2000 Commencement Address
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WALTER ISAACSON
TULANE UNIVERSITY
MAY 20, 2000
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Thank you President
Cowen, members of the graduating class, faculty,
family and friends.
I feel very lucky
to be here. My parents went to Tulane, most
of my family went to Tulane, and I grew up
in the neighborhood learning to ride my bike
on the paths of the old quad and selling parking
spaces to fans going to the great stadium that
existed before the Dome was built.
I made the mistake
of going North to college, to a place where
the weather was cold and the professors were
colder, because it was time to leave my backyard.
But I like to think that had I been born and
raised up North I would have experienced the
warm joy of going to Tulane.
So here is the
first thing you should know about graduation
day: every day hence, you will appreciate more
how lucky you were to be at such a magical
place.
You are lucky in
other ways. Your commencement comes at the
commencement of a new millennium. Symbolically,
that's very cool.
And it's more than
just symbolic: You are entering the real world
at a time when our nation is experiencing one
of the greatest periods of peace and prosperity
history has ever seen.
Don't screw it
up.
Its a period of
fascinating opportunities. The digital revolution
is transforming the flow of ideas and art more
than any revolution since the printing press
paved the way for the reformation, renaissance
and the rise of individual liberty.
And the biotech
revolution now dawning will allow us the opportunity
for better or worse, that's up to you to fiddle
with our genes, invent new plants and organisms,
create designer babies, and someday to clone
ourselves.
The challenges
you face will not be technological ones, but
moral ones.
As I said, don't
screw it up.
My parents generation
graduated from college during the Great Depression
and World War II. They struggled to feed their
families, then fought to save the possibility
of freedom, then came home to start businesses
and build homes that laid the foundation for
our current economy.
Not for nothing
were they called the Greatest Generation.
My own baby boomer
generation graduated from college thinking
that we, too, would be involved in causes greater
than ourselves.
To some extent,
the movements we were involved in the Civil
Rights struggle, the womens movement, even
the anti-war movement helped transform our
world for the better.
But we became,
most of us would admit, a generation that was
often complacent and self-indulgent. Thats
beginning to dawn on a lot of us now, sort
of like the joke we used to tell: What did
the guy at the Grateful Dead concert say when
the dope wore off? Answer: This band sucks.
So once again,
youre lucky: as generations go, mine is not
a tough one to follow.
Those of you graduating
today will do many things, but one thing that
will define you is that you are in the third
wave of the digital generation.
Those in the first
wave were like the pioneers and explorers of
early American history: they were geeky hackers
motivated by the thrill of a new cyberspace
frontier who set out to discover cool and neat
digital things.
Those in the second
wave of the digital generation were like historys
goldrushers and landrushers: motivated more
by dreams of IPO wealth, their main purpose
seems to be GetRich.com.
In the wake of
these goldrushers, your challenge is to be
entrepreneurs with a real purpose, a purpose
that is greater than the short-term business
plan.
It will be up to
you to assure that a digital divide does not
wreck both our prosperity and our social peace
by creating a two-tiered society.
And that means
being less complacent than my generation was
about a two-tiered educational system that
allows some to flourish in an information age
and others to stagnate.
The Information
Age revolution you were born into has the amazing
power to spread freedom.
Bratislava.
Kashgar.
But the goal of
freedom is not just individual material enrichment.
It is also the nurturing of the values that
we share as a society.
That is what distinguishes
great generations, as yours has the opportunity
to be, from the self-indulgent ones.
As I said, don't
screw it up.
Thus ends the historical
part of our sermon today. Now comes the one-piece-of-advice
part. That is when the commencement speaker
traditionally says, If I have one piece of
advice to impart, it is
Sometimes it is
grand and mushy, like... Make sure you follow
your dreams. Sometimes it is very specific,
like in the apocryphal Kurt Vonnegut speech
that exhorts: Always wear sunscreen.
My piece of advice-one
of many I could give, but you certainly don't
have to hear more than one piece on this day
is this:
Go on the road.
Drive across country. Take a raft down the
river. Do it soon. Do it often. Do it wherever
you feel you can spare the time. And, most
importantly, whenever you are at one of those
phases in your life when you feel you CAN'T
spare the time.
Go to a rotary
club meeting in a town where no one knows you,
and to a main street café where the
shopkeepers sit around drinking coffee on a
slow morning. Stop at a roadside drive and
play pool with a trucker who doesn't like the
way you look. Go on a date with someone and
decide on a lark to drive across Texas together.
You have just spent
four years getting an academic view of the
world. You know more at this moment than you
will ever know in your life. Today you begin
the process of unlearning what you thought
you knew. That happens by wandering down the
road.
The journey of
discovery is as old as Ulysses and Don Quixote.
But it has become quintessentially American.
Even though America did not invent the road
as an art form, each generation of pilgrims
has perfected it.
From Huck Finn
to Jack Kerouac, we've learned to look for
adventures around the bend. More subtly, we've
learned the relation between commitment and
detachment, between roots and rootlessness,
between community and individualism.
In college, perhaps,
you learned Tocqueville and his thesis that
Americans' sense of individualism was in deep
conflict with their sense of community.
