Baccalaureate speaker warns the U.S. of the 'hazard of supremacy'

By Linda Grace-Kobas

At a time when America is inarguably the most powerful nation in the world, there is the danger of the "suicide of success" and the "hazard of supremacy," the Rev. Gardner C. Taylor warned graduates at the Cornell Baccalaureate Service, May 25.

The Rev. Gardner C. Taylor delivers the Baccalaureate Service address, May 25, in Bailey Hall. Robert Barker/University Photography

Taylor spoke in Bailey Hall at the interfaith service, held before the Commencement ceremony, to honor student service and retiring faculty and staff. The recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000 and confidante of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Taylor was introduced by President Hunter Rawlings, who presided over the service.

Called the "dean of African-American preachers" by Time magazine, Taylor is pastor emeritus of Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, N.Y. A leader in the civil rights movement, Taylor has taught at prominent divinity schools, including Harvard and Yale, as an adjunct faculty member.

Taylor forthrightly set the task for the current generation of university graduates: "Our nation has come now to an ascendancy in history among nations. It is unmatched in the world now, perhaps more than any [nation] in the history of the world." He warned that the power of the United States "may be a threat to the whole world, if used unwisely."

Taylor said that wielding such power is not in itself immoral, because there have been just wars. "I believe the Civil War should have been fought," he said. But he used the Biblical account of the Garden of Eden to describe temptation as "a fine and shiny figure" that whispered to humans that they "shall be as gods."

"That is our problem," he declared. "The problem of overreaching." Americans should not think, "we will be more than anybody else," he said. "We are tempted as a nation today ... to lose what I believe is an essential concern of individuals and nations -- a decent respect for the opinions of mankind."

While his generation waged a battle against terrible racist injustice, "you face a more serious threat than that evil," he told graduates. "It is the threat of ascendancy."

Members of today's graduating class "are called upon to bring our nation back to ... a new birth of freedom in which a decent respect for the opinions of mankind prevails."

This year, for the first time, graduating students were honored during the Baccalaureate service. Forty-six graduates, nominated by their deans for their "intellectual integrity, commitment to a pluralistic community, excellence in scholarship and active citizenship," were seated on stage.

The combined university choruses performed with the Cornell Wind Ensemble. Kenneth Clarke, director of Cornell United Religious Work, gave the invocation, and Taryn B. Mattice, chaplain for the Protestant Cooperative Ministry at Cornell, gave a reading.

Shawkat M. Toorawa, assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies and adviser to the Muslim Educational and Cultural Association, led participants in the "Litany for Baccalaureate," which concludes, "Our graduates have entered Cornell, in the words of our founding president, 'that they might become more learned and thoughtful.' We now bestow our blessing and grant them leave, that they may be of greater service and accomplishment to their professions, nation and to humankind."