(Note: The following is President Jeffrey Herbst’s prepared remarks to the Class of 2011.)
On behalf of the Board of Trustees, it is my pleasure to welcome you to Colgate University’s 2011 graduation ceremony as the university celebrates its 190th commencement.
Please join me first in congratulating the 698 members of the Class of 2011 graduating today, along with four who have completed the masters of arts in teaching. I know that this day has been long awaited by you and your family. You have worked hard to complete the final test, hand in the last papers, participate in the ultimate performance, and give the remaining talk. This year alone you were also challenged by blizzards and floods that appeared at times to be almost biblical. You have achieved much to get to this point and you have a great deal to be proud of.
I am also delighted to welcome all of the parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters and family relatives here to celebrate with our graduates. You are important members of the Colgate community and it is a pleasure to welcome you back to Hamilton. The accomplishments we celebrate today are the responsibility of our graduates. However, I know that they could not be here today without your support. My colleagues and I recognize that a Colgate education requires a significant investment on the part of all families. We are grateful for the faith that you have placed in us by giving us your students for the last few years. In turn, we join you in celebrating the accomplishments of the students.
Finally, let me welcome the many members of the faculty, staff, Board of Trustees, and the community who are here today. Graduation is a signal event for a university as we celebrate the completion of a rigorous program of education by our students. We take pride in their accomplishments and celebrate this graduation as a moment of renewal not only for our school but also for the wider society in which our students now enter.
College is a time of personal growth and change and graduation is a moment to take stock of what has occurred in the past four years. I know that the students have used these last few weeks to reflect on your Colgate experience, what you learned, how you changed, and how you perceive your future. I also know from talking with countless alumni that you will continue to reflect on your college experience throughout your life.
Graduation for the Class of 2011 is, I believe, especially poignant because the world changed so much while you were here. When you first went to class on August 27, 2007, the world was in many ways a different place. The Dow Jones was at 13,300 but would in the next year or so go all the way down to 6,400 in March 2009.
Correspondingly, our economy lost trillions of dollars in wealth. When you began school, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers still were viable companies, General Motors, Ireland, Greece, and Portugal were unquestionably solvent and such concepts as TARP, credit default swaps, liar mortgages, quantitative easing, and shovel-ready projects had either not been invented or had yet to reach the popular lexicon. The economy, of course, has improved since the worst of times that we witnessed; however, the fragility of the underpinnings of our society has been revealed to us.
More specific to our graduates, when you entered Colgate you met students who were still benefitting from the supercharged economy of the last decade while now you have to confront a much more challenging job market.
The world witnessed many other changes, few predicted, at the time you began Colgate. It would have seemed unlikely to many that a little more than a year after you started school that the United States would elect its first African-American president. On the other hand, Hosni Mubarak seemed secure as the president of Egypt. Tiger Woods appeared to have a lock on being the world’s best golfer. Of course, Osama bin Laden was still alive, and most people were sure he was in a cave in northern Pakistan undergoing daily dialysis treatments. Superbad was the week’s highest grossing movie when you started school, so perhaps not everything has changed.
The iPhone was released on June 27, 2007, so there was an inkling of the impending revolution in mobile platforms. On the other hand, there were no iPads and most could not imagine why we would need what became one of the fastest and most influential products ever to be launched. Twitter had been launched in July 2006 but was only beginning to take off. 3G was a big deal. It would not be until June 2008 that Facebook would surpass MySpace in total users.
There is every reason to believe that the political, economic, and technological turbulence that you witnessed over your time at Colgate should be considered the norm for your lives. There are certainly many drivers of this turbulence, perhaps the most obvious of which is the revolutionary leaps in technology, including the now expected but still breath-taking advances in information technology, and the less heralded, to date, but likely gains in biomedical technology. At the same time, you will witness a continuing shift in global economic activity toward East Asia. It is now expected that China will surpass the United States and become the world’s largest economy around 2016, a notable development in and of itself but also the first time that a non-democratic country has held that position in a century.
We will also continue to witness the decentralization of democracy as ordinary people from across the world exploit technology to promote freedom but also the decentralization of violence as more and more tools of conflict become available to gangs, militias, and non-state actors.
Demographic shifts, climate change, and a host of other structural forces also seem to guarantee increased turbulence in the years ahead.
Of course, no one (or at least only a few who have invested accordingly) wants to see the stock market move down rapidly or people to invent new ways of killing each other. However, from a larger perspective, I hope that you will not be threatened by the increasing turbulence of this new world. In particular, I urge you to take notice of, but ultimately reject, the seemingly widespread pessimism in this country that the future is not bright for your generation and that you should have more limited expectations than your parents. I say this even though I do not have a particularly sanguine view of America’s current fiscal position and I am fully cognizant of the challenges ahead in health care, education, state budgets, and a host of other areas.
Rather, I am optimistic about your future because of you and the education you have received. Indeed, you should see that you are well poised to take advantage of the increasing turbulence around us.. As new entrants into this world, you benefit when the cards are being reshuffled. With great change comes great opportunity that can best be exploited by those with the freshest minds, the most energy, and the least investment in the old ways of doing things. In other words, you.
This new world of constant change — where technologies can become antiquated overnight and seemingly ensconced political systems are dismissed — advantages those who have been well-educated, who can think critically, write well, solve problems, and have the social, historical, and cultural competencies to understand others. These are, of course, among the attributes of Colgate’s liberal arts education. It should be no surprise that an education with classical foundations is, in my view, the ideal preparation for this turbulent world. That is precisely why liberal education has survived so long and why Colgate is one of the few institutions in this country that now takes upon itself the responsibility of thinking about its bicentennial.
Life in turbulence will require you to be flexible, adaptive, and willing to fail. I stress the last part because few are going to figure out this new world effortlessly and see their path unhindered. Rather, increased experimentation and flexibility will be critical in this new world because, as we have seen from the failed prognosticators of the last few years, no one is going to get this new world right instantly and repeatedly.
It is no surprise to me that one of the most common mantras in Silicon Valley — the heart of innovation in this country and the area where people are, not coincidentally, the most optimistic about the turbulent future — is “fail faster.” For your generation, the question of the next few years will not only be if you reasonably succeeded at what you attempted but also if you failed enough. Because if you did not fail, you probably did not set your sights high enough.
Go into the world with your eyes wide open, yes, but also with your mind open. There are great days ahead for you.