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Baccalaureate
Address
"Beyond Community Service: The Nation and the
Wider World"
"The
nation needs your involvement, and the wider world demands your
attention," President Levin told graduates.
Summer
1999
by Richard C. Levin
Four
years ago, at your Freshman Assembly, when you felt for the first
time the sound of the great Newberry Organ rumble beneath your feet,when you saw officers, masters,
and deans arrayed before you,
I told you that you had come to a serious place. I told you that
this is a place where ideas are taken seriously, where athletics,
extracurricular activities, and community service are taken seriously,
where involvement and moral responsibility are taken seriously.
In
my attempt to predict what would be in store for you here, I suggested
that you would come to appreciate the life of the mind, develop
your capacity to think critically and independently, engage actively
in something you feel passionately about, form friendships that
you would treasure, and come to understand yourself more deeply
than before. I also predicted that many of you would develop an
interest in helping those around you.
Your
record of involvement in our local New Haven community impressively
confirms this last prediction. You have worked with schoolchildren,
teenage mothers, battered women, the homeless, and those with mental
retardation. Each semester, about half of you found time to engage
on a regular basis in one or more of the many outreach programs
affiliated with Dwight Hall, the Office of New Haven Affairs, the
Athletics Department, or one of our professional schools or museums.
In these activities, you have come to understand that the helper
and the helped share a common humanity. Along with the knowledge
and habits of mind you have acquired here, your experience in giving
service has prepared you well for participation in and leadership
of civic, religious,
and community organizations.
What
you have done for this city you must now do for your country and
the wider world. I want to encourage you this morning to re-direct
at least some of your admirable energy for social betterment and
service. I want to urge you to take more interest in public issues
at the national and global level.
I recognize
that on this score you might require some persuasion. Many of you
have expressed to me disillusionment with the institutions of representative
government and cynicism about the people who shape and conduct public
policy. I think I understand some of the reasons for your disillusionment.
Our nation often seems obsessed with the personal lives of its leaders
and indifferent to their politics. Many politicians appear to be
more concerned with tomorrow's newspapers than with the long-term
consequences of their actions. We can't muster the will to enact
meaningful gun control despite a murder rate vastly in excess of
other developed nations. And we have recently entered a war without
formulating clear strategic objectives and, seemingly, without thinking
through many of the simplest and most probable contingencies.
It
is all too easy to blame politicians, special interest groups, television,
or the press for the diminished quality of public discourse
and the apparent incoherence of public policy. We must instead acknowledge
that these are our problems. I remind you of what our nation's founders
had to say about this, in The Federalist, Number 1, Page 1:
[I]t
seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by
their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether
societies . are really capable or not of establishing good government
from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined
to depend . on accident and force.
I recalled
these powerful words of Alexander Hamilton two weeks ago, as I listened
to Jared Diamond, the noted scientist and winner of the Pulitzer
Prize, who was on campus to deliver a lecture at the groundbreaking
for our new Environmental Science Facility. Diamond told the story
of Easter Island, where the inhabitants built a flourishing culture
best known for the enormous stone statues erected on the coast.
The stone was quarried many miles from the sea and transported on
the trunks of giant palm trees that served as wheels. The palm trees
were subsequently used as levers to lift the stones into place,
and then the trunks were carved into large sea-faring canoes, which
ventured far from the island to harvest tuna and dolphin, the principal
source of protein in the diet of the Easter Islanders. When the
last palm tree was cut down, the natives turned for subsistence
to the meager wildlife resources on the island, and ultimately to
cannibalism. When European explorers arrived, the island was an
uninhabited, barren wasteland.
How do
such things happen? They happen for the same reason that avoidable
wars and genocides have occurred repeatedly in this century. They
happen because people go about their daily lives, seeking fulfillment
for themselves and their families, without recognizing that large-scale
forces are going awry and without taking action to reverse them.
Hamilton's question is still open: It is up to us to determine whether
our future is to be decided by "reflection and choice" or whether
it is destined to depend on "accident and force."
Your
generation of Americans has enjoyed material prosperity, the absence
of general mobilization for war, and, although this work is still
incomplete, unprecedented opportunity for members of minority populations.
