Durham, N.C. - I've been looking for the right thing to tell you at this fateful hour. I've been struggling to find the words to guide you at this great moment of transition. At the senior class barbecue that my wife and I recently hosted, I think I found them. I saw one of you--actually, several--wearing a t-shirt with the message NEVER GRADUATE. Class of 2006, reconsider! What were you thinking? Do you have any idea how scary that world is out there? Do you have any idea how little a student stepping out of even the best of universities knows about that world and how to navigate it? Tell your entourage that you're glad of their visit, but that you are not planning to leave after all. If they ask when you do intend to graduate, you know the answer. Never. Welcome back to Duke.

But then a truly scary thought occurred to me. Perhaps it's no longer in your power to prevent your graduation. Every day that you worked at completing those papers and exams, you were, unthinkingly, extinguishing your ability not to finish. Now look what you've done. The faculty has already recommended you for your diploma, the trustees have already been asked to approve--and, friend though I am, it is probably no longer in my power to hold you back.

So I must envision you, two days hence, watching your Duke life vanish behind you. It seems an eternity ago that the car drove up to East Campus to unload you that will now approach to carry you away. As you leave, all that life packed into the last four years, so dense and compelling while it lasted, will erase itself like a dream on waking, thinned of substance and closed to you forever. And when you wake from the dream of Duke, then what? Then you enter The Afterlife. In Emily Dickinson's words, you will be "traversing the interval/Experience between/And most profound experiment/Appointed unto men."

What will you encounter out there--not Monday but in coming years? Nobody has ever been very good at guessing the future; but we can imagine a few things your late youth or early middle age (ouch!) might hold in store. This country has become obsessed with the economies of China and India, and with the competition they will present to a nation grown unused to challenges to its economic, military, and cultural sway. But which way will this evolve: will you live through an inevitable global polarization between established and emerging powers, a new version of the late 20^th century's Cold War, or possibly even a return of hot war on a global scale? (If that seems unimaginable, it only means that you're forgetting a long history prior to 1945). Or might this competition be managed in such a way as to guarantee the growth of prosperity throughout the world, a rising tide that would lift millions from poverty and squalor, with attendant conflicts wisely foreseen and constructively fended off?

In the wake of development, will a larger and larger share of the world's population come to use current energy sources as prodigally as we do, breeding conflict as nations rush to lock up finite energy supplies, and changing earth systems in irreversible ways? Or might new discoveries and new habits of consumption produce a different picture, averting a worldwide competition for dwindling resources and putting the manmade and natural world into a healthier accord?

On another front, we live in a time when medical research has made unparalleled discoveries about the human organism, making therapies available that were never before imagined, typically at great expense. What will be the next chapter? Will advances in health care continue to create both new cures and new inequalities between those who can afford them and those who can't? Or might we see a spread of the benefits of modern knowledge for physical well-being in this country and abroad?

It's clear that education will be the prerequisite for productive membership in the economy and society of future years. But here again, which road will we go? Will this country continue to be willing for unequal early training to write such unequal futures for people starting out in life, creating greater and greater gulfs between the well-educated and those not so empowered? Or might the problem of educational opportunity be addressed in a way that would save us from a future costly to us all, one where large elements of talent are wasted for lack of the training needed to bring this human promise to fruition?

I'm evoking a future of very different potential scenarios. When I visualize you out there, I can see the future you in very different ways as well. Some ironists speak of contemporary students as wanting to do just well enough in college to be sure they can do well enough after college, where "well enough" equates to placement in a job that may not be very interesting or fulfilling but is, as they say, well-compensated. (As if anything could compensate for a life of uninterest or unfulfillment.) If this scandalous assessment were to be true, then I might imagine your Duke Afterlife as the successful construction of your personal bubble, a shielded zone of prosperity and life-style pleasure you could travel in in self-enclosed comfort, such that whether or not the world went to hell, you at least would be doing well--or anyway, well enough.

I see two problems with this strategy. First, a life this rich in insulation is likely to pay a price for its insularity, robbing you of contact with a great deal that's humanly interesting. Second, it's a strategy of total passivity, with things outside the cozy personal sphere allowed somehow to just "happen."

