Freeman Hrabowski delivers keynote address
FREEMAN HRABOWSKI: Good morning to Wheaton College, to the Trustees and members of the faculty and my fellow honorary doctorate recipients, and to the families,
and most important, to the very impressive Class of 2007. Good morning again.
President Crutcher and all of you, I want to thank you for this honor. Before I begin, I really want us to take a moment and think about the fact, Class, that you know full well the meaning of inspiration.
I listened to Will talking about his faculty members and his grandmother. We were all inspired. And as you listened to the different honorary recipients talking about stories of different types, we couldn't help but think about what they've done to serve others and to be of public service.
One of the points made often is that we are a community. I want us to take a moment of silence for the graduates and families at Virginia Tech. We all know just how fleeting life can be in the wake of tragedy. We were all moved deeply by the dignity and grace of those in Blacksburg as they spoke from their hearts with composure and clarity. And so a moment of silence, Class and others, for your fellow graduates, for the families of those who died.
(Moment of silence.)
Thank you very much. This is a special day for the class. Classmates, let me tell you something that you will appreciate. I remember years ago when my adult son was a child and he went with me to a commencement. I was a speaker and he was about nine years old. He was always good at evaluating me. He would tell me what he thought.
After the speech and we were riding home, he said, "Dad, you did a good job, but I've always wondered why must there be a speaker at commencement? Nobody really listens to him." He said, "If you have to do it again, just be short."
So my gift to you today is going to be brevity and sincerity. I promise you that. Brevity and sincerity.
I want the families here today to think back to when they were at graduation and to remember who your commencement speaker was. Debbie and I were talking about this earlier. I have to make an admission to the class, although I remember who that person was, I can't remember one thing that person said. Not one thing. It's embarrassing.
So what I want to do is make two or three points. And maybe you will remember one point anyway. Perhaps if I do it with some conviction and you see my sincerity, you will think about what I'm saying.
This morning, walking into the building, I met a student who was rushing, and her name was Marlyn. She was a graduate. She was graduating today. Where is Marlene? Marlyn, I want you to stand, Marlyn.
Marlyn is going to be a teacher in New York City. Would you give her a big hand for that? That's wonderful. That's wonderful, Marlyn.
(Applause.)
I was so proud. When she said it, she said it with such passion. She said, "I'm going to be teaching in New York!" I thought, She's going to change the world because, my colleagues will agree with me, there is something about being a teacher.
I want to use a story that was inspired by you, Will, as you talked about your grandmother. This is the month of the Mother's Day, and I always talk about my mother, my Mama, as I would call her.
My mother was a teacher. At the end of her life -- my mother had taught me. She always told the story of growing up in a rural town in Alabama and having to work in a home. She said the people in that home would read and they would allow her to read. She said the more she read the better she became, the more she enjoyed it.
It was because of the reading that she became a teacher, Marlyn. At end of it -- my mother taught me in the eighth grade. Anybody ever have their mother for a teacher? I got my worst grades in my mother's class. I never forgave her for it. She would always say, and I would be upset with her, "Son, you're special and you can be even better."
I always think about that. If we can help people know how special they are, we can push them to be better and better and better.
Well, at the end of my mother's life, Will, she said to me, "I know the end is near." Nobody wants to hear that about their mother. But I asked her the question, "What was special to you? What is it that's special to you, Mama?"
She looked at me. I give this to you as a gift, to all of you. She said, "Relationships." She said, "My relationship with God." She said to me what she said all my life. "Hold on to your faith; you'll be okay." Then she said, "My relationship with my husband." She had forgotten Daddy died.
Then she really surprised me. I am an only child. She looked at me and said, "You know, I have a son." Well, I had forgotten that mother had Alzheimer's. So I got upset. I thought she was telling me some new information about a new brother that I had.
And so all of a sudden my grief turned to anger. She said, "He is a college president." She was talking about me, thank God. So there's a silver lining here.
But then she said, Marlene, something I want you to remember. She said, "You know, I now understand that teachers touch eternity through their students." Teachers touch eternity through their students. Whatever I had to give, my sense of right and wrong, knowing the difference between right and wrong, not just teachers, we all have that opportunity. And as Debbie said, you are all leaders.
This is why I'm so excited today. You are at one of the finest liberal arts colleges in the country. Give your faculty members and president and others a hand, would you? They're wonderful professors. Really nice--very nice.
(Applause)
That's wonderful. Wheaton professors, I want you to know sometimes I say that at commencement and the students look over and they kind of smile, but they don't do what they just did. They must have really meant it, because they don't need you anymore, yet they stood. So it means a lot, it really does.
One of my mother's favorite -- my mother was an English teacher -- and one of her favorite authors was Zora Neal Hurston, and at the beginning of her book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neal says, "Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some, they come in with the tide. For others, they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the watcher turns his head away in resignation, his dreams marked by time. That is the life of men and women."
Her point was that there were two groups of people in our society; people like you, people who have seen now dreams now fulfilled. Today represents a dream fulfilled for you and for your families.
As I walked in I said, "Congratulations, proud parents." People in the back said, "We are the proud grandparents." It was wonderful to see the faces. They are so proud of you.
Yet she was also talking about people whose dreams, in the words of Langston Hughes, are forever deferred. It occurs to me the fundamental purpose of an education is to help people to dream about the possibilities, and then to give them the skills and the value they need to reach their dreams.
So my fundamental point today to you is that the way you think about yourselves and the world, the language that you use, how you interact, your sense of self, your integrity, will determine not only who you are today, but who all of us will be tomorrow.
Take this moment, as one of my fellow honorees said, Debbie said, and enjoy it. I want to tell you to savor this moment. Savor it.
