See address by Louis Menand '73

Pomona College Commencement 2003
"Do Go Near the Water..."

Outgoing President Peter Stanley delivers his final charge to a Pomona graduating class.

On May 18, about six weeks before the end of his tenure, outgoing President Peter Stanley, speaking to the 391 members of the Class of 2003, gave his final charge to a Pomona graduating class.

“For years now, at this point in the Commencement ceremony, I have had the privilege of delivering what is known as the charge to the senior class. Though it is indeed a privilege, it is a role with which I’ve never been entirely comfortable. Because it has always struck me as a curious notion that we need to administer one final shot of prescriptive guidance to people whom we have just certified to have the skill set requisite to rule a small country, bring peace to the Middle East, and reverse the environmental degradation of the planet.

“I feel that more than ever this year, because at least metaphorically I am one of the graduates. I may have taken 12 years to pull off what you accomplished in four, but I have a sense, this year, that I have more in common with you than I do with the intellectual and moral giants who created the genre of ‘the charge to the class.’

“For graduates like us this is, first of all, a moment of fulfillment. ... There is also, in the nature of commencements, of new beginnings, a mixed sense of excitement and of uncertainty. The excitement goes without saying. If you have not been on automatic pilot, if you have been learning for a reason, this is the threshold moment when you can begin to put to sustained use all the knowledge, the skills, the capacities, the judgment, that you have built up over the years. The problem is that testing and applying these new capacities involves risk. Because as you complete college, one of the orienting premises of your lives changes. For as long as most of you can remember, some of the most important aspects of your being—your sense of space and time, the character of your friendships, the way you define and pursue your goals, your sense of responsibility to others, your expectation that certain kinds of support will be there for you—have all been shaped in important ways by the educational communities of which you have been part. Even if you are remaining in higher education, if you are going directly on to graduate or professional school, that will never be true to the same degree again.

“Graduation from college is one of life’s most important transition points. It is the moment when, having received the ball, you pivot in order to make your play. How you come out of this transition—your angle, your focus, your determination, your plan—will affect your life and the lives of everyone around you for years to come. We live in a risk-prone, consequence-averse society, in which people rashly put at risk their health, their environment, their finances in ways that are not sustainable, but allow themselves to be stymied by statistically improbable scares such as shark attacks. What you need to do at this point is to find your footing, set your goals, assess the risks you are prepared to accept, and make that pivot.

“My hope is that when you do so, you will decide to use your new and still-growing talents courageously, venturesomely, for the most substantial purposes that are within your reach. That you will not waste them on trivial or superficial things, but that you will never be afraid to risk them on behalf of something important, and that you will never allow yourselves to be lulled or cowed into a life of timidity. As last year’s commencement speaker, Bill Keller, said: commit yourselves wholeheartedly to a worthy cause that can be as big as freedom or as small as a child’s touch, and ‘get closer.’

“Do go near the water.

“Our lives derive their meaning from the quality of our commitments, not necessarily from their visibility, their prestige, or the financial reward that they bring. By bearing your added riches in trust for humankind, some of you will make spectacular art, invent new technologies, hold important offices, practice a profession at the highest level of achievement. One day you may stand on a stage like this one and be honored for those achievements. But if the world is lucky, some of you will do equally important work — in a classroom or a community center or in caring for someone in trouble — that does not make the evening news. Instead of a large salary or an honorary degree, your reward will be a quiet word, a touch, a look, and the deep, almost unspeakable joy of having touched another life and made it better. ...

“Now it is up to you to determine how to use this education, just as it is up to me to determine what to make of the rest of my much shorter life. Here is my own answer, the charge that I make to myself. Never stop learning. Never stop growing. Never stop caring. Dare to believe in something that is larger than yourself; and try to have both the courage to act on your beliefs and the humility to recognize that you could be wrong. Be open to suasion. Find the good in every person you know and honor them for it. Be the sort of person who opens doors and builds bridges, not the sort who closes doors and erects barriers. Earn your keep.

“And have a ball. Because life is too sweet a privilege to do anything less.”

A World of Difference

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Menand ’73 offers the Class of 2003 a meditation on life, education and humility.

A man hears a knock at the door. He opens the door, and there’s a snail standing outside. The man picks up the snail and throws it out the window. Four years later, the man hears another knock at the door. He opens the door, and there’s the snail. The snail says, "What was that all about?"