I want to suggest that these three blessings, which have established
for you an environment in which you can choose freely the lives
you wish to lead, haven't been conferred on you entirely by accident.
Wise leadership and sound public policy have made a large contribution
to shaping the conditions that allow you so much hope and promise.
Consider,
for example, the benign state of our national economy. We prosper
in large measure because we have a system that allows decentralized
agents "individuals and firms" to seek profit in relatively free
markets by responding to the abundant opportunities created by the
rapid advance of scientific and technological knowledge. But the
quality of public policy and national leadership has a powerful
impact on how well the system works. For example, a long history
of generous public funding for basic scientific research has contributed
mightily to establishing the foundation of our current prosperity.
More recently, the able leadership of Treasury Secretary Robert
Rubin, a 1964 graduate of the Yale Law School, and Federal Reserve
Board Chair Alan Greenspan has prevented regional financial instability
from causing a global depression.
Nor
is it entirely an accident that we have avoided war on a substantial
scale for the past quarter century. The collapse of Soviet
Communism may have been inevitable, but our response to the collapse
might easily have been mismanaged. During the crucial transition
years, we were fortunate to have an experienced foreign policy team
in the White House. As their recent memoir illustrates, President
George Bush, Yale College Class of 1948, and Brent Scowcroft, his
National Security Adviser, wisely focused on the long-term global
and strategic implications of the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the reunification of Germany, rather than seeking short-term political
advantage from these events.
Nor is
it an accident that members of minority populations have greater
opportunities in your generation than ever before. Here we all benefit
from the concerted action of private citizens like Martin Luther
King Jr. and the millions of people of every color who voiced support
for his position, as well as the political courage of President
Lyndon Johnson, who pushed through legislation that has made an
enduring difference.
I cite
these examples to remind you that good government, and the action
of citizens to encourage good government, has mattered, fundamentally,
in your own lives. This is an important reminder because the issues
I have just discussed -- prosperity, peace, and racial justice --
still demand our urgent attention. Because of improvements in health
care and changes in family size since the Second World War, your
prosperity in mid-life will depend profoundly on whether we seize
the opportunity, now, to reform the Social Security System. The
poorly conceived military action now under way in the Balkans makes
it abundantly clear that we must design and maintain a consistent
framework for global security that at once reduces the risk of nuclear
confrontation and deters aggression and genocide. We must also recognize
that, without substantial improvement in early childhood, elementary
and secondary education, too many children will be unprepared to
take advantage of the career opportunities that are now potentially
available to all citizens without regard to race or other circumstances
of birth.
Finally,
we must attend to the degradation of our global environment, lest
we ourselves suffer the fate of the Easter Islanders. If we fail
to intervene, by the time your children graduate from college, nearly
all of the world's rain forests will be gone. And by the time your
great-grandchildren graduate, global temperatures will have risen
between one and seven degrees centigrade. If we reach the high end
of that range, the results would be catastrophic.
In all
these matters -- Social Security, international security, racial
justice, and environmental protection -- powerful interest groups
will make it difficult to find and implement solutions. Still, your
responsibility is clear. Your education here has prepared you to
be thoughtful, reflective, intelligent citizens. The nation needs
your involvement, and the wider world demands your attention. Public
service and engaged citizenship are part of your Yale legacy. From
12 representatives in the Continental Congress to three of the last
five presidents of the United States, many Yale graduates have distinguished
themselves as public servants, while others, as private citizens,
have strengthened our democracy by speaking, writing, or simply
participating in the public arena. I urge you to perpetuate this
legacy.
Women
and men of the Class of 1999: To you much has been given, and from
you much is expected. You have been given four years to develop
good habits of mind, to pursue your passions, to appreciate your
teachers, to cherish your classmates, to understand yourself more
deeply. You have seized all these opportunities and more, and you
are prepared to lead lives of great personal fulfillment and service
to others. You have also been given the blessings of prosperity,
peace, and justice, and the perpetuation of these blessings requires
more than serving well your families and local communities. Get
involved with public issues; participate in public life. Give the
right answer to Hamilton's question. By your conduct and example
liberate our democracy from dependence on accident and force. Your
task is to shape the future by reflection and choice. 
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