Chairman Tanner, members of the Board of Trustees, Mr. Buckley, members of the faculty and staff, families and friends of the graduates, and most of all, members of the Class of 2000 and candidates for advanced degrees: Welcome to Cornell’s commencement!

Today we celebrate our graduates and send them off to the so-called "real world." Today we also acknowledge the families of our graduates – parents, grandparents, spouses, siblings and other family members who have provided so much emotional and financial support to the graduates. I’d like to ask the graduates to stand for a moment and applaud your families.

Robert Orben, the Wall Street Journal humorist, once observed, "May is when college graduates take their diplomas in hand and go out to conquer the world. June is when the world counter attacks."

But there are no honorary degrees at Cornell. Our graduates have worked very hard; they have earned their Cornell degrees. Having come through the academic rigors of Cornell, they are ready to confront the world on its own terms.

Those terms look very good to most Americans. The unemployment rate dropped below 4 percent in April for the first time in 30 years – and the nine-year economic expansion shows no signs or weakening or even slowing down. If you want to be a millionaire, you can probably realize your goal, even without Regis Philbin. As someone in New York City told me the other day, "I don’t work for the money. I work for the intrinsic satisfaction that comes from making all that money."

Whether you are about to begin your first job, or are moving to graduate or professional school or to a postdoctoral position, the years you have spent at Cornell have built your intellectual capital, and in a knowledge-based economy your critical minds and your high-order technical skills will continue to serve you well.

Cornell is a remarkable place. As a path-breaking American university, Cornell is a repository of reason, the home of science and the arts, of professional schools and practical learning. It is the champion of the human mind and its remarkable powers to discover, transmit, and preserve knowledge.

Our first President A. D. White conceived of Cornell as an "asylum for Science – where truth shall be sought for truth’s sake; where it shall not be the main purpose of the Faculty to stretch or cut science exactly to fit ‘Revealed Religion.’" The university would "afford a center and a school for a new Literature." It would "give a chance for instruction in moral Philosophy, History and Political Economy unwarped to suit present abuses in Politics and Religion." It would "secure the rudiments, at least, of a legal training in which Legality shall not crush Humanity."

Today White’s hopes, first expressed in a letter to a potential benefactor in 1862, have been realized to a remarkable degree. Whether the topic is modern European history, or the Indonesian gamelan, or sequencing DNA using a nanofabricated "lab on a chip" (as was reported in Science earlier this month), you will find Cornell faculty members, and students, doing path-breaking work. From the most complex theoretical questions, to the most demanding technical skills, to the most avant garde creative work, Cornellians lead the way by seeking, questioning, analyzing, synthesizing, refuting, debating, refining, and creating at what often seems to be the outer limit of human thought.

Yet there is another aspect of Cornell that we often ignore when we count our Nobel Prizes or our Rhodes and Marshall Scholars or our research awards. While we are a secular institution, like the nation itself, we allow ample room for the consideration of moral, ethical, and religious issues.

The importance of these issues to our students is evidenced by their strong interest in social justice, by their enrollment in religious studies courses, by the resurgence of Hillel on campus, and by students’ participation in religious services – including daily Catholic Mass and Muslim prayer sessions held in Anabel Taylor four times a day. Next year, we will be adding a Tibetan Buddhist chaplain to our staff. Though we rarely take note of these practices in our official documents, they are part of our campus culture.

It should not be too surprising, then, that two individuals who arguably made the deepest impression on our full community – as well as on me personally – this year were men of strong moral and religious convictions. Congressman John Lewis of Georgia’s 5th Congressional District spoke in Sage Chapel in February as this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Lecturer. And just last month Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa came to campus as our Bartels World Affairs Fellow, filling Newman Arena in the Fieldhouse. I have yet to meet anyone who heard those two men speak and came away unchanged or unmoved.

Unlike most of our graduates – and, in fact, unlike most Americans under the age of 30, who take national prosperity and limitless opportunities for granted – Congressman Lewis and Archbishop Tutu grew up in societies where the color of their skin defined and severely circumscribed their opportunities. Yet they both helped to change their countries by the force of their personal example. Both are intelligent and articulate. Both managed to obtain quality educations, despite tremendous odds. But what sets them apart from other very well-educated people is the moral authority they have brought to their nation’s struggles – a moral authority rooted in deep religious beliefs.

John Lewis, the son of a sharecropper, grew up on a farm in the segregated south, 50 miles from Montgomery, Alabama. He attended segregated schools – with time off to help the family harvest cotton, peanuts and corn – and became the first member of his family to graduate from high school. As early as age 7, he seemed destined for a career in the ministry. As he still tells audiences in his engaging way, he would hypnotize the family chickens entrusted to his care by quoting Scripture. Congressman Lewis went on to attend the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, and later earned a degree in religion and philosophy from Fisk University.

At an early age John Lewis perceived the injustice of segregation. As a student in Nashville, he organized sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters there. By the time he was 23 years old – barely older than most of our seniors here today -- he was one of the top six civil rights leaders in the country.

