Katharine T. Bartlett '68 delivers
keynote address
KATHARINE T. BARTLETT: Thank you very much, President Crutcher. It is really a great pleasure and an honor to be here today with faculty, staff, fellow Wheaton alumni, including fellow members of the Class of 1968, members of my family, including my husband, my sister and brother-in-law, and my mother, who saw me graduate here 40 years ago. Most especially, the graduates of Wheaton College Class of 2008, and their friends and families. (Address available as audio podcast.)
So how long ago is 40 years? Well, when I graduated from Wheaton, no one had yet landed on the moon; no one had had a heart transplant or an MRI or a CT scan. There was no Prozac or Ambien, no liposuction, and no laser eye surgery.
In 1968, there were no computers or Xerox machines, no spell check, not even correcting typewriters. I typed my senior thesis on the history of French Communism using a manual typewriter and four layers of carbon paper. Whiteout was invented when we were juniors, but it didn't work with carbons. So any error or change of mine more than a sentence or a word meant retyping the whole page.
We did our research without Google, without the Wikipedia or robots. We got to know each other without the help of FaceBook or MySpace or YouTube. We communicated -- this is the hardest to believe -- without cell phones, text messaging and answering machines. Telephone communication was through the pay phone at the end of each hall. There were no phone calling cards. Calls were made either by reversing the charges or coming to the phone booth with a great big handful of pocket change. We gathered to watch the TV news together in the common rooms typically after dinner. There were only three TV networks, no cable, no 24-hour news, and no TiVo. These were neither entirely the good old days nor were they the dark ages.
I mention that and a few other markers of the last 40 years, which is the core of my adulthood, to stimulate your thinking about the world of your adulthood, the most active and central part which is likely to be your next 40 years.
I start by asking you to imagine Wheaton graduation in 40 years when you return to celebrate with your son or daughter. I am guessing that everyone here in 2048 will carry a personal GPS sensor so you can track wherever anyone is at any particular moment. You will be wearing clothing that will change temperature to suit the day. And the fibers in that clothing with act as artificial muscles. If the sun is out, everyone will have taken their daily pill to prevent sunburn, unless of course your generation repairs the ozone layer. Through electronic mechanisms as common as today's cell phones, you will be able to transmit to each other while you sit here, not just written or voice messages, but also hugs and kisses.
In fact, maybe no one will really be here for graduation. I am imagining a virtual graduation so everyone can get front-row seating without having to get here in advance to secure their positions, without having to get all your liquids into three-ounce bags in a one-quart Baggie in order to fly here, and without having to find parking or just the right thing to wear.
If the event, whatever form it takes, has anything like a graduation speaker, he or she might be helping you remember 40 years ago, 2008, when Antarctica still existed, when we had not yet begun to trade recipes with life in outer space, or when we didn't yet have a cure for breast cancer, autism, and MS.
It would be impossible to anticipate all that lies ahead for you in the next 40 years. Fortunately, you don't have to. Wheaton has made you mobile learners. You know some facts, but more importantly, you have the critical thinking skills to function and adapt in a world in which the facts keep changing. You think across subject matters and disciplines, and across geographic boundaries. Perhaps also before too long, across the time-space continuum.
You know that change is inevitable and you also know with progress comes trade-offs and new challenges. I point out to my own children, too often I suppose, the things we have today that did not exist back then; a different pair of shoes for each separate sport and function; a different mixer or blender or processor for each separate food preparation; bigger, smarter houses, and an amazing array of quickly obsolete gadgets to get us places, save us time, communicate with one another, and entertain ourselves.
Most adults in the U.S. today have their own car, which the law requires to have seat belts and car seats for children, neither of which, I will mention, existed 40 years ago, and which give us enormous freedom to go when and where we want. Our produce comes without bugs and worms, and we can buy pristine bottled water imported from Switzerland.
As you know, this world of luxury, consumption and greater convenience has a price. The air we breathe has more toxic pollutants. The groundwater table is lower, our ice caps are not as frozen, our species not as biodiverse, our weather more extreme, and our national resources not as plentiful.
We have cured many diseases that used to exist 40 years ago, measles and mumps among them. And we have developed treatments for diseases that didn't even exist, like HIV/AIDS. We'll surely overcome some, if not all, cancers in the next 40 years, and maybe have a good treatment or cure for Alzheimer's and diabetes.
But even retiring various causes of death presents big challenges over the next 40 years, challenges such as how we take care of the growing population of the elderly, how we fairly distribute the miracles of medical science so that access to doctors, drugs and replacement organs is not just the privilege of the most wealthy among us. We will need to clarify the purposes worthy of that longer life. For it is not clear we can justify pushing off death longer and longer, only to prolong and intensify our obsession with staying young.
If looking back over the last 40 years makes it clear how rapidly and inevitable change can be, so it also reminds us that many things appear to come in cycles. Nineteen sixty-eight, as we heard all year, was a big year. Vietnam deeply divided our country as the Iraqi war does today. The protests took a different form. Without the internet, more happened in large groups in public places. And though we worried about the foreign threat, the dangers seemed less close by. There was nothing comparable to 911 in the 1960s.
But we, too, worried about whether the president had the power to invade another country, whether he had lied to us, whether the government's secret wiretaps were legal, whether the restrictions on our freedom were justified, and whether we would be safe if our country was not aggressive enough internationally. These big questions are part of your adult world, and you will soon be deciding them.
