Earning Commencement
By Emily Esfahani-Smith | Sunday, June 8, 2008
For many of you, Dartmouth College comes alive the day you enliven it freshman year. It is then ablaze for four years and burns out the day you leave. For many of you, that would be today. But what happens in those four years? Change? Do you change? What does college do to us, besides dropping a slip of paper on us, legitimizing us to the world? It prepares us for them, but how?
My senior year in high school, on the last day of classes before graduation, my classmates and I were told we were not ready to take the next step in our lives. One of the school’s most renowned teachers, as these things go, ended class with these parting words: “I will wish you good luck,” he said, “but I will not say congratulations: you have not earned it, after all.” We didn’t own the experience, the maturity, or the emotions requisite to the moment. We were half there, thinking about prom and college parties and leaving home. We were acting our age, not coming of age.
Now that 1,000 or so members of the Dartmouth community have officially come of age, today I remember my teacher’s parting words.
Every year, one week into June—our first real summer month—Dartmouth seniors celebrate their departure from our college. Their departure is not so much a celebration as a matter of fact: the fact that many came here to graduate, to get a job, to make good in life, a to-do list that now has every item checked off. Congratulations—that’s the word and the theme of the day, June 8, 2008, a day that has loomed over you all term—all year, all four years!—long. But have you earned it? Do you own it?
Every year, my sorority celebrates the outgoing seniors by reading what we call “Senior Recs,” or recommendations written by friends of a given senior. The recs, read aloud during our weekly meetings, customarily begin with a list of what the senior is proud of, or what she has earned in these four years here. Then follows a laundry list of achievements, from writing this-or-that thesis, to leading this-or-that organization, to “growing as a person,” to any other self-affirming accomplishment. The list is usually five to ten items long per girl, and seems to get longer with each rec that is read (I sometimes wonder if there is some underlying motive to one-up the pride-list from the week before, and then I chide myself for thinking such thoughts, and smile modestly as the recs are read).
Once, and only once, I can remember a girl listing a single bullet point: she was proud of her family and friends. I think my high school teacher would agree that she has earned something here, that she has earned a hearty congratulations today.
This expresses something common to twenty-some year olds at-large, not just select members of a certain sorority: our focus tends to be inward, to ourselves, and not outward, to life as a whole. The latter requires a security and comfort that the former lacks—in short, the latter requires maturation, or coming of age. Classes aside, this was what four years of college was for. That and a certificate of completion.
In his commencement address in 1955, Robert Frost asks the class of ’55 about their own maturation: “Have you enlarged a little bit? Have you broadened a little bit in these years, as you might have outside (I don’t know, maybe more so in college than out.) Have you got where you can take care of yourself in conflicts of thought—in the stresses of thought. I’d rather hold my own with anybody than hold my own against anybody—with him.”
This is important, this “with” business. By holding your own with people, not against them, you come through college relatively unchanged: the goal of coming of age is not to change yourself, but to complete yourself. Leave the conversions to Saint Paul, Frost winks.
For Frost, the height of maturity is accepting what other people have to say, or “the other man’s premises,” no matter how distasteful, without contradicting them. To contradict would be impolite. The point of college is to learn how to accept anything—any wayward blow or challenge or stress that life may throw your way—with perfect self-confidence; “you’ve been enlarged and broadened to where you can listen to anything without getting mad.”
For Frost, maturation meant humility. A humility only achieved by shaking off the irritants of rage and fury; maturation meant something similar to the girl in my sorority who put the achievements of others beyond her own. This maturing thing is a lifelong ordeal, but great things seem to happen on a fresh branch, the wood greener, the blossoms brighter.
It is hard to imagine the shakedown the heart and mind must endure on a day like this. Thanks to the labyrinthine gyrations of the D-Plan, the last time the graduating class saw an entire year at Dartmouth in all its glory—from autumn, to winter, to spring—was freshmen year. And certainly freshman year and senior year bear many similarities, not least of which is the anxiety of a new day, and the attending self-doubt and self-absorption that inevitably rides along on such a singular journey.
I am not so bold as to offer you advice at this critical moment in your life, but I will rather refer you to the advice of one of our forbearers. In the late nineteenth century Dartmouth Professor H. H. Horne wrote about the differences between the Dartmouth man and the Harvard man. What he wrote in the nineteenth century is still relevant today.
He said that we at Dartmouth are practical students: that is our insignia. Though this world presents many challenges wholly different from the world of Horne’s, it is not necessarily within the nature of a Dartmouth student to enter the world with the dull ambition to change the world, but rather, to change in the world. Change yourself, and let the world turn on its axis.
Professor Horne writes, “Of the old Dartmouth man, who is the prime subject of this sketch, it may be said, ‘he partly is’; of the new, ‘he wholly hopes to be.’” As the newest Dartmouth men and women, perhaps the class of 2008 can wholly hope to be that which Robert Frost has recommended for them to be—and by now you are certainly most ready to be that and more.
Congratulations.
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