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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

President's Wednesday Message


Recently, NPR selected its top 300 commencement speeches. The earliest is from 1774; the most recent, 2013. There are the names you would expect—prize winning authors, statesmen and women—but many more that you wouldn’t. For example, the list includes Andy Samberg, Bo Jackson, Kermit the Frog, and Sutton Foster. A few, like Meryl Streep and Madeleine Albright, appear multiple times. You can search the list by theme, which yields some interesting results. “Play” generates only 9 speeches, the smallest number; “change the world” generates 97, the greatest number.

I confess that I did not read Barnabas Finney’s 1774 speech, but I did click through to find it. If you follow the same path, you will find something remarkable: a digitized version of the actual document, complete with stains and handwriting. And this brings me back to “change the world” as a theme. Using a wireless connection to look at Mr. Finney’s 1774 speech on my laptop, I was struck by the passionate hopefulness embedded in this most common of themes. Regardless of our intervention, the world will change. It has changed so much that my ability to access Mr. Finney’s document is an expectation, not a wonder. The commencement call to “change the world” is really more a call to shape the changes all around us, to move them in a positive direction, to nudge the always spinning ball toward the net.

It may sound pithy to define change as the only constant, but a quick review of decades worth of commencement speeches suggests there is some truth in this truism. When were these words uttered at a commencement? “This country has profound and pressing social problems on its agenda. It needs the best energies of all its citizens, especially its gifted young people.” Or these: “We have to find a way to reduce the negative instability of modern life without going to a totally static world where nothing would grow.” Or these: “You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.”

The answers are 1969, 2011, and 1983. The speakers were former Senator Edward W. Brooke, President Bill Clinton, and author Margaret Atwood—an unlikely trio to join in a call for graduates to influence the magnitude and direction of the vector of change. Why does this single message recur? Well, as another commencement speaker, Barbara Kingsolver, reminded her audience: “The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends.” Each successive set of graduates walks across the stage and into the world ready to bend it a bit more … hopefully for the good.

What message would you share with our inspiring MCC grads next Saturday if you were our commencement speaker? Share it now in the blog comments.

Anne M. Kress
Office of the President
05/28/2014