Brodhead Calls for Courage in Convocation Address

Men and women of the Duke class of 2009, in a minute I will welcome you, but first I have a word for your entourage, the loving supporters watching from the Page Auditorium and Reynolds Theater. Parents, I know this day's feelings are complex. You are blessed to be the parents of youthful prodigies, and one of today's emotions must be great and justified pride. Since in modern America the notion prevails that getting your kid into a selective college is the highest known parental attainment and possibly your mission on earth, you may also be feeling twinges of self-congratulation. And why not? Your kid goes to Duke! Your life's work is done.

But a wiser part of us knows that parenthood was really about giving your children such nurture that some day they could step away from you and make it on their own, and today marks that day of separation and independence ”an occasion for pride though also for pain. Now, modern life has developed powerful pain relievers for this crisis of separation. Through the miracle of cellphones and text messaging, you could be virtually there with your son and daughter every step of their Duke way, checking in if not masterminding their lives by remote control. Ring ring! Did you see your adviser yet? Ring ring! Did you tell your new teacher about that wonderful paper you wrote in high school? Ring ring! That girl across the hall looked nice; you should befriend her! Ring ring! Did you befriend her yet?

But as my mockery means to suggest, the tools that could keep you close could also defeat this moment's purpose, for only by stepping away can you create the space in which your son or daughter's independent self can emerge. So I will now reveal what's really going on. We have locked all parents in the Reynolds Theater and Page Auditorium ”marshalls, please bar the doors ”and will proceed to search and strip you of all remote communications devices unless you agree to back off, a little, from your child's new life. Am I harsh? Well, I'll console you with this. If you'll leave your child alone, they will miss you and possibly even grow to admire you ”and your new relation as adult friends will be at least as pleasurable as the old one of control freak and irritable dependent. Is it a deal?

We will now turn off the feed to the remote viewing locations so I can speak in confidence to the men and women here before me. Duke Class of 09, nice work! You did it: today I officially admit you to a great new life. When you're in high school, everything seems to be either forbidden or required. Here a paradise of possibilities will surround you, along with a new freedom to choose your way. What will it add up to? Where will you come out? That's too far off for any of us to say, but I want to lodge one thought in your mind as you set out. You'll soon have a thousand little things to keep you busy, but the big thing Duke has in store for you is the chance to discover and fortify your mature self.

My thinking on this subject received a clarifying jolt the summer before last. I was newly coming to Duke and, like you I imagine, both exhilarated and somewhat uncertain, and abnormally receptive to any hint as to what this place was about. In this state, dutiful boy that I am, I read the book assigned to the entering class: last year, this was Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains. This book charts the career of Paul Farmer, a man who though still young ”he is even now only in his early forties ”has been recognized as one of this day's most important humanitarian figures. As you may know, Paul Farmer is a man with one foot in the world of advanced medical training and research: an M.D. and Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology from Harvard, Farmer is the chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. But as medical director of the Clinique Bon Sauveur in rural Haiti, he has another life among the poorest of the world's poor, in a place where people are greatly more vulnerable to every health threat and where the simplest forms of therapy can be a distant, unaffordable dream.

Farmer's life's work has been to remain hyperconscious of the gap between these worlds and to try to bridge that gap through personal action. Part of his work has been to publicize the health conditions of the third world through his books and lectures, and to make the world of abundance (including abundance of expertise) feel the ethical challenge of the profoundly unequal health fates that coexist with it. (Health inequalities do not always require great distances: Farmer has also worked with poor and immigrant populations in Boston.) Another part of his work has been to carry the benefits of modern medicine outside its usual sphere. Farmer and his co-workers have been leaders in figuring out how expensive therapies for HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis can be adapted to the third world, and in mobilizing the funding to pay for these therapies. But perhaps most striking, though Farmer has become a major figure on the world health scene and been honored with countless awards, he has insisted on continuing to care for the very poor and sick himself, in his own person to minister to their need.

Paul Farmer is a person who has found how to bring his distinctive gifts to bear on one of the deep challenges of humankind, which could be my definition of an admirable life. He also exemplifies a good life under conditions of globalization: addressing problems that know no boundaries by deploying intelligence across boundaries, he shows what an individual can do even in a world of large, transnational forces. But I confess that what struck me most when I read Kidder's book was the news that Paul Farmer was also a Dukie, a member of the class of 1982. As I sat wondering what it meant to go to Duke and what happens to a person by virtue of going there, by chance, Paul Farmer was thrown up before me as a possible answer. Let me to try to unpack what his story taught.