On the road you'll
learn that he was wrong.
The foundation
of America's civic faith is that community
and freedom are compatible. They are interwoven
in our social fabric.
Being at a national
magazine is like being in college. People ply
you with lots of theories. Every now and then,
you have to go on the road.
Since I've been
editor, I've taken our staff on two trips.
The first place,
a couple of years ago, was driving from the
Atlantic to the Pacific on old route 50.
The second was
a trip on a small boat down the Mississippi,
which ended here in New Orleans last month.
After hearing the
national politicians pontificate about school
choice, it was useful to be at a PTA meeting
in Osceola as parents debated what a charter
school would mean for a town that revolves
around its one high school's Friday night football
games. After hearing debates on capital punishment,
it was interesting to meet the inmates on death
row at Angola.
As we headed across
route 50 two years ago, we saw those who had
struck out west in search of new opportunities.
The digital revolution allowed people to set
up businesses and enterprises wherever they
wanted.
Old family-run
shops and cafes on main streets had given way
to big-box stores and chain restaurants in
mega malls.
But we kept noticing
a yearning for a lost sense of community. Irwin
Miller, the 87-year-old patriarch of Cummins
Engine in Indiana, had turned that company
from a dying rust-belt manufacturer into a
global supplier of high-tech products. By using
the internet, he said, I can hold meetings
and make sales on five continents, accomplishing
in an hour what used to take two weeks of traveling
But his main effort
was revitalizing the town's touchstones of
shared community: the local library, the museum,
the theater, the abandoned main street. We
are a nation of individuals and of cooperators,
he said. We got to keep remembering the relationship
between the two.
Two years later,
going down the Mississippi, we saw that yearning
for a restored sense of community even more
perhaps since people who lived by a river,
just like a tree that is planted by one, tend
to be more rooted.
The backlash against
the sameness and sterility of the big Wal-Marts
and chain stores first took the form of what
I call the Rousing of America: the creation
by developers like James Rouse of quaintly
entertaining renovated shopping areas like
Fanieul Hall Market in Boston, Harborplace
in Baltimore, and even the Jackson Brewery
and the Riverwalk here.
Now you can find
the Rousing impulse in small towns like Cairo,
Illinois, or tiny hamlets like Kimmswick, Missouri,
that are exposing every brick and cobblestone
in an attempt to cash in on the current prosperity
with quaint old shops.
Similarly, you
can see a related phenomenon that could be
called the Williamsburging of America. Small
towns are rummaging back into their history
to reassert their unique identity and attract
tourists.
Hannibal has become
a recreated Mark Twain theme park town.
In Navou, Illinois,
Mormons whose families lived there a century
ago are returning to recreate their old settlement
and reconstruct their old temple.
And the hotel owner
in Kimmswick told us of the town's latest scheme
which is to do reenactments of the Civil War
battle there.
When I said I had
never heard there was a battle in Kimmswick,
he conceded that it was in his words just a
skirmish that involved three Confederate soldiers
hiding in a cave. Whatever.
What these faux-Williamsburgs
have in common is that they are motivated equally
by a desire to have their kids reconnect to
their history and a desire to attract tourists.
The result can
be a bit surreal and even disconcerting. The
quaint new shopping areas sell mainly knick-knacks
and souvenirs. The history is really sanitized.
Hannibal features
cute kids playing Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher,
but no one recreates the role of Jim or the
runaway slaves.
In Navou the Mormons
celebrate their nineteenth century village
life but gloss over the bloody religious battles
that led to them being pillaged and expelled.
The quest for authenticity
has produced its opposite.
And yet its important
not to be cynical. In a rootless, road-loving
America, one can sense a sincere yearning to
reestablish roots, restore community identity,
and have a place that feels like home that
you can return to.
Indeed, by the
time we got near the end of the river, we were
amazed by the number of people who had ventured
forth and then returned home to where they
felt a sense of identity.
Not just white
Yuppies, but even blacks who fled the racism
of the old South. Alma Smith, whos now 69,
left Vicksburg for Chicago with her family
when she was only 8. She got a good education,
became a psychologist. Now she's back in Vicksburg,
where the greatest economic growth comes from
attracting retirees. At some point, she says
everyone has to come home."
This yearning to
return home, this yearning for a community
with identity and roots, is one of the most
powerful things one learns from going on the
road. I know. I feel it myself, here today,
here in my home.
As T.S. Eliot famously
concluded his Four Quartets: We shall not cease
exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/
Will be to arrive where we started/ And know
the place for the first time.
We all drink from
wells we did not dig, and we all eat fruit
from trees that were planted by people who
came before us.
The better we understand
that, the more we'll realize that what will
distinguish our time on this planet are the
wells we dig and the trees we plant for those
who come after us.
That's not something
you're expected to understand today. You learn
it as you go down the road.
It will begin to
make sense when you have your first kid.
And by the time
you get to the end of the road, you will understand
that this is what keeps the whole journey from
being meaningless.
Now's the time
to start down that road. That's why they call
this a commencement. Godspeed.
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