1996 Commencement Address

128th Commencement address
Cornell University
Hunter R. Rawlings III, President
May 26, 1996



Chairman Weiss, members of the Board of Trustees, members of the faculty and staff, members of the Class of 1996 and candidates for advanced degrees - whose special day this is - parents, families and friends of the graduates, honored guests:

A commencement ceremony means different things to different people. For the graduates, it is the end of a long road; or at least a scenic turn-out on the expressway to a job or graduate school. For the trustees, deans and faculty, it is the culmination of their work over the past four, five, eight, nine or more years - for with each new class of graduates the promise of the university is fulfilled. For the parents and families of the graduates, it is a day when years of love, nurture, worry, and financial support finally bear fruit. And that is a substantial accomplishment. Ann Landers may have been right when she said, "If you think education is expensive, consider the cost of ignorance" - but she didn't have to pay your bursar bills.

We know how hard parents and families have worked to make this day possible - and I invite the graduates to join with me in giving their families a round of applause.

I also want to recognize the contributions of the other groups I've mentioned by acknowledging those of their members who are retiring or completing their terms of service this year.

Completing their terms of service on the Board of Trustees as of June 30 are:
I also want to acknowledge Sol M. Linowitz, the Governor's trustee, who left the board in October and was named emeritus at that time.

Retiring deans and executive staff include:
Retiring from the faculty are 33 individuals, who have given 1038 cumulative years of service to Cornell, with an average of 31.5 years per retiree. I also want to recognize the many men and women who are retiring from staff positions this year and to thank them for their years of exemplary service to Cornell. For all of us, today is a day of celebration because in recognizing the achievements of the graduates and their limitless promise, we too are renewed.

I want to begin my remarks by thanking the graduating class. Thank you, first of all, for filling Lynah Rink again and helping bring back Ivy titles for both the men's and women's ice hockey teams. You and your classmates have turned in outstanding performances in other sports, too - including soccer and women's tennis, both of which qualified for post-season national tournaments.

I want to thank you for setting the standard for public service. Last year, Cornell students, including many of you, provided almost 85,000 hours of service to the community. Earlier this spring, your classmate Neil Giacobbi was honored by the Campus Compact, a coalition of 500 colleges and universities, for establishing "The Partnership," a student organization that works with local human service agencies to rehabilitate Ithaca homes. In all, 2,300 students participated in service initiatives through the Public Service Center; many more did service projects through their student organizations or on their own.

I want to thank you for your contributions to the Senior Class Gift. Under the leadership of Bill Mack and Esther Kang, co-chairs of the Senior Class Campaign, more than 1,000 of you contributed to the class gift campaign - the largest number since 1983, when seniors could put their gifts on their bursar bills. Every one of your gifts was essential. Each $19.96 you gave - multiplied a thousand times - will continue to benefit students through the Class of 1996 Senior Scholarship.

Thank you for Teatrotaller, Cornell's first serious theater group devoted to producing plays by Hispanic authors in Spanish and Spanglish. Your classmate Isabel Ramos first proposed the idea of producing high-quality theater in Spanish three years ago, and every semester for the past three years she has selected a play, auditioned troupe members, solicited funds, directed and produced a major Spanish-language production - in addition to her academic work. These high-quality productions by student volunteers have routinely attracted audiences of 300 people or more - and both Cornell and the local community have benefitted from them.

Thank you for producing a rainy, sane and safe Slope Day. The start of the year may have "Fun in the Sun," but the end of the year now apparently has "Fun in the Mud." And I'm just glad that I don't have to do your wash.

Thank you for reassuring me that the Cornell tradition of demonstrations and protests is alive and well. By conservative estimate, you've participated in - or endured - three major protests, and at least 103 minor skirmishes. You've protested everything from the GOP's Contract with America, to student aid cuts; from vandalism of Daniel Martinez's Arts Quad sculpture, to proposed changes in residential housing policy, to whether the university should - or should not - try to rescue a stranded deer.