John Lewis believes in the power of creative non-violence, and time and again as a young black man working for civil rights, he put his life on the line. He endured arrests and beatings, jail time and unspeakable indignities in order to awaken the American conscience to the struggle for civil rights. Yet, despite the physical and emotional hardships he has withstood, he remains a man without bitterness who is committed to larger goals. "We must put down the burden of race," he told us in Sage Chapel. "It is too heavy a burden to bear."

Today, as a member of Congress, he continues to work to protect human rights, secure personal dignity, and build what he calls "The Beloved Community." "It is not just materially or militarily that we must measure our might, but morally," he said.

Some 10,000 miles away in South Africa, Desmond Tutu faced discrimination as endemic as that found anywhere in the old American South – excluded from opportunity and deprived of human dignity not only by prejudice but by the law of the land. Like John Lewis, Desmond Tutu managed to obtain a good education, training as a teacher and later for the Anglican priesthood, despite the limitations South African society placed upon him because of his race. And like John Lewis, Archbishop Tutu deserves much of the credit for changing his nation’s inherently racist paradigm.

Realizing that dismantling apartheid would require an international effort, he used opportunities for international travel offered by his position in the church to bring international economic pressure to bear on the South African government. In 1984, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bring racial justice to South Africa. His efforts culminated a decade later, when South Africa held its first free elections, and elected Nelson Mandela as its president.

Yet, to me, the most telling moment in Archbishop Tutu’s remarkable life is a very recent one – during which he served, at Nelson Mandela’s request, as head of his nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As Archbishop Tutu explained during his talk at the Fieldhouse, the Commission’s mandate was to chart a so-called "third way" – to heal the wounds and right the injustices that had occurred under apartheid without Nuremberg-style trials, but also without letting the nation forget what had taken place. And so for almost three years, the commission offered those who had committed crimes under apartheid amnesty in exchange for the truth. No matter how unspeakable the crime, if it was committed for political reasons, its perpetrators could redeem themselves by making a full confession in open court

The commission’s work was difficult and controversial. Some felt that those who committed atrocities were getting off too lightly – they called for retributive justice, for revenge. But Archbishop Tutu and his commission sought another kind of justice – restorative justice.

As he told us last month, "We have seen the potent power of truth to help people heal . . Restorative justice says we seek such a healing." "Amnesty for truth" – that is a powerful bargain.

As a campus, as a nation, as a global community -- where issues of race and ethnicity continue to cause unease or much, much worse -- we need to hear the message of our common humanity that both John Lewis and Desmond Tutu brought to Cornell this spring. But even more, perhaps, we need to fathom the genuine conviction that both John Lewis and Desmond Tutu have brought to public life. They did not require money or status to have an impact on their countries. They did not need public office or position to become complete human beings. These are authentic individuals, who do not seek political success, but instead, whom high office finds, because of their integrity, their moral strength and their compassion. Their contributions have been monumental. Yet unlike those who rely exclusively on reason and intellect to achieve their goals – or worse, adjust their stance on major issues in response to public opinion -- John Lewis and Desmond Tutu have found inner sources of strength. Having lived in dehumanizing societies, they demonstrate how sound and productive a life lived in accordance with deeply held principles can be. They have not confined their activities to Sunday sermons, whether to chickens or to human beings, but have felt called to take a major role in social and political causes, indeed to become activists.

Many of you graduating today have also been activists during your time at Cornell, combining reason and intellect with deeply held convictions. Let me give you just two examples, from the many I could cite.

Justin Minkel '00, a College Scholar and Africana studies major in the College of Arts and Sciences, was a winner of this year’s Robinson-Appel Humanitarian Service Award. Justin, in partnership with a community member, created the Belle Sherman Multicultural After-School Program, "dedicated to the success of local elementary school children who need both academic support outside their homes and exposure to a world outside their neighborhoods." Children in the program have met poets, musicians and scientists; they have come to Cornell for behind-the-scenes looks at our facilities; they have visited local sites important in African American history; they have received one-on-one tutoring in science, math and literacy skills. And all because one Cornell student had a vision for improving this community and the determination to follow through.

I have also been struck by those students who have worked ably on the sweatshop issue for the past several years. Their commitment to human rights has been rooted in deep moral concern and an international perspective. Claire Urban, Class of 2000 and a history major in Arts and Sciences, has for the past two years served as president of Cornell Students Against Sweatshops. She and hundreds of other Cornell students – particularly students in ILR -- have cooperated with the administration to achieve a shared goal: improving the working conditions of men, women, and children employed in the apparel industry, both here in the United States and overseas. Constructive advocacy by Cornell students has given Cornell a leading position nationally, and has created a productive environment for change on campus.

Groucho Marx used to say, "Those are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others. . . " But whether the issue is sweatshops, environmental protection, human rights, or any of myriad others worthy of concern, Cornell students have acted out of principle, often informed by moral or religious beliefs.

