Valedictory Address
As you can see, I brought along a personal cheering section in the guise of the Dartmouth College Glee Club. Though I have been a member of the Glee Club through all my years here, it has only been during this last year that I fully appreciated how important it has been to me, and how much I'll miss it. Thank you all very much.
Partly in recognition of the fun that we have had singing here, and partly as a means of exhorting me to originality in this oration, one of my friends in the Glee Club went so far as to suggest that I sing the valediction. Now, quite apart from the unorthodoxy of such a plan (which would defy the very meaning of the Latin words vale dicere, "to say farewell"), in light of the competition I would be exposing myself to on this platform. . . well, I decided that really wouldn't be such a great idea. Nevertheless, I would like to do the next best thing, to read you the second verse of the "Twilight Song," which has been the introduction to nearly every one of our concerts and which is therefore familiar to many of you, I'm sure. The words are simple, but they are, I think, singularly suited to this occasion.
Brothers, while the shadows deepen, While we stand here heart to heart, Let us promise one another In the silence ere we part: We will make our lives successful; We will keep our hands from shame, For the sake of dear old Dartmouth And the honor of her name.
Brothers and sisters we are and have been for the last four years, but the shadows we have cast here are waxing as the sun of our college days sinks now beneath the horizon which is our graduation. Despite the best efforts of the Alumni Council to bring us together, this is undoubtedly the final time that our entire class will "stand here heart to heart." The time is now, if ever, then, to take a look at that sun and like sailors - to determine our course for tomorrow by the aspect and colors of its setting.
For the privilege of four years' attendance at one of the finest liberal arts institutions in the nation, we are profoundly in debt - some of us quite literally, in fact. We are, first of all, deeply grateful to each of the various agencies here assembled on our behalf: to our parents, who in most cases paid the bills and who were also ready with the other less tangible but more important kinds of support that saw us through final, after final, after midterm, after final . . . (that's just one of the many advantages of the Dartmouth plan: we have more of everything); to our faculty and administration without whom there would be no College, and for whom we at Dartmouth can be particularly grateful for their dedication and availability to us the undergraduates; and to our classmates, who helped us in ways and at times that our families could not, and who are perhaps the single greatest asset of the College, though they would not be here but for its other attributes.
Our obligation is far greater, though, than can be expressed on a price tag, and it is owed in large measure to ourselves, for with this education comes the responsibility to fulfill its purpose. From us to whom much has been given, much is already and far more will be expected in the future. This is, I think, the meaning of the pledge in the verse I have read. Yet when we promise to "make our lives successful," we do not vow to return to our tenth reunion each in a Mercedes-Benz, brandishing the full panoply of other symbols that mark the achievement of a position and salary commensurate with the investment made here. The shame from which our hands must be kept clean is not embarrassment for having won an inferior income or notoreity relative to our peers; it is the realization that our decisions have been ill-made, our choices ill-founded. We may surely err, but let us err boldly. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, "To train a man in mind and not in morals is to train a menace to society," he underscored one of the essential features of an education in the liberal arts: it is free in precise relation to the number of choices it demands of us, and the benefit of such an education is to be found as much in the process as in the ostensible goal.
Although the burden of the responsibility is primarily a personal one, it is further characterized by the degree to which we share it and by the ways that a choice made by one of us will rebound to affect the rest. This is particularly true for us at Dartmouth, where the unifying spirit is so pervasive, and where tradition plays such an important role in maintaining it hence the added incentive to live up to our pledge," for the sake of dear old Dartmouth." The "honor of her name" is in many ways intimately tied to that of our own. In referring to our responsibility to foster the traditions we have shared here, I do not mean that we must pass them on without alteration. Change is, after all, a prerequisite to progress, and if something as time-honored as Coke can change, then I suppose there is always hope for Dartmouth, too. We are, however, the continuing tradition of the College, and what Dartmouth will be is largely of our making.
In singing then the twilight song of our departure, taking our final bow, as it were, in this pageant which began at Convocation four years ago and ends here now with Commencement, we might only hope to achieve the same perspective - on both our accomplishments and our expectations for the future that the immortal wit Chuckles the Clown had when he said: "a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants." We must continue to sing our songs and to dance our dances, and if we do get seltzered along the way, well, we'll always dry out again.
Harry Andrew Blackmun Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court Doctor of Laws
The American public has discerned and appreciated your sturdy independence, your unassailable integrity, your quiet courage, your endearing modesty of style, and withal your acute sensitivity - a sensitivity that stems from your determination never to overlook the fact that the judgments handed down with such finality by the Supreme Court are not mere abstractions, but are decisions that can in some measure alter the lives of individual men and women, ordinary people living under the Constitution that you and your colleagues must interpret.
Theodore Ryland Sizer Chair, Department of Education, Brown University Doctor of Humane Letters
You have recently participated in a five-year national study, in the course of which you travelled far and assessed with rare penetration the current state of our high school system. Your contribution to the report on the study - the book Horace'sCompromise - has been widely praised, and warmly commended to the decisionmakers.
At the heart of the inspiration you provide us is the evident unshakability of your conviction that the essentials of education are teachers, students, and subjects of study; that, when properly aligned and designed, less can be more; and that, under a more personalized system, the excitement and joy of discovery can flourish for teachers and their pupils.
W. Brian Barnes '85 delivers the valedictory.
