The Wisdom of the Elders

It was that time of year again, and thousands of commencement speakers hoped that millions of graduates would remember their words better than the speakers remember what was said when they commenced. At the University of Rochester, James O. Freedman, former President of Dartmouth, held forth. “Someone once asked Woodrow Wilson when he was President of Princeton University what the function of a liberal education ought to be. And Wilson replied, `To make a person as unlike his father as possible.’” So much for education as the transmission of a heritage. I don’t know if Wilson actually said that, but, if so, it would be a kindness to his memory to forget it. A liberal education, Freedman went on to say, “ought to make a person independent of mind, skeptical of authority and received views, prepared to forge an identity for himself or herself, and capable of becoming an individual not bent upon copying other persons—even persons as persuasive and influential as one’s father.” There you have it: independence, skepticism, individualism, forging a unique identity—I wannabe Me! One does hope the students were skeptical of the authority of their commencement speaker.

At the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, the actor Alec Baldwin dispensed wisdom. Mr. Baldwin, it may be recalled, raised hopes when he said he would leave the country if George W. Bush became President, but then reneged on his promise. Baldwin told the students of fashion that “billions of people around the world” buy all kinds of things in order to “make a statement to the best of their ability, and within the boundaries of their own tastes and budgets, about who they are.” The problem is that “most of them are not creative people. They just don’t have that gene. They haven’t developed that muscle. So the uncreative people of the world rely on the creative people of the world to help them.” There you have it: a perfect match of creative speaker and creative graduates, locked in mutual admiration. None dare call it elitism.

Julian Bond of the NAACP did the honors at Susquehanna University, a putatively Lutheran school in Pennsylvania. He quoted someone who had escaped from the World Trade Center on September 11 who said, “If you’d seen what it was like in that stairway, you’d be proud. There was no gender, no race, no religion. It was everyone helping each other.” To which Mr. Bond commented, “But away from that stairway—in America’s streets—there is gender, there is race, there is religion.” Mr. Bond has, over his many years, done his bit to get rid of gender and religion, even as he has made his living by race, the difference that, one might suggest, should make the least difference.

Then there was Anna Quindlen at Sarah Lawrence College. “When I quit the New York Times to be a full-time mother, the voices of the world said I was nuts,” she declared. Think of that. From Hamburg to Bangladesh, from Stockholm to Shanghai, from Honduras to the remotest reaches of Siberia, the voices of the world joined in declaring, “Anna Quindlen is nuts!” Ms. Quindlen exhorted the students to be radical individualists, following her example. “Each of you is as different as your fingertips. Why should you march to any lockstep? Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.”

One imagines a graduate of independent mind in the audience whose timpani was telling her that Anna Quindlen is the quintessential representative of the self-flattering feminism that has turned the lives of so many women into a misery. Ms. Quindlen would, in no uncertain terms, let such a student know that that is the wrong response and she had better get back in step with folks like her who repudiate marching in lockstep. That’s the logic that has always prevailed among the herd of independent minds.

In hope of relief from the deluge of commencement bullfeathers, I turned to the famously conservative novelist Tom Wolfe, who spoke at Duke University. He’s interested in neuroscience and said, “Let’s not kid ourselves. We’re all concatenations of molecules containing DNA, hard wired into a chemical analog computer known as the human brain, which as software has a certain genetic code. And your idea that you have a soul or even a self, much less free will, is just an illusion.”

There you have it: the elders offering final counsel to the successor generation, the beneficiaries of the greatest educational system in the world, the bearers of civilization’s legacy across new frontiers of human aspiration and achievement. Another generation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children, exhorted to preen themselves on their individualistic conformism, remembering always, of course, that none of it is true.