From what I've said, you may have guessed that Farmer was marked in early life by clear signs of his special calling (perhaps a toy stethoscope and a small halo), came to Duke knowing just where he was headed, and advanced straight toward that end to continual and mounting applause. But go read the Duke chapters of Mountains Beyond Mountains and you'll learn something far more interesting. As far as I can tell, when Farmer sat where you're sitting, he was mostly just some bright kid from somewhere ”in his case a trailer park in south Florida ”with a certain bent toward the sciences but no sense of a special orientation. The picture you get of his early Duke years is of a person endlessly gregarious, delighted with all the new human types that surrounded him and exuberantly open to all kinds of new opportunities. Farmer came here thinking he might study chemistry, but while here became interested (among other things) in poetry, women's studies, and eventually anthropology, spending a junior year not in Haiti but ”you guessed it ”in Paris.

Eventually, and by chance far more than intention or plan, Farmer found things that had a decisive effect on his sense of direction. In his reading he came across the work of the little-remembered Rudolf Virchow, whose study of epidemics in late 19th century Germany led to the conviction that medical problems have social causes in addition to biological or organic ones. Kidder quotes Farmer as saying of this discovery: "Virchow had a comprehensive vision. Pathology, social medicine, politics, anthropology. My model!" (It was exactly not his model, of course, until reading Virchow helped him crystallize it.) At about the same time, Farmer found himself drawn to student activism on behalf of North Carolina farm workers ”at that time, largely immigrant laborers from Haiti. There he met a Belgian nun who helped expose him to a potent new version of the Catholicism he had been raised in: liberation theology, with its critique of wealth and power and extreme spiritual privileging of the poor.

It would be accurate to say that Paul Farmer the famous humanitarian went to Duke. But from this telling, it would be truer to say that some kid became Paul Farmer while at Duke, and by going to Duke. That special orientation that we now know him by was not visible to himself or others when he first arrived. He found that self here: Duke is where he did the reading that drew his emerging concerns into an explosive conceptual unity; North Carolina is where he met the Haitian poor, the object of his future calling.

I'm talking about Paul Farmer, but as you guessed, it's you, not him, that is on my mind. For though you'll be running around in a state of zany activity for the next four years, and though on any given day you might think of that day's projects as what you are here for, with luck, what will really be going on is something more consequential and mysterious: this will be the place where you find yourself, come to a clarified sense of your interests, your gifts, and your powers. It's not my thought that you too should become Paul Farmer ”though you could certainly do worse, and a student entering Duke today will find many opportunities to develop in that direction. (Duke teachers and students are already active bringing health care to underserved sites around the world and in this city, and this summer Duke was chosen as the lead site for a massive research project to try to find an AIDS vaccine.). But the world has many needs besides medical needs ”needs for political and moral leadership, for entrepreneurship and invention, for education, for entertainment, and a thousand more; and with luck, this group will help meet every such need in your future lives. My wish is that your Duke years will help you toward some sense of the talents and service that will be your distinctive contribution, as Duke helped Farmer find his.

So far so good! But how are you going to get there? I turn back to Kidder's book for possible hints. The Paul Farmer of today is a classic case of a man with a calling. But if that calling clarified itself here, it's not as if it came to him through a Eureka! moment of personal revelation. It revealed itself only gradually, and not through a single stimulus or cause. The Virchow discovery came through reading, work in a formal academic program. The farm worker discovery came through what we would call an extra-curricular activity. The liberationist theology discovery was an event in Farmer's religious life. But in practice, his case shows, these distinctions can be almost wholly artificial. It was all these modes of experience acting together ”intellectual, social, and spiritual currents intersecting with each other, interanimating each other, and being lived together ”that helped him toward his finding of self.

So with you: it's the whole person, not the student alone but all the sides of you, fully engaged and acting in concert, that will get the full education Duke can give. So you'll plan your education best if you remember to allow the whole of you to be acknowledged and engaged. But another lesson I take from Farmer is that advance planning can only take you so far. If Farmer found his destination, it wasn't by already knowing his goal and charting his way there. He was just eager for everything his new life brought him; if he found his way eventually, it was by freely trying things for their possible interest or pleasure, without much care about whether he was good at them or how they might pay off. Farmer wrote drama reviews when he came to Duke because it looked like fun, and in spite of the fact that he had never seen a play before the first one he reviewed. He joined a fraternity because it looked appealing and became its social chair, though he felt free to drop out when his interests migrated elsewhere. A scientist eventually, he was an ardent amateur athlete and (for awhile) an enthusiast of an arty poetry crowd that did bits of guerilla theater like rappelling down the sides of the Allen Building. (Note to Listeners: This is now forbidden.) In short he was open to anything and up for everything ”and if he eventually found subjects and activities that resonated with him more profoundly, it was his willingness to keep engaging himself with new opportunities that brought him, in time, to those spots.