Because you see, I remember when I was graduating from college almost 40 years ago, it was amazing. In 1970, I was so worried about grad school. I just asked my girlfriend to marry me. I'm saying, Oh my God, what am I doing? And I looked out and I saw my parents, and I didn't take the time just to say, This is a good day. I was nervous. All of you are nervous. You know you are. Right? You are thinking, I'm leaving this wonderful place. What am I going to do? Well, take a
moment. You're going to be okay. You're going to be okay, I promise you. Savor this moment.
Let me give you a story. I am a southerner and I believe in stories. You ever see that movie Steel Magnolias with Dolly Parton, when that person leaves and she says, There's a story there. Well I got a lot of stories, but I'm just going to give you a couple.
Here's one story: When I was a kid, Will, my grandmother knew I loved to eat blueberry pie. I loved doing math problems and eating blueberry pie. My mother was trying to get me to be not such a fat little kid. I was this fat little kid. My grandmother said, He has good cheeks, let him have his blueberry pie. She would make two pies; one for the family and one for Freeman.
And she would sit there as I ate that pie and just smile with such love. I can still taste that pie today, savoring that moment. And so take the moment and savor. And then think about how you have been transformed here. Will talked about that. Others have talked about that.
The fact you have this wonderful liberal arts education. You've heard this word liberal is from the Latin adjective "liber" and "ducore", meaning to lead out of. You have had a chance to pursue ideas of all types, to learn to write well and think clearly and to ask the big questions as Kathleen was staying. You have had a chance to think about justice and injustice, and to think about how you want to be leaders.
Here is my point to you. Some of you read Samuel Beckett, the Irish novelist who often wrote in French. In one of his books, the character is studying the dancing of bees. And when bees are dancing, they are actually communicating with each other. He said this about that phenomenon.
He said, Here is something--this dancing of the bees--here is something I could study all my life and never understand. But the significance was that he said it with great rapture. He was absolutely fascinated, because the more he studied the dancing of the bees, the more he began to understand how they communicated. But the more he understood, the more he realized there was so much more to know.
There is the essence of what you have gotten from Wheaton. You understand you must continue to learn and grow and ask the hard questions and sometimes take the stance that is not popular because it's the right thing to do. This is what it means to be liberally educated: To pursue, to explore, to express, to question, and to continue to learn.
You know, it's interesting, last week I did something I never thought I would do. Growing up in Birmingham, going to jail with Dr. King, I understood the importance of believing in something. We believed that in America, even if there was injustice, that first, we didn't have time to be victims. We needed to be empowered as members of the Posse are empowered to be the best that they could be. We believed we could make the difference, as I am asking you to think about how you will make a difference as leaders.
It never occurred to me that one day I might be standing here as president of a university speaking to a group looking like this. When I was in elementary school I had never seen a white child. That's how different the world is today.
Last week something happened, and I said I wished my mother could see me. I sat at the table with the Queen of England. It was quite an experience. I will tell you what I thought. When we're walking out, I will tell you about the experience. Everybody wants to know.
But this is what I want you to know. Students, the one thought I had was how proud I was to be an American. Because while we are fascinated by royalty, the world looks at us and understands that through education, we can come from all kinds of backgrounds and rise to the top. This is the significance of America; that we want to work to help all children, Marlyn, to get the education they need, so one day they can be sitting at a Wheaton College or around the world and move to the next level.
That's what I want you to think about because the most important point for you to think about is who you are today, what it means to be a Wheaton graduate, and how you will live your lives.
I want to close with a story about one of my students who inspired me so much that I tell this story all the time.
His name is Tevon, an inner city kid from Baltimore. He had been to Russia, had become fluent in Russian, was a major in literature. And he had come to see me to talk about the experience.
I asked him a simple question. I said, "What do your parents do?" All of a sudden this big guy, six foot five, got tears in his eyes. And I said, "What's wrong?" He said, "Doc, I never wanted to tell you my story." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because" -- he said something I had not heard on my campus -- he said, "I am a ward of the state."
I had to think about what he meant. He had no one. He told me a story of how his parents abandoned him because of drugs and he had been in a crack house. And he said, "Imagine what happens to a 13-year-old child left to fend for himself. I have seen the ugly side of life, Doc."
I said, "Well, how did you get here to my university?" He said, "The only thing I had, I had two things. I kept praying, 'God help me.' I kept praying, that was number one." Then he said, "I studied. Somehow I learned to read. I studied. I figured that if I could get to be more and more knowledgeable, I could do something with my life." I got into foster care and then got into a group home. I kept working and studying to forget about the pain of everybody leaving me.
Somehow I got to UNBC, but sometimes I didn't have money to eat."
I said, "Tevon, how can you be so positive when life has dealt you such a tough hand?" He said, "You know why? Because I'm determined to make a change, a difference in the life of other people." He said, "Somehow I have been allowed to live, so I can help someone else." He said, "That's the essence of my education."
Tevon, I want you to know, as of this month, is finishing a graduate degree with a Fulbright Scholarship back in Russia. That's a really nice story.
Here is my point to you as I close. If Tevon can be that positive and that high achieving with no help, imagine how much more you can do with your wonderful parents and grandparents and friends and classmates and professors. You've got everything you need to be the leader you must aspire to be.
And so I challenge you to watch your thoughts, they become your words. Watch your words, they become your actions. Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character.
I tell my students, Your character has everything to do with who you are when you don't think anybody is watching. What will you do then?
So watch your thoughts, they become your words; your words, your actions; your actions, your character. Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.
Congratulations to the Class of 2007.