Universities have a good deal of difficulty in finding the right place for politics and religion on campus, just as the U.S. as a nation has difficulty finding the right place for religion within our politics. There is a reason why this nation was founded on the principle of separation of Church and State. Religion and politics make an uneasy mixture.

Our founder Ezra Cornell felt the same way about his university. What Professors Isaac Kramnick and Laurence Moore have shown to be a "Godless Constitution" is mirrored in the phrase religious conservatives used to describe this university in its early years: they called it "Godless Cornell."

Cornell’s founders worked diligently to keep the university open to all and strictly nonsectarian. That was brought home to me in 1997, when we opened the original cornerstone of Sage Hall and eagerly looked for a letter that Ezra Cornell had sealed in the stone nearly 125 years before. Mr. Cornell, true to his eccentric ways, had made no copy of his letter and shown it to no one beforehand, so its contents were a matter for considerable conjecture. Surprising most of us, Mr. Cornell chose to warn of the dangers of sectarianism.

"On the occasion of laying the corner stone of the Sage College for women of Cornell University," he wrote, "I desire to say that the principal danger. . . I see in the future to be encountered by the friends of education, and by all lovers of true liberty, is that which may arise from sectarian strife. From these halls, sectarianism must be forever excluded, all students must be left free to worship God, as their conscience shall dictate, and all persons of any creed or all creeds must find free and easy access, and a hearty and equal welcome, to the educational facilities possessed by the Cornell University."

And so it is that Cornell University has steered clear of espousing specific political or religious preferences, and that is a good thing. Bob Hope once explained that he did benefit performances for all religious denominations, because "I’d hate to go to Hell on a technicality."

But this healthy impartiality does not mean that we refuse to teach politics, or religious studies; or that we forbid students to join political groups or to practice their religion or their atheism on campus. Politics and religion are proper objects of study at a university, and they are important spheres of personal engagement. Our duty is to ensure that all members of our community feel free to express their views openly and confidently, and also feel an obligation to listen carefully to the views of others.

The question for all of us, and especially for the graduates who have so many choices open to them today, is how to live a complete life – one that is intellectually alive, socially and politically engaged, and grounded in moral principles. Our challenge is to determine how we live such a life in a pluralistic, global society in which many well-founded values conflict.

As Michael Ignatieff noted in his biography of Isaiah Berlin, "In a post-imperial world, cultural world views – religious, secular, Western, Eastern, Christian, Islamic – compete for allegiance in conditions of increasing equality. Working out how these ethical worldviews can cohabit the same political space has given special salience to the problem of moral pluralism."

It has also tested our ability to have a campus where a world of views is welcome and respected. We live in a pluralist country, and Cornell is a pluralist university. We practice tolerance of others, and rightly so. Beliefs, whether political or religious, need to be protected, because they are precious. At Cornell we espouse open doors, open hearts, and open minds. But openness and tolerance are empty vessels without ideas and ideals. And ideas and ideals are weak without moral conviction to give them life and purpose. It is refreshing to see on our campus not simply a tolerance of ideas, no matter how controversial, and an openness towards moral and religious conviction, but a celebration of many beliefs, and a particular respect for conviction that leads to action. Cornellians consistently act upon ideas, upon conviction, and thereby develop character, and there is nothing we need more today than character.

In our remarkable market economy, it is tempting to make a headlong dash for material success. They say money isn’t everything. But, for many people, it is way ahead of whatever is in second place. The quest for a bigger signing bonus -- or better stock options -- absorbs our attention, as we contemplate 24-7 as a way of life. Winning – whether in economic or political terms – appears to be what is important. And the values of the market place – easily reformulated, at a moment’s notice, to reflect what will sell – take precedence over all.

But that kind of success – which seems hard -- is actually easy. Serious leadership is more difficult. It requires authentic moral conviction harnessed to keen intellect and committed activism. John Lewis and Desmond Tutu have furnished us eloquent examples this year. Each felt compelled to take a major role in social and political causes and to become an activist. Each brought significant issues to the public arena in a way that gives them moral authority – regardless of whether they would be an easy "sell." And in so doing, they help the rest of us learn at the intersection of reason and faith.

Cornell is a community with a vigorous culture of debate. We are a university with few party lines. We have a powerful combination of theory and practice, informed by reason and also by strong beliefs that we bring to bear on public issues. And, although we are staunchly nonsectarian, and have been for 135 years, moral convictions have contributed mightily to who and what we are.

Last year at our Baccalaureate Service, Harold Bloom quoted Rabbi Tarphon, one of the early Judaic leaders whose words from about the year 200 of the Common Era, are preserved in The Sayings of the Fathers:

Rabbi Tarphon said, "The day is short and the work is great, and the laborers are sluggish, and the wages are abundant, and the master of the house is demanding."

And then Rabbi Tarphon added, "It is not necessary for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it."

Members of the Class of 2000, we look to you to continue your work, with great skill, broad knowledge, and the insights gained from both reason and moral conviction, in the world beyond Cornell. Congratulations and best wishes to you all.