I am not so romantic as to believe that it's in the power of individuals to change the course of history. But I'm not such a pessimist as to believe that history advances through a logic wholly separate from the work of will and choice. The open questions that I began by raising will be answered in your lifetime, and if they're not answered for the better, they will surely be answered for the worse. No one person will determine whether we get the constructive or the destructive version of any of these paired futures. But the ideas people have or fail to have and the efforts people make or fail to make will, cumulatively, make one of these paired possibilities increasingly actual, and the other increasingly unreal. My thought has always been, if you're going to be living with the consequences of someone's choices, why not have them be your own? From here I extrapolate to quite a different future for you--one in which, whatever life or career you choose, you'll use that as your base to engage your time in all its risks, dangers, and possibilities; and use your gifts actively to shape your portion of the world.

This isn't going to happen if you don't try for it; but if you do, your chances are not that bad. Duke has equipped you with things that will be powerful assets if rightly deployed. You may be jubilant at the thought of escaping the tyranny of schoolwork, but if we did things right, your celebration may be premature. If this place worked as it was meant to, habits of curiosity, analysis, and articulation have been so deeply bred into you that you couldn't be mentally inert if you wished to, or couldn't be so for long.

It's my confident expectation that whenever a Dukie appears on the scene, something active, inquisitive, inventive, and constructive has been added to the mix. But when I speak of assets you bring to the table, I'm also thinking of qualities of heart, not of intellect alone. No one could be on this campus without feeling the powerful force of your other-directedness. For many of you this has taken the form of service in this city or in sites throughout the world. I praise this work for the common good; but when I speak of other-directedness, I also include the most visible fact of your life here, the life you've shared with your friends. Your daily interactions are about to be broken up, but these friendships won't end, and neither will the habits they have perfected: the habit of caring about others, the habit of taking trouble for others, the habit of coming together to create a more interesting experience than any of you could have made on your own. I read this as laying the foundation for a whole approach to life that I look for from you, one that seeks individual fulfillment in the life of a larger community. Former congresswoman Shirley Chisholm was talking about this more generalized form of friendship when she said that "service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth." I say it to what you have so often said to our rivals: Pay your rent.

Last and very quickly, if we have been through some hard things here together, that need not prove the negative it might appear. For building a better world, humans need access to that special form of intelligence called wisdom, and the way to wisdom has never been through school exercises or the formal curriculum. Like it or not, this form of knowledge comes the hard way, through trial, through conflict, through failure and error, and through suffering and loss. I would gladly have spared you every hard thing we have been through since I arrived--last year's controversy over issues of free speech, our more recent conflicts over the presumption of innocence and the social values that will govern this community, the death of friends and classmates who did not complete your journey. But I know that, just to the extent that you have lived the emotional complexities of these incidents, you leave here with a deepened understanding of the terms of human life. In the measure that you have not protected yourself from difficulties but opened yourself to their sometimes painful human meanings, you have got an education, one that will make you a more thoughtful contributor to your times.

My first word to you came from an anonymous sage. My final message, somewhat less suitable for tee shirt emblazonment, comes from the American philosopher Josiah Royce. Royce said: "The best world for a moral agent is one that needs him to make it better." Here's the bad news: you are in no danger of living to see a world that is not in need of improvement. If you should wake up someday to find that universal human perfection has broken out, call me and I'll refund your tuition. Here's the good news: though you won't achieve perfection, you can live so as to make things better, if you have the intention to do so and take a proper reckoning of your powers. The reason college has such a hold on people is because that's the time when they come into their mature powers. Your powers--of analysis, of initiative, of discipline, of sympathy--have grown prodigiously in your Duke years; and your love of this place is your love of the growth it enabled. The consequence of that growth is that you are now capable of being a person who will work thoughtfully, imaginatively, compassionately, and intelligently on the raw materials of your time. But if that's so, I'm starting to change my mind. Maybe it's OK for you to graduate! You're ready. Get out of here. Go well.