Well, you’re an awesome sight – a room full of possibilities, of a thousand adventures poised to be launched.
It is appropriate, before you embark on these journeys, that we pause to measure what brought each one of you to this place on this day.
Much of it was your own energy and dedication, for which you deserve a sense of deep satisfaction.
But you are in this place, at this time, because you have been invested with the dreams and hopes of others, who have sacrificed so much for the privilege of watching you walk to the stage today. You represent the hopes of a generation of men women, your parents and your loved ones, who worked for years to make this day possible for you, and for whom this is also a landmark in their lives. You bear on your shoulders their dreams, as well as you own. If I can pause, I invite you all to rise and applaud them.
This is also a moment of deep satisfaction for those who guided you on this journey. For a professor, a teaching assistant, a librarian, this moment is central to their lives too. It can be poignant for them -a life measured in goodbyes -because if they’ve done their job right, you will leave, and they will likely never see you again. I invite you to applaud those who taught you and guided you in the years that brought you here.
It is also appropriate, even urgent, to speak of those who will follow you, because I think you have a responsibility to them. It is very hard to be a student today, as you know. Many of those who follow you will be saddled with crippling debt when they graduate. Fees and costs are rising. They should not be. This nation must come, one day soon, to accept that higher education is not a privilege, but a responsibility we have to each other in society, just a universal medical care is. Higher education is not an enrichment for the wealthy, it is a fundamental civil right for any citizen of our society.
Our post-secondary education system in Canada is becoming increasingly commercialized. Universities and colleges are often driven to corporate begging because of provincial and federal neglect. The endowment of institutions of learning should not be dependent on corporate largesse, however grateful we are for corporations that are enlightened enough to support us. There will rarely be a faculty of history or philosophy that flourishes in a world dependent on corporate imperatives. The contents of our libraries and the diversity of our departments and teachers should not be determined largely by market values.
I also worry about those who follow you because of the pressure our society is putting on them. That social message is increasingly this: Adapt to the marketplace; prepare yourself to compete for a slot in an industry. Conform. Yes, it is important to be practical — but we are cowing the students of tomorrow into short-changing their dreams in order to become soldiers in a machinery of marketing and mass consumption.
The next generation will probably never have a pension. They have been taught that no company or institution will have any loyalty to them, so don’t bother being loyal to your company. Every man or woman for themselves in a global Darwinian race.
A race for what?
The point of higher education is to foster diversity and individuality, not conformity. The point of a university is to develop a searching and creative mind, and to nourish imagination. These qualities are not luxuries, not indulgences; instead these are the very strategic assets that a nation needs. We want critical, imaginative, informed citizens that will advance the common good in ways we have not yet conceived, rather than to sullenly conform to the short-term needs of the present.
These ideas are not radical. The man elected President of the United States this week has enunciated these ideas as a principal part of his platform: that if you perform a period of national service, you will be guaranteed a higher education by your country. This isn’t idealism or charity -this is sound, strategic national policy.
Let’s talk about public service, then. Remember who you are and where you come from. You represent, today, the hope of your society, your country. You are the nation’s strategic investment in the future. This country has nurtured you, and you have a social debt to this country. It is a country built on co-operation, tolerance and civility. Those qualities also need to be protected and nourished in a world of global commercial ferocity. You are the heirs of a peaceful nation of civil values. The preservation of that social responsibility, and that national civility, is in your hands.
Your life, if you live it well, will be measured by what you have done in the service of others, in the service of our values. The stories worth telling, in the twilight of life, are the stories of battles fought in the service of others, for the general good, and in the betterment of the human condition.
The moment that seized the global imagination in Chicago this past week is, in considerable part, the triumph of students who marched alongside the people of Selma and Montgomery, Alabama. It is the vindication of those who fought against the Vietnam War and for the rights of people to determine their own destinies. It’s a victory for neighbourhood organizers, for voters’ registration workers, for women, for all minorities. All, in their time, were mocked. All in their time felt marginalized and ridiculed. All, forty years later, stand vindicated. I am proud of those who were in the vanguard of my generation.
It is for you to determine the causes of your generation. You face the degradation of our environment and the uncertain future of our planet. You face global civil wars and genocides. But your opportunities are historic too. Your generation may, to pick one national goal, finally redeem the structural injustice against the First Nations that gnaws at the conscience and core of our Confederation.
Don’t compromise the values you have learned.
Resist orthodoxy. Rebel against smug privilege, against entitlement, against indifference, against the arrogance of power.
In whatever role, large or small, that you play in your life, find something that’s broken — and fix it.
The future is not a defined place, a destination on a map.
The pathways to the future are not predetermined, they are not obscured trails in the fields and woods that merely wait to be uncovered. The future is an ever-changing destination, shaped by the traveler and by the journey itself.
The pathways to the future are not discovered. They are made.
Thank you for this honour. It is a privilege to be part of your graduating class.
Thursday, November 13, 2008 in Speeches
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