Thank you also for giving us a Rhodes Scholar, three Mellon Foundation Fellows, a Raul Wallenberg Scholar, a Luce Scholar, and a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar. I want to congratulate once again the winners of these national and international awards: Barnaby Marsh, Eric Chwang, Jon Miller, Rosamond King, Karin Klapper, Maureen Quigley, and Andrea DeTerra.

Thank you, also, for making Cornell's chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects the 1995-96 "Chapter of the Year." Several of NOMA's members are seniors, and we appreciate all you have done to help the chapter earn this award.

Thank-you for giving us "The Globe," the largest Macintosh World Wide Web site in the world. Todd Krizelman and Stephan Paternot started the web site in Todd's dorm room way back in 1994. They now run a company, WebGenesis, with a staff of 17 in Collegetown - and they still have managed to graduate on time.

And thanks to all of you who produced and performed in Cirque de Cornell, the sometimes hilarious, always entertaining, welcome students provided to me and my family at last October's Inaugural.

I mean it sincerely when I say that it has been inspiring to get to know such an engaged and successful class. You've contributed to every aspect of the university, and years from now it will continue to bear the imprint of your Cornell years.

Of course, I'd like to think that Cornell played some small role in your success. Let me remind you of some other landmarks of these past four years which have shaped your experience here.

First, it has become easier to be a student at Cornell - or at least to waste less time trying to be a student here. The greatest cause of registration delays was eliminated by technology during your freshman year - when your ID cards, complete with digitally stored signature and photo, were waiting for many of you at the fieldhouse. Then a quality-improvement team in the bursar's office found ways to reduce the number of unnecessary visits - and the waits they required. And now CoursEnroll is threatening to eliminate - I repeat, eliminate - lines at the Grand Course Exchange.

We've done some major renovations and construction during your time here. In fact, I sometimes worry that when you think of Cornell as alumni, you'll remember not ivy-covered halls but orange construction fences . . . and that the sounds of jack hammers and beeping dumptrucks will bring back even more memories than the chimes. I recognize that all this construction has been a challenge. You returned for your sophomore year to find the university in the midst of a half-mile long steam line project along East Avenue between Phillips Hall and Tower Road. And when that was complete, we closed off Tower Road, so that construction of the expanded ILR facility could begin. There have been days when you really couldn't get there from here.

But there have been benefits of the construction work which you have been able to enjoy. Cornell dedicated the Kroch Library soon after you arrived - with its treasure of rare books and special collections on topics ranging from medieval witchcraft to the Vietnam War - some 1.3 million volumes in all. The Language Lab in Noyes Lodge on Beebe Lake opened halfway through your freshman year. With 4,000 titles in its tape library - in 96 different languages - and with advanced video, audio and computer equipment, it has given you one of the best facilities anywhere in which to study a foreign language. Thanks to the generosity of the Ho family, we now have a pedestrian mall in the area between Campus Road and the Straight. Ho Plaza is a beautiful gathering place and entrance to campus that today's and tomorrow's alumni will remember with the same affection older alumni have for the elms. At the Vet College we began the largest single construction project in the university's history. The new veterinary medical center will be dedicated during Reunion Weekend in June. And just a few weeks ago, we began closing off the area around Sage Hall in preparation for a major rebuilding project that will make it into a suitable home for the Johnson School. You were here to see all these projects begun or brought to fruition.

A third landmark of your Cornell years has been the successful completion of the Cornell Campaign, which raised a remarkable $1.507 billion. The campaign's success is a tribute to the leadership of President Emeritus Frank Rhodes, who worked tirelessly to present the case for Cornell to alumni, friends, foundations and corporations across the country and around the world. It is also a tribute to the devotion of so many others here today - trustees, parents and students - whose combined efforts enabled the campaign to reach and surpass its goal. Among its significant achievements, the Campaign raised more than $200 million for student financial aid and created more than 1,000 new scholarship funds. These funds will help ensure that Cornell continues to be a place where talented men and women can study and learn, regardless of their financial means.

