Brodhead to the Class of 2011: Engage the World as You Engaged Duke

I remember
standing here four years back when you had just arrived. Looking out at that great
mass of anxiety about the new life you were entering, I said: little as you may
believe it, Duke will become home for each of you, the single place on earth where
you feel most at home. And lo, it came to pass! For years you have walked
around as if you own the place. Four years of contact have done nothing to
slake your appetite for the company of other Dukies.  Look at your wardrobes; what does every garment you own say?
Duke! Duke! Duke! Duke!

You're at home all
right. But that happy state is now about to end. As a euphemism we call this
your commencement, but you know the emotional truth of this weekend. Class of
2011, Duke is about to eject you, evict you, expel you, exile you -- to close the
gates and banish you to the cold, hard world outside.

And since I'm
enjoying the role of prophet of doom, I'll go further. Let's face facts: the
world you are being sent out into is a hideous mess. You arrived here in jolly
times. In fall 2007 we were still cranking through the longest growth of
prosperity in recorded history, with few signs that the good times would cease to
roll. Well, we got that wrong: you got to hide out at Duke from the deepest
economic downturn since the Great Depression. And now that the blackest clouds
have begun to clear, the prospects are not exactly rosy. In 2011, the
accumulated debt of the United States will pass 15 trillion dollars and will
exceed 100 percent of GDP for the first time since World War Two, with
obligations set to rise and rise. Have you seen the graphs this spring, with
the bright red deficit line zooming upward for the rest of your adult lives? Thanks
a lot!  Through a combination of
idealistic choices and self-indulgent habits, your elders of both parties have handed
you an enterprise that's mortgaged to the hilt, with no evident margin for new
investment, that still has not solved elementary problems of how to deliver
quality health care, quality education, or steady employment for those willing
and eager to work.

Then to cap it
all, you, the inheritors of this mess, are apparently history's greatest generation
of incompetents. This winter the national press gave extensive coverage to a
study suggesting that many students today learn absolutely nothing from their
time in college. Another set of books, surveying the cognitive effects of the
new media you are the first generation to inhabit, assure us that not a single one
of you is capable of paying attention to anything for longer than (say)
forty-five seconds, or communicating thoughts more than 140 characters in
length.

Are we feeling
suicidal yet? But you're right: this picture is way too gloomy. Let's take it
part by part.

First, while I don't
minimize the challenges, I wouldn't have excessive confidence in the dire
predictions of this time. There's no such thing as a good time to graduate, in
the sense that all indicators are positive and guaranteed to stay that way.
When that has seemed to be the case, history's threats and changes were only
temporarily hidden. Spring 2001 seemed a lovely time to graduate -- the government
was about to run a surplus and the world was substantially at peace; but the
surprise of 9/11 was only four months away. In any case, given the variables at
play, historical predictions never stay "true" for long. The one
scenario I bet you will never face 10  or 20 years from now is the one most
confidently advanced today.

As for those who
revel in the thought that you and your contemporaries are mindless nincompoops,
they have not met you, and they have not thought enough about how education
works. These days, universities are under pressure to articulate the "learning
outcomes" each course and program is meant to deliver and to document that
these outcomes were actually achieved. Given the number of students in this
country who have never mastered fundamental skills, and given the lifelong price
people have to pay when the foundations of learning aren't strongly laid, I don't
doubt that some such metrics are needed in earlier stages of schooling. But the
approach is singularly ill equipped to catch the value of what happens at a
school like Duke.

We did indeed set
requirements for you, and we did assess how well you reached them, course by
course, term after term. But we could never compute the worth of your Duke
education by taking those parts and summing the results. For one thing, when
this place was really working, your academic experience did not consist of a
set of separate pieces. The things you studied collided with one another,
rebounded off one another, led you to see connections no single course could provide
on its own. Plus your learning was never a function of formal coursework alone.
Duke makes a specialty of having students put classroom study to the test of
real-world experience. Your work in health clinics in DukeEngage or clean water
projects in Engineers Without Borders, or research labs, or public policy
internships, or financial literacy clinics offered to people in this city, will
leave no mark on your transcript, but they will leave a mark on your mind, a
deepened human knowledge of what classes can only teach abstractly.

