Chairman Tanner, members of the Board of Trustees, members of the faculty and staff, families and friends of the graduates, and most of all, members of the Class of 2001 and candidates for advanced degrees: Welcome to Cornell's commencement.

As a cartoon a few weeks ago in the Denver Post said, "And for those of you who did not drop out of school to make millions with Internet startups, we have this modest consolation prize . . . a diploma."

You knew better. You stayed on to earn your diploma. And, of course, it is not just any diploma. It is a Cornell diploma. You can acquire one only by completing a rigorous academic program and meeting the high standards your professors demand. There are no honorary degrees at Cornell. You can't get one on e-Bay. Each of today's graduates has worked hard and achieved a great deal in order earn a place on Schoellkopf Field. So let me say first: Congratulations, graduates of Cornell

As we celebrate our graduates, we also acknowledge their families, who fill the stadium today. Many of the graduates are members of extended Cornell families. For some, the connection to Cornell goes back generations -- to parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents. Others have siblings who are graduates of Cornell. I am pleased to note that among our graduates today is Laurie Tamis of the College of Arts and Sciences. Laurie's family began its association with Cornell in 1991, when her oldest sister, Annie, Cornell Class of 1995, began her studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Laurie's middle sister, Karen, graduated from the Arts College in 1997. And Laurie is earning her Cornell degree today. While this commencement is a day to celebrate Laurie's achievements, it is also an occasion to acknowledge her parents, Nancy and Donald Tamis, who have had children at Cornell for 10 consecutive years.

I'd like to ask Laurie Tamis -- and all the graduates -- to stand and applaud your families: your parents, grandparents, spouses, siblings and other family members who have provided so much emotional and financial support during your years at Cornell.

What was it about these past few years that have made them so memorable? There is no typical Cornellian and no typical Cornell experience, but there are certain things that give a distinctive texture to each graduating class. Let me remind you of some of them.

You arrived on campus -- most of you -- in the autumn of the Cornell Pumpkin. That mysterious gourd appeared atop McGraw Tower in October of your freshman year. It remained there for many months, inspiring speculation . . . and scientific experimentation . . . and its own "pumpkin-cam" -- Cornell's pioneering effort in reality TV . . . until our then-Provost Don Randel went aloft in the basket of a crane to retrieve it for positive identification. But we have yet to discover how it got there in the first place, so Class of 2001, this is your opportunity to come clean!

Yours was also a class of the Silent Spring -- and silent summer, winter and fall -- when the chimes in McGraw Tower were sent away for re-tuning and refurbishment for the first time in their 125 years at Cornell. The chimes have come back, as we've heard this morning, more tuneful than ever, and with an expanded musical range. And the chimesmasters again set the tone for each Cornell day.

Each of you will have your own special memories of Cornell: creating a computer-animated video of a Mars space flight for NASA, as your classmate and Merrill Presidential Scholar Dan Maas did; hearing author Don DeLillo read from his works as part of the 50^th anniversary of Cornell's Epoch Magazine, which had published DeLillo's first piece of fiction 27 years earlier; organizing the Festival of Black Gospel, which filled the campus with powerful spiritual music in February, as it has done every year for a quarter-century; carrying forward Cornell's name in speech and debate --as your classmate Steve Zammit did by winning two national speech championships; designing and building soccer-playing robots that won the International RoboCup competition two years in a row; and just last week, sweeping the International Formula SAE collegiate automotive design competition -- considered the world's premier student competition in engineering -- by a wide margin. Cornell's 39-member student team, under the leadership of faculty adviser Albert George and senior co-captains Benjamin Kolp, Philip Hodge, Raina White, Keith Epstein and Jordan Eber, took the overall championship, giving Cornell its sixth overall victory since 1988 and its first since 1998. You have accomplished all those things and more during your time here, and you have contributed a great deal to our university.

This spring, as I taught my first full academic course at Cornell in partnership with my Classics colleagues Jeffrey Rustin and Hayden Pelliccia, I was reminded of your individuality, your independence of mind, and your inventiveness. Cornell students come from every socioeconomic background, every ethnic group, and from a geographic area that extends internationally. When you come here, you bring all your talents to bear on our campus community. I was inspired, and relieved, to be teaching such an intellectually engaged group of Cornellians about the political, social and intellectual life of 5^th-century Athens.

I was also struck by how differently I experienced time in class from time spent on my administrative obligations. Rather than rushing from issue to issue, or from meeting to meeting, I had an opportunity to reflect on many matters that are literally timeless: the nature of political responsibility; the necessity of philosophical independence; the tensions between religious obligations and civic duties in a democracy. The opportunity to consider these and other concerns with Cornell students was liberating, and reminded me once more of the need for careful reflection amidst our overly-occupied lives.

Your generation of students has taken the time to give serious thought to protecting the environment, and you have sought out Cornell faculty members who could inform your interest and encourage you to take a long-term view. Some of you have carried out research in ethnobotany and bio-prospecting under the guidance of Eloy Rodriguez, the James A. Perkins Professor of Environmental Studies in Cornell's L.H. Bailey Hortorium. Prof. Rodriguez has taken undergraduates to the Amazon, to the Yucatan, and to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic, where Cornell recently opened a biodiversity laboratory, to learn about tropical rainforests and identify plants with medicinal properties that grow there.

