphazard, appearance. It is good that an academic robe covers so large a multitude of sins, some of them verging on scarlet. If I wanted to shock myself I might try to imagine what some of our male graduating seniors are wearing-or not wearing-under their robes today.

    But an academic robe is supposed to do more than cover; it is also supposed to reveal, to signify, just as the sheepskin does, that the possessor has taken a degree at a respected institution of higher learning. The robe, the mortarboard, and the sheepskin are intended to recognize the labors of students, their determination, their persistence, their struggles and eventual triumphs. It was not for the robe itself that our seniors went hollow-eyed from puzzling out Aristotle, groped through the labyrinthine arcanities of literature, became furious at computer programs, No-Dozed their way through calculus. It was not for the robe itself but for the privilege of declaring what the robe declares: I was the student, I suffered and endured, I exulted and laughed, snoozed and wept, in order to absorb into my personality some of the basic propositions and intellectual achievements of civilization.

    The commencement address is a very old tradition and it has always been easy to make fun of it because so many of them have been pompous and hollow, gorgeously hifalutin in language but as empty of substance as ten-year-old hornet nests. But these are charges that may be laid against many kinds of ceremonial public speech-and if a commencement address is stilted and dull (as this one is likely to be), still it is relatively harmless. It may even be beneficial: a midday nap might do many of us a lot of good.

    Lately, however, there has been a turn in the opposite direction. Instead of hearing speakers who vaunt in glorified terms the values of education, we have been confronted with those who tell us that higher education is pointless, extravagant, and useless. "A college education has no practical purpose," say these speakers. "It is superstrength of character that made me the grand individual I am." Well, no one has had the gall actually to say that latter sentence, but Art Buchwald, Maya Angelou, and a whole flock of others have promoted its sentiment. These speakers have stood on the hospitable platform and told audiences as large as ours today that a college education is not worth having.

    It is my hope to shock the establishment by saying that it is worth having-not for the material gains that accrue to the university-educated individual, the larger salaries and better opportunities for advancement in the professions, though these are important, and the facts of their existence are well documented. But if material gain was all that a university education was good for, then it wouldn't be any good-because, as our other sassy commencement speakers point out, one can be financially successful without it.

    No, there are other matters at stake.

    This is often the point in their lives when graduating seniors congratulate themselves for having escaped the clutches of education at last. But of course it has been the job of the university to see to it that they never escape, that they have been prepared in ways that enable them to see in every aspect of their lives opportunities to learn, to observe, and to compare what is before them with what they know of the past. A great deal of university education consists of conversation with ghosts. On an old psychological test, the Minnesota Multiphase Personality Inventory, as it was called, there was a question designed, I expect, to search out paranoid tendencies. "Do dead people ever speak to you?" it asked. For a student the answer must be: "Yes, all the time. Our campus library is the repository of important voices, most of them belonging to dead people. I go there to listen to what they have to say and to think about it. My teachers want to enable me to have conversations with these ghosts, so they assign papers and hand out examination questions. In this way I have held converse with Shakespeare and St. Paul, with Mme. Curie and the Wright brothers, with King George III and Martin Luther King. With those who in the past helped shape the world I live in today, I have held colloquy, listening and then talking back. In this modern world I inhabit I can recognize their ancient handiwork still in use and can judge it for what it is and for what it may yet become."

    I believe it is fair to claim that the student who remembers to say these things, or to think them, really has been educated. She stands in a position to take a longer view of things than that afforded by the scurry and confusion of ordinary daily life with its babble of newsprint and television, its easy temptations to sloth, self-indulgence, and intellectual dishonesty. An educated person knows and heeds the watch-word of Socrates: Know thyself, and understands that one of the ways we begin to know ourselves is by comprehending something of the way the world that surrounds us works, how it came to be the way it is, and what relationships with it already obtain before the alumna begins to fashion a new and fresh and highly individual relationship. Education makes it possible for us to recognize that the world presents us a different pattern of meaning to decipher every day and every hour that we live, and that this pattern we must interpret is composed of elements long familiar to us from our studies in history, science, politics, religion, literature, and art.