Beyond this, there
was the teeming world of the extracurricular, a zone of experience that was not
formally graded but that was certainly not lesson-free. Wherever three or four
Dukies gather together, they organize a dance ensemble, or a Quidditch team, or
a relief effort after an earthquake, or a library party for two thousand with
bizarrely talented Sinatra impersonators. Assembling groups with varied talents
to visualize an activity, execute it, and accomplish together what no single
person could accomplish alone is a profound form of learning, and can pay rich
dividends for "serious" work.

Add these up and a
key something is still left out: the learning that took place just by inhabiting
this community. The most interesting book I read this spring is Edward Glaeser's
excellent Triumph of the City. (If I
were nice like Oprah I would put a copy under each of your seats in Wallace
Wade.) Its point is that when varied populations of talented humans are brought
into sufficiently close proximity, the result is transformational. Bike riders
ride faster when they ride in a pack with a faster rider; grocery clerks do
checkouts faster when a high-performing clerk works on their shift. From
ancient Athens to Renaissance Florence to the great global metropolises of our
time, humans have always been most productive and creative when they shared
densely-packed space with a multitude of others, encountering each other in random,
unprogrammed ways.

That's the secret
of a great university campus. For without meaning to or being much aware of it,
the members of a community like Duke swap masses of information, strike sparks
from each other, sharpen each other's wits, and raise each other's game,  through their encounters every day. Four
years with all these forms of education swirling together in indistinguishable
combination and you are changed: you're smarter, more thoughtful, more capable,
more confident. This new you -- this far more empowered self -- is the real "learning
outcome" you will take from Duke.

What will you do
with it? Where will it take you? As of today, no one can say. The deep goods of
education can't be measured at the finish line. They reveal themselves over time,
as you translate your powers into an emerging life. Your parents want you to
march straight from success at Duke to some career haven that will guarantee
security and prosperity for the rest of life. But I have the privilege of
meeting uncountable alums of this university, people of all ages doing every
imaginable thing, and scarcely one of them is doing anything they could have
envisioned at their graduation.

I know a graduate
who went to law school who then, rather than going into practice, went to work
at the Federal Reserve during the great inflation crisis of the late 1970s.
When he went back into law, he had new opportunities thanks to his expertise in
finance. Over time, this knowledge led him to be asked to work on the
privatization of state-owned companies in China. That opened a new career doing
business across Asia's emerging economies, which scarcely existed on the day he
left Duke.

I know an alum who
helped mount arts productions as a Duke undergraduate, after which he went to
business school. He then went to work for a famous consulting firm but at age
32, quit it, with no other certain prospects, to wait out an opportunity in the
land of his dreams, Hollywood. Many moves later, he ended up as the chairman of
a major film studio and deviser of a new financial model for the film industry -- with
many chapters still to go, since he's still in his forties now.

I know an alum who
had two children in the days when the lack of childcare made it extraordinarily
challenging for women to return to work. She co-founded the company that became
the national leader in creating quality childcare opportunities; later, she
became Commissioner of Human Services for the state of Tennessee; later still,
she became the director of a foundation addressing children's needs and the
dropout crisis across this land.

I know an alum (a
onetime member of the field hockey team) who went to work for the then-virtual-startup
Microsoft, talked the firm into creating its education practice and became its
first director, then left to launch a series of entrepreneurial ventures, some
for profit, some not for profit. Six months ago she agreed to take a new job
directing entrepreneurial activities at Duke.

Each of my
examples used Duke as a springboard; but not a single one of them could foresee
the life that awaited them when they sat where you sit now. They found their
chances by applying their intelligence and creative energy to the emerging
needs and opportunities of their times, and having the courage to follow their
talents, and take some risks.

Their turn then.
Your turn now.

Men and Women of
the Class of 2011, I told you you were about to lose your home. I'm sorry; the eviction
notice can't be revoked. But how did Duke become your home? You made this place
yours by engaging it: the more you invested Duke with your energies, the more
you made it yours. Through the sum of your involvements, you have developed every
aspect of your whole person. As a result, you are now capable of deeper
engagements with the world, through which you will make new homes -- and on and
on, through a long life of learning and involvement. At Duke you became the
person who can write the next chapters of a significant life. Go write it now.
You can.