Other students have worked with Tom Eisner, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Chemical Ecology, or Jerrold Meinwald, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Chemistry, who have been Cornell faculty members and collaborators for more than 40 years. As a result of their leadership, Cornell has become a world center for chemical ecology, bringing the field into focus and training many of its outstanding practitioners. I hope some of you will follow in their footsteps as scientists and as advocates for the biosphere.

Some of you have taken a course from Susan McCouch, associate professor of plant breeding, or worked in her lab, or heard her lecture on "creative botany" in the popular Mind and Memory course. Prof. McCouch, along with Steven Tanksley, Ray Wu and other Cornell faculty members, is working to enhance the nutritional value, yields and disease resistance of edible crops in the developing world in collaboration with Cornell's computational biologists and specialists in bioinformatics. In her classes, students learn about biotechnology, but they also explore the ethics of creating genetically modified foods to feed a hungry world.

And while you've learned a great deal from your professors, you have brought environmental issues such as global warming into clearer focus for the campus as a whole through efforts such as Kyoto Now!

The quality of your environmental concern is reflected in your success in winning Morris K. Udall Scholarships. Udall Scholarships were established by Congress in 1992, and are awarded to top students with an interest in careers in the field of environmental public policy. Since it began participating in the competition four years ago, Cornell has ranked first or second in the nation each year in the number of students earning Udall Scholarships. Your classmates Beth A. Lawrence, a natural resources major, Michael Schwaiger, a double major in government and psychology, and Peter Velez, an environmental engineering major, have all won Udall Scholarships during their time at Cornell. I am pleased that this spring three more Cornell students, all of them in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, have continued Cornell's strong record by winning Udall awards.

The comedian George Carlin once joked, "Scientists announced today that they have found a cure for apathy. However, they claim that no one has shown the slightest bit of interest in it. " That discovery was obviously not made at Cornell.

Your concern has extended beyond environmental issues to include societal ones, and, in partnership with Cornell faculty members, you have begun to produce tangible results. Some of you worked with Prof. Kate Bronfenbrenner on a study to determine why the average American worker appeared to benefit so little from the economic expansion of recent years. You found that threats to close plants and move corporate capital elsewhere were effectively keeping workers from experiencing real economic gains. You've demonstrated informed social concern in other ways, not least by asking former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, Cornell Class of l960, to be your speaker at the Senior Convocation yesterday.

Many others have contributed to your development at Cornell, including the Rev. Robert L. Johnson, director of Cornell United Religious Work. Bob Johnson, who is retiring this year after 19 years as head of CURW, has had a deep and lasting influence on the campus as a whole. With a fervent commitment to civil rights, Bob Johnson has devoted his career to healing divisions. He has a gift for combining the sacred and the secular to address pressing issues with a great deal of wisdom, as he did as our Baccalaureate speaker this morning. His sermons have added a great deal to the intellectual, philosophical and religious experience available to you at Cornell.

Whether you have studied in Nepal or Madagascar or Chile or elsewhere through Cornell Abroad; whether you have performed alongside theater professionals in the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts or contributed to an Ivy or national championship in one of Cornell's 36 intercollegiate sports (including this year, Ivy championships in wrestling and softball, a national championship for women's polo, and a first-ever NCAA tournament berth for women's lacrosse), I hope your Cornell experiences have been transformative. I hope they have given you purpose and enthusiasm for life after Cornell, and also planted the seeds for a life-long connection to our campus.

Your classmate Linda Goodman, in her final "Room 11" column in the Cornell Daily Sun (May 1, 2001) said it well when she quoted Billy Joel: "And so it's time to change our ways. But I've loved these days."

As we celebrate how far you have come since your arrival at Cornell–and the bright prospects that lie ahead for all of you--I'd like to take a few moments to remember those who are not with us today. I particularly want to recognize Michelle Evans, Class of '01, who participated fully and contributed greatly to this campus until her death in an accident last spring. Michelle was a top student, and during her time here, she stretched herself and challenged herself to take advantage of every opportunity for intellectual engagement available to her -- as an active member of the Black Biomedical and Technical Association, as a research assistant in Prof. Elizabeth Adkins-Regan's laboratory, as an extern at the Weill-Cornell Medical College during her winter breaks, and as a teacher in a remote village in India during one of her summers. She did all those things and more with a clear goal in mind: to become a physician who would work in developing countries after earning her degree. Michelle's was a life worth more than simply remembering. It was a life worth emulating. Cornell has established a memorial scholarship in her honor -- to be given annually to a student in the pre-freshman program, who we hope will be inspired by Michelle's example. Before you leave the campus, I hope you will walk by Michelle's bench on the Stimson Hall Plaza and read the inscription it bears: "In loving memory of Michelle A. Evans '01, February 8, 1979-March 16, 2000. Devoted premedical student and dedicated biology major. She wanted to make a difference and she did." I'd like to think that Michelle's spirit and commitment will continue on in each of you.