A liberal arts education is like that. You knock on the door, and someone throws you out the window. Four years later, you turn up again and want to know what it was all about. Liberal arts colleges are aware of this syndrome, and they have developed a method for dealing with it. At the end of each school year, they invite a stranger to a big ceremony. First they dazzle the stranger with honors, and then, when he is besotted by the reports of his own magnificence, they put him in front of a microphone and encourage him to try to explain what they know perfectly well cannot be explained, which is what it was all about. This year, I am the besotted stranger. The truth is, one is not besotted nearly enough in life, and I am very grateful to President Stanley, to the trustees, to the faculty, and to the members of the class of 2003 for the experience. It means a lot to me. Thank you, from my heart. In return, I am happy to assume the annual duty of failing to put into words what it was all about.

Here’s one way to think about it. You go over to your best friend’s house for your first sleep-over. Your friend’s mother asks if you would like a tuna fish salad sandwich. Your own mother makes tuna fish salad sandwiches for you all the time, so you say sure. When you bite into the sandwich, you realize that your best friend’s mother’s tuna fish salad tastes completely unlike the tuna fish salad your own mother makes. You never dreamed that it was possible for there to be more than one way to make tuna fish salad, or that the differences could be so nauseatingly consequential. And what is it with the bread? It’s brown, and there appear to be seeds in it. What is more unnerving is the clear evidence that your friend regards his mother’s preparation as perfectly normal, and has obviously been eating it with enjoyment all his life. Later on, you learn that the pillows in your friend’s house are filled with foam rubber, instead of feathers. The toilet paper in the bathroom is pink. What sort of human beings are these? At two o’clock in the morning, you throw up, and your mother comes and takes you home. It is an introduction to the world of difference.

Later on, you go to grade school. There, you discover other children who are smarter than you. Also, even more difficult to believe, cuter than you. How can this be? Your parents always told you that you were the smartest and the cutest. On what other subjects did they mislead you? Your personal belief that you are an incredibly fast runner is shattered at the first recess. It is suggested to you, and not necessarily in a friendly or constructive spirit, that your clothes are uncool. The thought that there might be a cool way to dress, as opposed to an uncool way to dress, had never occurred to you. The whole concept of coolness, a concept you now realize will dominate your life for the next fifteen years, had simply not crossed your radar screen.

Eventually—for nothing can be done to prevent it—there is high school, and with high school comes the life-moment people refer to now as your "sexual orientation," appropriating a word that used to mean finding your way out of the wilderness, but that now means something else, more like finding your way into the wilderness. What you had not really registered about sexuality before you got there is that it is not optional. You’ve got to have one. Sex is the class you cannot skip. What’s worse is that the information is so bad. It takes most of us too long time to learn one of the most fundamental rules in life, which is, Never, ever believe anything anyone says about sex.

Also, oh yeah, four years of math, four years of science, fours years of a foreign language, the whole student leadership/community service thing, PSATs, SATs, SAT IIs, APs, and the college application essay, a hideously booby-trapped requirement that obliges you to boast about yourself while pretending to be a modest and other-directed person, which is a very mean thing to ask a seventeen-year-old to do. Then, you get thrown out the window. In my case, that’s really the way it felt. I had never been west of Buffalo, New York, until the day I flew into LA on my way to college. There were many surprises. I had no idea, for instance, that I would be attending a school whose athletes are cheered on by a chirping sound. Also: what’s the story with that guy on the wall in Frary’s genitalia?

Anyway, liberal arts education. The first thing to say about it is that college is not that different from the bad sleep-over, the cool clothes crisis, and the sexual orientation nightmare. It corresponds to a developmental phase in your life. This is impossible to see when you are in the phase, just as it was once impossible to understand how human beings could sleep on pillows filled with foam rubber. But even people who are beyond college tend to assume too quickly that development is over after puberty.

It’s not. Your mind happens to be in a body—more accurately, your mind is a function of a body. The mind is not a stationary receptacle which gets gradually filled with knowledge. It is a growing, perpetually morphing thing. Never despair of it. Aptitudes switch off, like the aptitude for fluency in other languages, but new aptitudes switch on, like the aptitude for raising children, or running an office, or writing a novel. You don’t have any control over when and where hair begins to appear and disappear on your body, and you don’t have control over what your mind is ready for, either. This is why precocity is overrated.

