'A Sense of Place'

Chairman Tanner, members of the Board of Trustees, fellow members of the faculty and staff, families and friends of the graduates -- and members of the Class of 1998 and candidates for advanced degrees: Let me deliver my most important message first: Congratulations!

You have worked hard to sit in those caps and gowns, and today it is our pleasure to celebrate your success. You have met and even exceeded your potential -- and we are very proud of you.

We are also very grateful to you. This class has given us two Marshall scholars -- Dan Klein of Arts and Sciences and Jeremy Lack of ILR. It has given us a campus newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun, which has been an intelligent, responsible voice in the academic community and which has elucidated important campus issues, presented different points of view on contentious subjects and deepened our understanding. Editor-in-Chief Hilary Krieger and the other seniors on the 1997-98 editorial board deserve a great deal of credit for their journalistic courage and care.

This class has also given us spectacular athletics contests -- helping the men's hockey team qualify for the ECAC playoffs in Lake Placid three years in a row and giving us a stellar season to inaugurate our new Niemand-Robison Softball Field. The women's softball team, in fact, ended its season this year with a school record of 37 victories, including a spectacular 22-game winning streak.

And this class has given us positive identification of the mysterious orange object that was perched atop McGraw Tower for most of the year. I want especially to congratulate the seniors on Team 318, who used a remote-controlled balloon equipped with a hollow drill bit and "pumpkin cam" to obtain a sample of the object without ever leaving the ground. The team then analyzed the sample using a scanning electron microscope and wrote a 30-page report documenting their findings. Their results were later confirmed by our Provost Don Randel and a team of professional plant scientists led by Professor Emeritus John Kingsbury: It was a pumpkin after all.

I also want to congratulate the families of the graduates. "My son, the doctor" may be graduating as a history major. "My daughter, the engineer" may be on her way to Law School in the fall. But, even if things did not always go according to plan, you've never lost confidence in your graduates' ability to do well. You can appreciate Picasso's story about his mother's confidence in his ability to succeed: "My mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk, you'll end up as Pope.' Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."

No matter what careers your graduates have chosen, you have been there for them over the long haul -- supporting them and encouraging them at every turn. On behalf of the graduates, I want to thank you for your loyalty and for your love. Please stand -- mothers, fathers, grandparents, brothers, sisters, spouses and children of the graduates -- so that we can recognize you and thank you.

Today, though, belongs chiefly to the graduates, and it is fair to ask, considering all you have given Cornell, what have you gained from your time here? I hope your list includes at least the following:

First, I hope you've gained a sense of self-confidence at having succeeded at a difficult task. You have probably worked harder here than ever before in your life. The papers, the prelims, the reading, the problem sets have seemed unending. But most of you have achieved more than you thought you could.

A Cornell education, however, is not just about working hard and gaining a credential -- no matter how useful that credential will be to you in the future. One of the great benefits of being at Cornell is the opportunity for self-discovery available here. The world's great minds and the world's great talents find their way to our door -- to expand our horizons and to enliven our spirits. Within the last year alone, we've had a visit from primatologist Jane Goodall, who is currently a Cornell A. D. White Professor-at-Large. We have heard from Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health, from Susan Faludi, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of "Backlash," and from Grammy-Award-winning singer Richard Smallwood, who performed during this year's Festival of Black Gospel. Novelist Dan DeLillo was here in September to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Epoch, the campus-based literary magazine where DeLillo's first published fiction appeared 27 years ago. Corporate leaders such as Merck's Raymond V. Gilmartin and GE's Dennis Dammerman gave invited lectures and participated in some of your classes, as did The Honorable Haris Silajdzic, co-prime minister of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who spent two days on campus as the Bartels World Affairs Lecturer.

The year before, I should add, many of you came to the Statler Auditorium to hear George Mitchell speak about the prospects for peace in Northern Ireland -- as the Bartels Fellow for 1996. And as Senator Mitchell's initiatives have brought new hope

to that strife-torn region this spring, I have thought frequently about how fortunate we were to have had him on campus at such a pivotal time.

Even more remarkable than the parade of visitors who have come to campus during your time here are the great minds on the faculty -- who have been here for you day by day. Not every one of you was in Prof. David Lee's introductory physics class on that October day in 1996 when he, along with Prof. Bob Richardson and their former graduate student, learned they had won the Nobel Prize in Physics -- but some of you were. And I doubt that you minded when Prof. Lee diverged slightly from the syllabus that day to talk about the work that had led to the prize. Some of you learned chemistry from Prof. Roald Hoffmann, another Cornell Nobel Laureate, who has taught introductory chemistry to undergraduates virtually every year since coming to Cornell in 1965. Others of you have gotten to know him in the Temple of Zeus, where he frequently can be found discussing poetry with Prof. Archie Ammons and other faculty members, students, and local writers over morning coffee. Still others of you may have built balsa-wood bridges in Prof. Mary Sansalone's freshman course on "Modern Structures," learning firsthand about how various types of structures carry loads -- and also why Prof. Sansalone has earned so many distinguished teaching awards, including the U.S. Professor of the Year Award from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation and a Weiss Presidential Fellowship from Cornell.