There is another Cornellian I'd like to remember today -- a faculty member, a poet, a mentor, and a close friend to the students, colleagues and visitors who walked through his open office door in Goldwin Smith Hall. Archie Ammons, who passed away in February, was one of the 20^th century's greatest poets. He was a prolific writer -- working virtually every day of his life, and publishing poetry in almost 30 books. His work earned every major poetry prize, two National Book Awards, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Many of Archie's poems seem deceptively ordinary -- reports on the weather or the minutiae of daily life -- but on closer reading they reveal a sly humor and often an astonishing depth. Here are a couple of the really short poems of A. R. Ammons:

Resolve

We must work

in the spirit

of unity and

cooperation: I'll supply

the unity and

you supply the

cooperation

Correction

The burdens of the world

on my back

lighten the world

not a whit while

removing them greatly

decreases my specific

gravity.

Archie Ammons had a quality rare among us these days, and badly needed in our broader culture: the ability and the inclination to think deeply and with sensitivity about what matters. In an era when the world seems obsessed with speed, measured in nanoseconds, and computing power measured in gigabytes, very few of us take the time to think through what we are doing; to consider where we are going; to measure the effects of our actions on others.

Now that we are thoroughly enmeshed in the information age and the knowledge economy, we are perpetually plugged in, wired, connected. It sounds good to be "connected," but to what? Minute-by-minute stock quotes? CNN? Instant messaging?

Watching people talk on cell phones while driving, dining, jogging, swimming, and in various other less mentionable pursuits, I am often led to wonder if their mouths and ears are connected to their brains and hearts -- or rather are floating free in cyberspace, carrying out virtual conversations with other, similarly detached appendages around the planet. If the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan averred, we are living in very thin air indeed. Where in all this rapid communication is thought? Where, above all, is reflection? Contemplation?

Contrast the nervous, affected discourse of cell phones to the Archie Ammons approach. Despite his prodigious output of poetry and his national acclaim, Archie enjoyed nothing more than taking time to talk to people face to face -- in his office or in the Temple of Zeus, where he would lead poetry discussions once a week. A few years ago the Cornell Magazine put together a list of things that every Cornell student should do before graduation -- and taking a poetry class from Archie Ammons was one of them. Many of you did so, and you are better for it. No matter how busy he was, he had a knack for appearing unhurried and for making his visitors feel that, at that particular moment, they were uppermost in Archie's sphere of concern.

Archie applied the same unhurried receptiveness to his poetic procedure. On his frequent walks in nature, as Archie told a writer from Audubon Magazine a few years ago: "I see something, and I think this is the way it goes in nature: a ditch or a stone or the bark falling off a stump or a bird washing itself in a brook or something like that. I have many poems about these very things. They seem to condense or concretize or make immediate a situation that corresponds to a feeling I have. I have the sense that I gain some release by finding an external embodiment of something inside. . . . one achieves some release from anxiety. Especially, of course, when you get back home from the walk and write the damn thing down."

John Cleese, who has been a frequent visitor to campus as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large, has called this approach to the world "tortoise minded." Unlike the "hare brained" approach -- data-based, action-oriented, logical and fast -- the "tortoise mind" seems to be wandering aimlessly, examining a problem for its own intrinsic interest, making unusual associations. But it is the tortoise, not the hare, who is likely to create something powerfully original and significant.

Archie Ammons' approach to poetry and to life is especially relevant to you, starting out in new jobs or in graduate and professional programs. It will be tempting, especially in the next few years, to live your life in 15-minute increments, all carefully loaded into your PDA from your desktop computer and vice versa -- to make 24-7 a way of life, with activity and connectivity substituting for reflection and thought.

But there are very few bearings in cyberspace, despite what the purveyors of GPS receivers would have you believe. Knowing exactly where you are -- with latitude and longitude accurate to within a few meters -- may be comforting if you're hiking in the woods. But it is not very useful unless you are receptive to what the larger experience can teach you. Only then will you find the release that opens your mind to new insights and enables you to move forward.

Cornell has offered you abundant places for contemplation, thought and release: the Cornell Plantations, the Laboratory of Ornithology, the Johnson Museum and many others -- not as ends in themselves, but as avenues for reaching new levels of understanding about yourselves and your place in the world. It has also introduced you to a remarkable diversity of people, many of whom are now your friends for life. I hope you will continue to seek out such places and such people -- and to make time for contemplation, thought and release -- no matter where you may go after Cornell. If you do, you will contribute more of real value to the world, and you will be far more fulfilled, and more plugged into yourself, than if you spend your life on a cell phone.

Let me conclude with one of my favorite Ammons poems, titled "Salute," which seems like an especially good way to send you off:

May happiness

pursue you,

catch you

often, and,

should it

lose you,

be waiting

ahead, making

a clearing

for you.

Class of 2001, candidates for advanced degrees: I congratulate you all.