Nineteen sixty-eight was a time of voter registration drives, boycotts, freedom marches for civil rights. Shortly before exams in our senior year at Wheaton, the Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated, followed by Robert Kennedy a few months after we left here.
In 1968, although all students at Wheaton were women, few of us fully appreciated the unfairness of the limits the world placed upon us as women. The working world was divided between men's jobs and women's. I am embarrassed now, frankly, that these limitations didn't bother us more. We were talking in the line coming in, why we weren't more in protest about those posture pictures. Some of you know what I mean.
There were no women studies or gender courses at Wheaton or elsewhere to raise our consciousness, and few among us, myself included, questioned that a woman's priority should be finding a man and making him happy. Things like sexual harassment, domestic violence, anorexia didn't have names, although were all around us. Abortion was illegal in most states and very dangerous. Many states, including Massachusetts, prohibited the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried persons. There were no laws protecting those with disabilities or guaranteeing the physically disabled access to public buildings, restaurants or movie theaters. And there was virtually no public conversation about the possibility that people should not be penalized for their sexual orientation.
Much of this is changed. While we were at Wheaton the Voting Rights Acts, Title VII, and other civil rights laws were passed. Due in large part to these laws, most blatant forms of discrimination placed on race and gender have significantly declined. Researches in our time used to measure racial prejudices with such polling questions as, Should white people have the first chance at any kind of job, or, Should there be separate sections on buses for whites and blacks?
Affirmative responses to these questions got so low that they stopped asking these questions in the early 1970s. Of course, women in minorities increasingly are firefighters, astronauts, they run companies, sit on corporate boards, are doctors and lawyers. And there are now laws that offer some protection from discrimination based on disability, age, and sexual orientation.
This degree of change would have been hard to imagine in 1968. We could not know in 1968, even, that in our graduating class was the future governor of New Jersey, and future head of the Environmental Protection Agency, an agency that did not exist in 1968.
We could not know that at another all women's college 35 miles away, was a student who would be running for the democratic nomination for president 40 years later. Nor that her primary opponent in the primary would be a then 7-year-old son of a black Kenyan father and white mother from Kansas.
For that matter, few here in 1968 could have imagined that our college might some day admit men, or that it would choose a black man to be its president.
Yet for all of our progress, we note the problem of prejudice based on race, gender, disability and age has not gone away. In its mutated forms, discrimination is more subtle, less intentional, and more unconscious than it was in 1968, and in an important sense, more resilient. While the laws passed in the 1960s improved access for women and minorities to the workplace, the voting booth and public office, the law will not be nearly as effective a tool in addressing the largely unconscious stereotyping in which all of us unintentionally engage, that often takes the form of guilt, anxiety and social distancing behaviors. That the second generation race and gender issues are complicated, can be observed in the extent to which support for each of the democratic presidential candidates in 2008 is both because of their sex or race, and in spite of it.
Will race and gender come to make no difference at all in the next 40 years, your 40 years? Hard to say. The unintended forms of prejudice, unfortunately, are not only learned, culturally re-enforced and complicated, motivated by complicated psychological needs, they are also built right into our normal processes of cognition. Overcoming them will require an extraordinary combination of individual effort, optimism, self-criticism and knowledge.
Wheaton has given you many opportunities to prepare for these and other challenges. Here you have learned about leadership, which will never be obsolete, no matter what lies ahead. Over the next 40 years, some of you will become public figures, some will work in the frontiers of science and technology, or be leaders in business and finance.
In this class there are future poets, playwrights and novelists. There are sensible, caring people who will know how to guide their families and their communities through times of joy and moments of crisis. There are dreamers and visionaries in this class and there are pragmatists.
Regardless of your leadership style or different arenas in which you will excel, Wheaton has brought you to the start of the core of your adulthood with the skills and values with which you will attack your world and prove yourselves. You are more mature than when you came here, clearer about what you have to offer and want from human relationships that you form, firmer about what principles you will stand by, and more reflective about what counts as a life purpose to you.
It is now closing time at Wheaton for the Class of 2008. As best said by the Semisonics, "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here." You are all going on to something new; a new job, graduate or professional school, public service, volunteer opportunity, a new chapter in a personal relationship. A new start.
When I was Dean of Duke Law School, I asked every student on the first day of law school to write the recommendation letter they hoped could be written about them when they graduated. Consistent with the self-reflected intentional values for which Wheaton stands, I recommend to you the same.
What do you want to be able to have said about you in five years, in ten years, or 40 years from today when you return for your 40th Wheaton Reunion? What do you want to have become, as evidenced not only by your tangible achievements, but how you respond to the bad moments, how you treat those who are not in a position to do anything for you, and what kind of commitments you keep. What will you do going forward so that this letter can be written about you?
George Eliot told us, "It is never too late to be who you might have been." I would add that it is also never too early. You are in one of the most exciting junctions of your lives, a time that invites special scrutiny into those ancient and enduring philosophical questions of identity and purpose that Wheaton has equipped you to ask and re-ask.
You now enter the 40-year period during which you will live your answers to these questions. I will see you in 40 years for a full report.
Thank you again, Dr. Crutcher, for honoring me with this degree, and for the opportunity to speak to this class. Thank you.