Prof. Walter LaFeber, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of American History, recently won the 1998 Bancroft Prize in American History for his new book, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations Throughout History. Many of you have taken Prof. LaFeber's courses in U.S. and foreign relations, and you know of his strengths as a scholar and teacher. But what I find most interesting is how he came to write his latest prize-winning book. He had become intrigued, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, by surveys that showed that the majority of Americans felt that Japan had become the number one international threat to the United States. He searched for a good book on the subject of American-Japanese relations to gain a better perspective on the issue -- and finding none to his liking, he decided to write one himself. Universities are communities of inquiry -- where faculty and students alike learn to discover things for themselves, not merely to study the achievements of others, and to extend them to the wider world.

Salman Rushdie, the writer, once commented that an "important dimension of literature is that it is a means of holding a conversation with the world" -- and Cornellians are fortunate that so many of those global conversations over the years have had their genesis on this campus. I hope that you will continue those conversations long after you leave Cornell -- and that the process of self-discovery you have begun here will continue throughout your lives.

There is one more thing I hope you've gained from Cornell and that is a sense of place. By that I mean an attachment to this university and this unusual community that will stay with you wherever you go. A sense of place -- this place -- animates the writings of people like Diane Ackerman and James McConkey, who collaborated this spring to teach the course called "Mind and Memory: Explorations of Creativity in the Arts and Sciences." It enlivens the scholarship of historians like Carol Kammen, who not only teaches local history on campus, but also writes a weekly column about it for the Ithaca Journal. And it is revealed in a host of different venues, including the Plantations Path, which winds its way through some of Ithaca's most significant natural and historic sites from Treman Triangle at the foot of Cascadilla Gorge through the heart of campus and on to the Newman Arboretum.

The critic Naomi Blivin once observed that civilization rests on two very fragile bases -- high culture and good topsoil. Cornell is unique in the extent to which it combines them both. High culture, on the campus and in the community, fuses with a strong agricultural heritage and a setting of remarkable natural beauty to give the greater Ithaca area and those who live here a sense of attachment and belonging.

Garrison Keillor, public radio's favorite storyteller, came to Bailey Hall shortly after most of you had left for the summer last year. Cornell chimesmaster Serena Wong '96, now emeritus, played the McGraw Tower chimes that day -- then ran to Bailey to explain to Keillor how it was done. The Cornell Glee Club, under the direction of Scott Tucker, sang Cornell songs. Keillor seemed especially taken by the natural beauty of the campus and its land-grant roots, and they both figured prominently in his show.

As he has done countless times in his own beloved Lake Wobegon, Keillor identified our myths for us and wove them into a sense of place we could embrace as our own. If you heard his show on the radio, you probably were nodding in recognition when he described Ithaca -- the nation's most enlightened city -- as a place where you could live all your life and never run out of choices in granola.

You may remember Garrison Keillor's take-off on the Odyssey, in which Ulysses forgoes the chance to party on pillaged wine after the Trojan War in order to return to Ithaca and his beloved Penelope -- and work to combat urban sprawl and preserve green space. As they are driven by the wind to the island of the Cyclops, Ulysses asks his helmsman about the one-eyed monsters on shore.

"Cyclops, eh. . . Is it a cyclop or a cyclops?"

"I don't know. I'm only a helmsman," is the frantic reply as monsters roar in the background and the crew gives cries of alarm.

"Well, find out. Bring up the dictionary," says Ulysses amid the sounds of crunching. "I would just like to know the correct name for it. If I didn't learn anything else at Cornell, at least I learned accuracy. . . "

That really is Ithaca . . .that really is Cornell.

A number of us had occasion to reflect upon that sense of place again this spring at the AmmonsFest -- a weekend celebration of Cornell's own A. R. Ammons and his works, which now include nearly 30 books of poetry. The event included readings by several of Archie Ammons' former students including poets Kenneth McClane, the W.E.B. Dubois Professor of Literature at Cornell, Cynthia Bond, Nancy Viera Couto, Alice Fulton and Angela Shaw, and talks by Roald Hoffmann, Harvard critic Helen Vendler, and a reading of his poetry by A.R. Ammons himself.

I had the pleasure of introducing Archie at that event, and I found it to be an enjoyably daunting task. A.R. Ammons is a man who spent the first 17 years of his life on a North Carolina farm -- with 50
acres and a mule and the family Bible as the only book in the house -- but who today is viewed as one of America's greatest poets. He has won two National Book Awards, a Robert Frost Medal, a MacArthur award, but his most lasting achievement may be the coffee conversations he has with students and colleagues at the Temple of Zeus and in his Goldwin Smith office, where he has long worked with an open door.

One of Archie Ammons's special gifts is his ability to draw richly upon his perception of the natural world, which he observes with the skill of the science major he once was and the competent naturalist he remains today. Yet Archie's meticulous descriptions are only a beginning -- an entree into a world of reflections that forces the reader to become involved. Archie Ammons is of this place, and yet he transcends this place -- and in so doing he creates a sense of place wherever he goes . . . for himself and for those who have come to know him through word and deed.

I hope you will feel a continuing bond with this place when you leave Schoellkopf Field today. I hope that you will remember the role it played in making you who you are and what you will yet become; and that, having experienced it here, you will create a sense of place for yourself wherever in the world you now may go.

One of Archie Ammons's poems is called "Salute." It 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 1998, candidates for advanced degrees: Congratulations and best wishes to you all.