I'm urging you to the notion that the way to find yourself at Duke is to lose yourself in the new things it offers, to take some chances and follow the lure of what's interesting, without undue concern to demonstrate moment-by-moment that you are on the official road to success. I'm not urging you to abandon all sensible plans. But if you aren't willing to stray somewhat from the path you have premeditated, then you're doomed to reach only those destinations you have already been able to envision. But aren't there a thousand things now calling out to you that you've never had available before? Every day I'm here I learn of new things to be interested in. Tissue engineering? Brain-machine interfaces? These things were unthinkable ten years ago, and Duke undergraduates are now in the middle of unfolding their possibilities. Extraordinary documentary filmmakers? Fabulous South Asian dancers? Every day I meet students who became these (and many other) things here, and you could too. If you're not going to find anything very interesting in Duke's intellectual and human scene, then all I can say is, you lied badly to us last year and should relinquish your place at once. But in my experience, college students deprive themselves of opportunities out of timidity far more than out of uninterest. The vulnerability-conceding "I might not be good at that" is easily translated into the ego-soothing "I wouldn't dream of wanting to try that;" the shy "that interesting-seeming person probably wouldn't want to know me" is easily converted into the brave "I certainly wouldn't want to know that sort of person" ”and on and on, until we have shut ourselves into a risk-free zone that buys security at the price of massive self-restriction.

I say this on the highest authority (I am the President): what Duke wants for you is a magnificent self-expansion, a rich realization of your powers of intelligence and thoughtful action. What we ask from you is openness and continual engagement, as the means to those ends. But something is needed to make this happen, and to achieve it we need your help.

It probably has not occurred to you, but the way you choose to interact with each other will be the main fact establishing the medium you're about to live in. You're the ones who are about to decide, by the way you treat each other, whether this will be a broadly welcoming place (as I trust) or a society of tight exclusionary systems; you're the ones who will decide if this is a place of where people vie to assert their superiority or support and applaud each another's attempts. I know Duke and I'm very hopeful, but it's only you, not the institution, who can make these differences in practice. If you've listened to my words, you know that this is an issue of education, not of etiquette alone. For your education, it's of the essence that each of you have access to the full measure of self-enlargement and self-discovery that could await you here. For that reason, it's essential that you undertake to create together the kind of atmosphere in which each of you feels free to expand and explore.

I'll tell you something funny, though I almost hesitate to say it. Kidder reports that when Paul Farmer strode across this campus, he would sometimes loudly sing songs from The Sound of Music. (I promise you, this could have been no cooler an activity in 1979 than it would be today.) How might I have responded to this? Probably by thinking that this person must be a total jerk. What would have kept me from doing it (and perhaps still does)? The premonition that you and others would think I am a total jerk. But I have come to a new view of the matter. Knowing perfectly well how others would respond, it must have been an act of bravery and joyous freedom for Farmer to have done that thing. And seen in that light, those reactions I just mentioned would be ”well, you know what: the invisible intimidations and self-intimidations by which we clap ourselves and one another in prison, repressing each other's individuality in the name of the Accepted Thing.

I have no wish to touch off an epidemic of Sound of Music singing (I am already cringing at the thought), but I'm hoping you will be a group that will tolerate and encourage each other's individualities, and even have the boldness to enjoy some yourself. I expect to hear that the Duke you are creating is a world of mutual respect and consideration. I trust it will be one in which you feel some curiosity about your differences and some comfort with each other's curiosity, not recoiling with horrified shouts of "You mean you're" (fill the blank with one term from each pair): a Republican?/one of those liberal Democrats? Actually religious?/truly not religious? A full-blooded Southerner?/ A person who's never met a Southerner before? (You can extend the exercise on your own.) But I hope too that you'll create a world that gives support for risk-taking and authentic exploration, rather than the dull peace of mutually enforced uniformity. You will thrive here in proportion as you give each other courage ”the courage to actually find out what it is you think.

Women and men of the Duke class of 2009, I like you fine the way you are, but I look forward to watching your transformation ”not into something you're not, but into a more realized version of what you are. You can help make this happen, by seizing the opportunities of this place and supporting the free experience of others. Do that and twenty years from now, a future president can tell future freshmen the amazing tale of you, and how Duke helped you become the celebrated Amanda Conner, or Alexander Osmund, or Sean Thompson, or Mansilla Lopez (I picked these four at random; please fill in your own name). We have four years together with only one day gone. Let's make them something great.