A fourth landmark of these past four years has been the growing recognition that students, including undergraduate students, can play a significant role in research and scholarship. Earlier this spring I attended the Undergraduate Research Forum, where more than 150 undergraduate students, including some of you, presented the results of their research and scholarly work. Your success as researchers and scholars belies the myth that undergraduate education and research are antithetical. At Cornell they go hand-in-hand.

I saw the complementarity of teaching and research illustrated dramatically last night, when we recognized three faculty members who have been selected as this year's Weiss Presidential Fellows: Lois Willett of Agricultural, Resource and Managerial Economics; Fred Ahl of Classics; and Dan Huttenlocher of Computer Science. All three are respected scholars in their fields; all are superb teachers; all have taken the extra time and effort required to know their students personally - helping them with independent study projects, involving them in research, and caring about them as people, not just as social security numbers on a computer screen. The Weiss Fellows confirm that great teaching thrives in a great research university - and it always will.

Each of you will have other special landmarks of these past four years: The night jazz artists Ellis and Branford Marsalis filled Bailey to overflowing; the visit of Hanan Ashrawi, internationally known as one of the chief spokespersons for the cause of Palestinian independence, as the Bartels World Affairs Fellow last November; the talks by Janet Reno, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Lani Guinier, and Billy Joel.

I have been impressed to see how many of you have used your time at Cornell to explore religious traditions - your family's or other ones. There are 32 student religious organizations listed in Cornell's directory - and they range from the Muslim Educational and Cultural Association to the Campus Crusade for Christ; from Baha'i, ECKANKAR, and Hillel to Chinese and Korean Bible Study groups. You and your families filled Bailey at an early hour this morning to hear Dr. Susannah Heschel, our baccalaureate speaker.

Cornell was founded as a nonsectarian institution where "persons of every or no religious denomination [were] equally eligible to all offices and appointments." For that, the university was attacked by the 19th-Century religious press as "Godless Cornell." But over these past 131 years, it has been Cornell's refusal to align itself with any single religious tradition or sect, while being welcoming of all, that has contributed to the richness of religious expression on the campus.

And that tradition of nonsectarianism has implications beyond the campus. Just this winter, Cornell political scientist Isaac Kramnick and historian Lawrence Moore examined the similarly productive dichotomy between church and state that is a hallmark of the U.S. Constitution. While sympathetic to the role of religion in American life, the authors demonstrate that the framers intended the Constitution to be godless because they believed church-state separation was the best guarantee of liberty. The secularization of the body politic, they point out, has allowed for multiple religious perspectives to flourish within the United States - something that parallels the experience of "Godless Cornell."

Cornell is a place where students are introduced to most everything they're going to meet in global society. It is an intellectual place, a cultural place, a social place, an entrepreneurial place. It is a place that brings together the young and the old. It is a place committed to the advancement of both scientific thought and humane values. It is a place of religious breadth, of racial and ethnic diversity, of academic endeavors that embrace the whole of human thought. It is the most vibrant and most complex of American institutions.

In its variety and its scope, Cornell is the quintessential research university of the late 20th century. It has a remarkable, indeed unique, collection of academic resources - statutory and endowed, practical and theoretical - dedicated to public service, as well as to research, scholarship, and teaching. Charting new ground at its founding as the first truly American university, it has continued to evolve to meet emerging state and national needs. Like other institutions of its kind, it has vastly increased the nation's research capacity; given us breathtaking advances in the sciences and in medicine; and, in more recent decades, expanded technology-transfer operations that stimulate economic development. The American research university, of which Cornell is such a splendid example, has a remarkable range, a wealth of dimensions. Over these past few years, you've confronted that complexity and put it to good use.

But within all its complexity and its diversity, the university retains certain core values that have made it among the most long-lived of human institutions as well as among the most responsive to change. "Three Thousand Futures," the Final Report of the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, noted:

Taking, as a starting point, 1530, when the Lutheran Church was founded, some 66 institutions that existed then still exist today in the Western World in recognizable forms: the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the Parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man, and 62 universities. Universities in the past have been remarkable for their historic continuity . . .They have experienced wars, revolutions, depressions, and industrial transformations, and have come out less changed than almost any other segment of their societies.