The observation about college coinciding with a developmental phase is not merely impressionistic. Studies show that SAT scores do predict how a student will perform in the first two years of college, but they actually have no correlation with how that student will do in the last two years. And big surprise, really, for why should a test someone takes when she is seventeen predict her accomplishments at twenty-two? If you teach college, you see it again and again: students make a leap between, roughly, their sophomore and junior years. Wet logs catch fire. You will see this if you go to law school or medical school or graduate school. You will encounter there very successful students who could not have gotten into Pomona. Some people don’t catch fire even until graduate school, and beyond. You shoot your arrow over the horizon, and then you trudge up to see, many years later, what target you hit. It is a rule of life even more fundamental than the rule about sex talk: There are many paths upward. It’s like rock-climbing. (Not that I’ve ever rock-climbed, but I did see Mission Impossible II). There is no one way up the mountain. If your route is blocked, don’t waste much time complaining about it. Find another route.

Also, of course, there is not just one mountain. When people speak of education, they often talk about enlarging your horizons, and stuff like that. But a lot of education is really about making you feel smaller—forcing you to realize that you are not the measure of all things. Education is gradual, adult-supervised exposure to the fact that you’re not everything. It is a process of making you shrink in relation to the rest of the world. One thing college compels you to realize, for example, is how many things you will never know. Look through the course catalogue now, after four years, and you will see vast areas of learning and activity that you never even stuck a toe into while you were here. This is humbling. It should be humbling. Humility is good. We don’t have enough of it these days.

While you were going to school here, your professors probably kept bugging you by saying that it wasn’t information they were teaching you; they were teaching you how to think. Professors at liberal arts colleges are always saying this, and students are never thrilled to hear it. For one thing, why did you buy all those spiral notebooks to write the information down in if the information isn’t what’s important? Is thinking on the exam? No. What’s on the exam is information. And what were you doing before you got to college if it wasn’t thinking? It’s all a tiny bit insulting.

What your professors were saying, though, is that one of the purposes of acquiring knowledge is to understand the limits of knowledge. They were trying to expand your mind in order to enable it to encompass its smallness. Your professors believe that this awareness is empowering, and so do I. What they mean by "thinking" is the ability to see around the corner of what is already out there, what is already known, what everyone takes for granted—the ability, really, to see that there is a corner at the end of our little street.

Why is having this ability important? It protects us from our own certainties; more important, it protects other people from the effects of our certainties. There are too many people around these days who believe they’re on a mission from God. The only people who should be on a mission from God are the Blues Brothers. It is a world of difference, and the differences go all the way down. We disrespect them at our peril. To use our little metaphor: there are many tuna fish salads; there is no tuna fish salad as such. It is amazing how hard it is for people, even well-educated people, to believe this. They mistake the home for the world. But there are many homes, many discourses, many ways of considering the case, and no one way accounts for the whole. One thing a liberal arts education wants to make you see is that people thought differently before us, and people will think differently after us. The ice we walk on is never not thin. This isn’t a philosophical point. It’s a practical point. Seeing the limitations in other people’s way of understanding things makes us stronger. Seeing the limitations in our own way of understanding things makes us better people.

When the Beatles were the most popular group in the world, between around 1964 and 1970, they used to spend all their time together. They didn’t just tour together and record together; they lived next door to each other, they hung out in each other’s houses, they even took their vacations together. People asked them why they did this. The Beatles’ answer was that they felt that the only person who could possibly understand what it was like to be a Beatle was another Beatle. The Beatles were practically the only people in the world who did not think that the supreme joy in life was to be touched by a Beatle.

Generations are like this. The reason it is so comfortable talking to people who are your own age, even if they are strangers, is because you have, almost automatically, so much shared experience. You listened to the same bands when you were fifteen, went to the same movies when you were eighteen, read the same novels and watched the same television programs. You share a universe of assumptions and attitudes—a kind of moral code-that is different from your parents’ and that will be different from your children’s. Your parents are not going to love me for saying this, but I have never really cared about the criticisms of my work and ideas made by older people. What do they know?

I do care about the criticisms of people in my generation, because we shared a life path. This is especially true of the people you go to school with. If you are like me, you learned as much in four years from your classmates as you did from your professors. What’s it all about? You know what it’s all about. It’s about other people. They need you, and you need them. And that is why we say to you, this last time you are together: Keep in touch.

—Louis Menand ’73 won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for U.S. History and the Francis Parkman Prize for his book The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. His latest book, a collection of essays, is American Studies. He is currently a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.