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Richard Brodhead: Where You Went and Who You’ll Be

Part of the Commencement 2015 Series
Students walk into Duke Chapel for the baccalaureate service Friday.
Students walk into Duke Chapel for the baccalaureate service Friday.

A Duke alum I know was back here two weeks ago on a curious errand. He had come back to stock up on those Duke spiral notebooks for sale at the Duke Store. This person graduated 30 years ago and has gone on to significant success.  Appointed to the Federal Communications Commission by President Bush and reappointed by President Obama, not a common feat, he has presided over one of the most significant and transformative areas of the modern economy: telecommunications, wireless, and internet policy. In all those years, I learned, he has only ever used Duke notebooks to jot down his thoughts, pulling them out before Congressional hearings or, this week, at a meeting in London.

I ask myself, what could this amazing brand loyalty possibly mean? Well, maybe he just loved this relic of good times here. Or maybe Duke notebooks have been a subtle tool for self-advancement, a way to give the waiting world the subliminal message, Heads up! I went to Duke! But at this stage in life he scarcely needs college gear to make himself impressive, so my third guess is this: He has carried a Duke notebook as a kind of talisman, a magic token meant to bring good luck and ward off foes.

You might be shopping for a talisman this week. You’re at a precarious point in life, are you not? Behind you stretch four enchanted years at Duke, but the clock is ticking, and in short order you are about to be thrust out of this good place, driven out into the great unknown, the terra incognita of the Duke afterlife, where, like sailors in the days before Columbus, you will be assailed by all manner of dread beasts. Before such uncertainty, you and your parents must be hoping that your Duke diploma will function like a superhero’s magic superpower, opening all doors and averting all threats.

Won’t it be great if Duke renders you omnipotent? I hope that works for you! But since magical thinking isn’t totally reliable, let’s ask, what will going to Duke really mean for you in the long, mysterious years ahead?

We got one answer this spring when New York Times columnist Frank Bruni published a book called Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be. (If it wins no other awards, this book will win the prize for the book with the most one-syllable words in its title.) With clear calculation, this book appeared at just the season when American families are reaching their annual frenzy about college admissions decisions. To an audience obsessed with the possibility of getting in—or not getting in—to a super-selective school like Duke, to families who have been subjecting their children since birth to deforming pressures to become The Perfect Applicant, and who await word from admissions offices with the existential suspense older cultures reserved for the Last Judgment, Frank Bruni’s message is: Get Over It! The college you get into does not matter as much as you think! Happy and successful people have started life through other doors than an elite, highly selective college. Going to such a school never guaranteed success; failing to attend one was never a bar to success. Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be.

Now that’s all true, and it’s actually good that people’s fates are not locked in when they are seventeen or eighteen. But if where you went to college does not have everything to do with what you go on to do thereafter, is it possible that it has it has nothing to do with it? Permit me to have my doubts. You may remember a line attributed to Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do.” (In the weird way of our modern world, this line will now be familiar to those who don’t read Greek classics as a tagline from Under Armour ads.) In this concept, our virtues and deficiencies are not fixed in our character. They’re built, constructed in us through a history of actions, with repeated actions laying down habits that then appear to spring from us innately. You’ve done many things so repeatedly here these last four years that in an Aristotelian light, those aren’t any longer separate from you: they have shaped the lineaments of who you are.

Current work on neuroscience comes at the same thought in a different way. To the old debate whether character is determined by nature or environment, neuroscience has taught us that the answer is neither and both: we are shaped through the continual interaction between the world we experience and the cognitive apparatus through which we apprehend the world.  Recent studies have documented that the brain’s circuits are not hardwired at birth or even early childhood, but are being perpetually rewired in response to new experience—what is now called neuroplasticity. The brain can shrink and lose tissue in circumstances of deprivation or bad stress; creative environments promote the nerve growth factors that generate new cells and new circuits of connection. If a house had the same kind of plasticity as the brain does, I was told by a helpful colleague, it would grow more rooms if more people came to live in it. If no one used the room for years, the room would shut off the lights, disconnect the electricity, and eventually collapse.

