A Former President’s Graduation Advice

It’s graduation season!  

I doubt that I need to remind parents and students to attend the main graduation ceremony. Who would want to miss the chance to hear speaker after speaker, while you bake in the sun? But many colleges and universities also hold a less well-known ritual – a religious one called baccalaureate.  

A religious event at a secular school? You better believe it.

At Northwestern, it is a time to celebrate in a single space many of the world’s great religions. And what a list: Baha’i, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism. It begins with a call to prayer from different religious traditions, and my eyes would fill with tears of joy as I listened to the exquisite echoes of a Tibetan Buddhist singing bowl while members of other faiths took turns interjecting sounds of their own: Christian church chimes, the Muslim adhan, and most meaningful to me, the shofar.

The music, the chanting, and the talks always renewed and inspired me. It is a beautiful time to recognize that sometimes faith can bring us together, instead of, as is sometimes the case, pull us apart. The few hundred in the audience (compared to 25,000 at the main ceremony held in our football stadium) seemed to enjoy it as much as I did. My advice is simple: check it out.

As for the students, be sure to take the time to acknowledge those who helped get you to this point. No one needs to suggest that graduates thank their family and friends. During the main ceremony, I would ask our students to face the stands and salute their loved ones. This generated the most enthusiastic ovation of the day.

Who hasn’t had a teacher, coach, neighbor, or member of the clergy, who was there at a critical time and set you on your life’s journey? Let them share in your glory.

But I would also ask graduates to do something else – seek out those who helped them along the way, but with whom they have lost touch. Who hasn’t had a teacher, coach, neighbor, or member of the clergy, who was there at a critical time and set you on your life’s journey? Let them share in your glory.

There is no reason not to try to find contact information for such a person. The bad news about social media and the internet is that anybody can find you; the good news is that you can find virtually anyone.

I usually tell graduates a story of my own. I was an indifferent student before college, and it never occurred to me that I had a future in academia until the professor in one of my first college classes – The Romantic Poets – took me aside and told me that I had talent as a writer and as a thinker. The subject of the course didn’t matter, as I ultimately became a professor of economics, not literature; what did matter was that someone had made the effort to encourage me when I needed it.

I searched for him on the internet and discovered that, forty years later, he was still teaching the joys of Wordsworth, now at an extension program in a small college in Canada.

I found his email address and wrote that he had changed my life. I lit up when he quickly replied that after all these years he remembered me …  until he went on to describe me as a tall, red-haired guy. Alas, my hair was never red, and my height peaked at under 5 foot 8.  

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I recalled that person as well – he sat next to me in class. Oh well, the point wasn’t to make me feel better. It was to let him know that his kindness helped me to achieve what I had gone on to accomplish.

I would conclude my baccalaureate remarks with a prayer – that the respect we hold for other faiths would grow, while the love of our own faith would strengthen. Here is another prayer – may we all take the time to share our successes with those who are no longer in our lives.  

Who knows? Maybe someone will reach out to you in return. If it is that tall, red-haired guy, tell him his old professor remembers him fondly.

Morton Schapiro is the former president of Williams College and Northwestern University.  His most recent book (with Gary Saul Morson) is “Minds Wide Shut:  How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us.”