We work to assure that 460 years in the future, many of today's universities, including Cornell, will still exist in recognizable form. They will adapt to the changing environment they confront, which is a prerequisite for survival, but they will still provide teaching, research and public service of high quality. And they will retain certain core values which are essential to their strength. These core values have been the foundation of your Cornell education, and they will continue to serve you, and the university, well. Let me remind you what some of the most important of these values are:

The first is intellectual honesty, that is respect for the evidence. Intellectual honesty is what enables you to entertain ideas which are foreign to you or with which you disagree. It is because intellectual honesty is so fundamental to the university that academic freedom is something we fight vigorously to preserve. Informed by their own research and scholarship, for which we demand an objective and rigorous accounting, we give faculty the right and the responsibility to seek out their own areas of intellectual interest, no matter how controversial. In return, we expect that all members of this intellectual community, faculty and students alike, will be willing to ask the hard questions, to examine assumptions, to scrutinize data, to think critically about what is discovered in an effort, not simply to support one's own position, but to move closer to the truth. Cornell has given you the skills -and, I hope, the desire - to do that, for intellectual honesty is a value with application far beyond Cornell.

The second core value of the university is respect for other people and their points of view. For all their diversity, institutions like Cornell can and must also play a unifying role. Drawing on the breadth of backgrounds and experiences found among its individual members, a university is also a place to shelter debate, to encourage dialogue, and to explore the potential of diversity to both enrich and reinforce community. Voltaire is often quoted as having said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Yet too often our current debates - political and social - are framed in terms of winners and losers rather than a need to find a common ground.

The importance of a common ground was brought home to me earlier this month when I attended the second annual Perkins Prize Award Ceremony at the A.D. White House. The Perkins Prize for Interracial Harmony and Understanding was established by Tom Jones, a Cornell trustee, who was a student activist during the late 1960s. It honors President Emeritus James Perkins, who was president of Cornell at that time. The Perkins Prize provides recognition to those who have worked hard during the year to create bridges of understanding and respect between different racial and ethnic groups. It also establishes those goals as worthy ones for the Cornell community as a whole.

This year's winner was the Festival of Black Gospel, which for 20 years has brought people of all races and backgrounds together for a weekend of worship and song. Music is the only language in which you can't say a mean or sarcastic word, and we're grateful to the Festival of Black Gospel for reminding us of that.

The third core value is the desire to keep on learning. You've probably heard the old truism that half of what you've learned will be obsolete in five years - but no one knows which half. Most of us could not have predicted five years ago that people would be surfing the Net to find everything from Chinese take-out restaurants to the latest economic data on Latin America. The Web has become as much a part of the culture of higher education as the slide rule was in the 40's, 50's and 60's or the hand-held calculator was a decade or two ago - and most of you have jumped into the newest technology with gusto.

But it is a constant challenge - for students and graduates alike - to think deeply about ideas. Deep thinking is hard, and it is often not much fun. Most of us would rather watch TV. As a result many of us become fixed in our positions early in life and hold those positions for the next 40 years. Or we become paralyzed into inaction by the sheer volume of information we must somehow absorb.

T.S. Eliot, in his poem, "The Rock" (1934), lamented:

" Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

Without deep thinking, we are in danger of drowning in the sea of hyperinformation in which we are suspended. With it, we have the prospect, at least, of navigating through the ever-roiling waters toward a distant shore of promise and hope. One of the most important things a university can do is to give students the desire to keep on thinking deeply and learning eagerly throughout their lives. I hope Cornell has done that for you.

If there is one message I hope you'll take with you it is, "Don't stop now." You've learned a lot. You leave with a lot. But it is not enough. Keep on learning - and your life will continue to be rich and full.

Class of 1996, candidates for advanced degrees: Congratulations to you all!

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