To me, this suggests that if Duke will confer a continuing benefit, it’s quite shallow to think that benefit is a matter of the prestige or contacts a Duke connection will give. The key benefit is the difference Duke made inside you. By coming to Duke, you came to live in a ridiculously interesting environment. For four years, you’ve been surrounded by phenomenally interesting classmates, no two alike, but all in some measure amazing; enmeshed in networks of inquiry and discovery stretching from formal classes all around the world; engaged in endless activities mobilizing group talents to overcome self-appointed challenges.

What are the chances that that milieu left you unchanged? Bringing your personal force of mind to bear, each of you activated your own version of Duke’s opportunities. In turn, every experience you engaged has provoked a burst of neuroplasticity, a growth in your capacity for intelligence in all its modes:  intellectual, emotional, social, cultural, spiritual. Unless you have been almost unimaginably dull-witted, you’re a different person than the self who came here four years past. You have something better than a magic notebook: you have a well-exercised and empowered mind. This is Your Brain on Duke: you’ve learned how to focus and press yourself to do your best, you’ve learned how to notice and express and connect things, how to formulate problems and muster the resources to address them, how to open yourself to others and learn from their other perspectives, how to work with a diversity of talent to accomplish what none of you could do alone. Post Duke, people will value you because they will find these gifts in you.

So if I were reviewing Frank Bruni’s book, I would say that if the value of college choice can be overrated, it can certainly be underrated as well. Where you go may not be the only interesting determinant of who you’ll be, but it can have a decisive, even transformational impact on the development of your powers.

But it does not follow that having finished Duke, you’re set for life. Having lots of activity in your mental house may cause the brain figuratively to grow new rooms, but a lapse of activity can cause those rooms to darken and even shut down. The only way to keep the new strengths you’ve built up these past four years is to continue to exercise your powers of mind, to keep reaching for chances to learn and grow that will lead you far beyond the things learned here.

Which sounds easy, but now there is a hitch. These last four years, a flying circus of perpetual opportunity has been laid on for you every day. When you graduate, this won’t come so easily any more. Going forward, you’re going to have to assume a new degree of responsibility for accessing the chances for experience and discovery that here were institutionally supplied.

You may not believe me, but life after college is actually greatly more rewarding than the life you’re about to leave, because you engage it with full adult freedoms and responsibilities. But as you’ll also learn, a narrowing often travels together with this advance. Most career paths bring you into frequent contact with some kinds of people, but not others; who care about some kinds of things, not others; and who ask some kinds of questions, not others. As people settle down, this tendency can lead on to further forms of limitation, as we settle in neighborhoods with “our” kind of people, not others; who generally share our same outlook and values, not others; and so on. Each elimination of variety and challenge around you can bring arrested development within you. To continue the growth we celebrate today, you’re going to have to work to keep from shutting down your world.

At best, you’ll even use some of that mental power to think about the world we could inhabit. You’ve heard that income inequality, which had diminished over several decades culminating in the 1970s, has now advanced to historic highs. America exceeds many other developed nations in its degree of income inequality, but this is by no means only a Western issue. When I began working on this talk, I was in China, a country in which the historically unprecedented growth of wealth since 1980 has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, while creating degrees of inequality with no precedent in modern times. It’s as if the source of well-being available to us is inextricably tied to unequal distribution of that well-being: the more you get of the one, the more you get of the other.

Education, I need not tell you, is all tied up with this larger tangle. In theory and sometimes in practice, educational opportunity is the best way to mitigate pre-existing inequalities. But without anyone meaning to do this, education has also become a massive agent of inequality, with differing quality of preparation and instruction yielding lifelong differences in capacity and opportunity. If anyone already knew the answer to these riddles, we would all have rushed to adopt it. But I do not despair that creative, intelligent, concerned people could bend the curve of these histories over time. That’s a use you could make of the intelligence you’ve amassed, if you remember to try.

My friends, where you went isn’t who you’ll be. But it could help you to what you could become. Life isn’t about struggling along until you suddenly Are something. Life is a journey, a voyage of self-unfolding through collision with experience. A prior stage in that journey brought you to Duke. Duke helped you on with your becoming. Now you leave here to trace that journey forward. If you want a magic talisman to protect you on your way, remember, that fantastic superpower is only an image of the real power you have already begun to win. So long! Leave with Duke’s gratitude for your time here, and do come back if you run out of supplies.