    Is it not fair to point out to those who ascend commencement platforms and declare their identities as self-made men and women innocent of the taint of university education that universities have preserved the very idea of self? It required hard thought for the early Greek philosophers to formulate even murky ideas of what a self is, and the roll call of thinkers who have contributed to our modern notions of the self is a long and highly distinguished one, including not only those we have already mentioned-Socrates, Plato, St. Paul, and Aristotle-but also such figures as Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, Duns Scotus, William James, Franz Kafka, Thomas Hobbes, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a matter of fact, this figment of vain imagining, the self-made man or woman, is a mere debasement of one of Emerson's most celebrated exhortations. "Trust thyself," he said. "Every heart vibrates to that iron string." Better for you, Ms. Angelou, better for you, Mr. Buchwald, if you had quoted our American philosopher directly and got it down right.

    None of us made ourselves-physically, spiritually, mentally, socially, or financially. Good Lord, just think of the cogitation, the processes of trial and error, the thousand thousand failures that had to precede any sort of success in the emergence and development of such basic concepts as currency, credit, national economy, banking, unions, taxation, and capital. We take all these things for granted, but there were no banks in the western world until the 14th century in Italy. There were no banks in England until the 17th century. Before the hardheaded and lucky millionaire or billionaire declares himself self-made he had better recollect that it was history that provided him with the tools to make his fortune and that the university, more faithfully than any other institution, has preserved history in the face of frightful difficulty. Then when he is invited to address graduating seniors he may say-as, to be fair, many have said-"I never had the opportunity to attend college, but I recognize what the institution does and has done and I salute it."

    I am optimistic enough to think that is what most citizens believe: that whether or not they had opportunity or inclination to attend, the university is a good thing. Perhaps they cannot describe its functions in detail, but they have a large general concept that is traditional and valid. A detailed description or precise definition would be hard to come by. I have taught at UNCG for 30-odd years and have attained but a limited notion of the functions of the university, it has so interwoven into the fabric of society.

    In fact, the university has become so integral a part of society that it is impossible to imagine our contemporary America without it. If you could abstract the university from present-day America, some things would not change very much. Philosophy, ancient literature, religion, and art would be less affected than other institutions. But our national defense would be painfully damaged if not mortally wounded; our industries would be weakened and our systems of commerce soon outmoded. The researches in physics and chemistry that sustain our munitions design and our weapons delivery systems are nurtured in university classrooms and laboratories; the mathematics that develops and refines our computer networks will continue to be born in the university-nowhere else are pure mathematicians desired; the sophistications of future economics will be developed by university theorists; even the water we drink and the air we breathe will be affected by university studies in environmental science. Without a national defense to protect his freedom, without the access to an electronic global intelligence, lacking a national economy that can compete with other national economies, without water to drink and air to breathe, no citizen would be able to indulge himself in the notion that he is self-made. The fantasy of being self-made is one that is available only to the highly privileged person on this planet.

    It is a fantasy not available to the university graduate who has been given some inkling of where he or she stands in relation to the past. This person understands that self-creation is as undesirable as it is impossible, that any individual human being who boasts his or her own importance is the victim of delusion. We often think-lazily-of colleges and universities as mental gas stations, places where one goes to fill up the tank of the mind with facts and ideas. Then, when the old brain is all full up, when not another date or equation can be squeezed into it, you drive away as an educated person. Of course, it is not like a gas station. It is more like an auto repair shop whose mission it is to get the thing running efficiently, to strip away the useless doodads and to get some precision into the mechanisms. One of the useless excrescences a university ought to strip away is the insidious delusion of self-importance. And one of the most ostentatious features of this delusion is the fantasy of being self-made, a fantasy that any real awareness of history will chop away and send to the scrap pile. This delusion is as unnecessary, as ridiculous, as those extravagant tailfins that used to characterize the Detroit log wagons of the 1950s. I will stake my reputation as an academic on the belief that the giant tailfin is gone for good-it is not coming back.

    So-be proud of your mortarboard! Wear it night and day for the rest of your life. Never take it off. For one of the things it proclaims to one and all is that you have an awareness of the civilization you were born to and a gratitude toward it. The mortarboard, the robe, the sheepskin all declare: I am not a self-made person and am proud to say so.

    Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Good luck forever.