One year ago, the editors of The Chronicle's 101st volume heartily congratulated Professor Emeritus John Hope Franklin on his selection as the Class of 2006's commencement speaker.
No one, the paper's mouthpiece said, was better qualified to deliver the address. "[S]uch a man, though humbly included among our faculty, though living and teaching in our midst, is truly a national treasure," the editorial board wrote ("A valediction forbidding top choices," March 28, 2006). "To accord him the privilege of speaking at commencement is to remind students what an honor and privilege it is to attend a university with such top-notch faculty-and as the members of the Class of 2006 subsequently pour out into the world, with what better piece of information could they leave?"
More than half of that staff editorial's wordage lauded Franklin as a choice. The remaining paragraphs, however, addressed the issue of rampant student disappointment with the selection process. The two are related, but not inextricably linked. Few if any students expressed disappointment with Franklin as a speaker. But plenty of students were miffed to see Franklin, one of our own, as the choice for speaker.
Muffled student disappointment reemerged this week, as The Chronicle reported Tuesday that a member of the University's Board of Trustees and co-chair of the Financial Aid Initiative will deliver this year's commencement address. Speaker Richard Wagoner, chairman and CEO of General Motors Corp., received his undergraduate education at Duke (Trinity '75), and in the words of President Richard Brodhead, "He loves this university and has served it in a thousand ways."
What do students find disappointing about Wagoner? Certainly not his lack of accomplishments (GM's recent failings notwithstanding); lauded as a brilliant international businessman, he is the youngest CEO in GM's history. And it cannot be a question of his loyalty-his blood runneth Duke blue, with two of his kids, his wife and his father all fellow Blue Devils. His alumnus status isn't the problem, either. Few objected to Ricardo Lagos, the former Chilean president who received a Ph.D. in economics from Duke, when he was selected to address the Class of 2005.
Perhaps it is a question of Wagoner's salience. His heavy involvement on several Duke boards suggests that it was not particularly difficult to coax him into speaking. Meanwhile, without reading the lede of The Chronicle story or without being an economics major, most students cannot identify Wagoner. (No such problem, incidentally, with John Hope Franklin.) In economic terms, perhaps Wagoner is a widely available, generic substitute for a brand-name item.
The university valediction is a rare honor, yet it is not without a very specific function. It is an exhortation forbidding students from taking their call to service too lightly. Bold claims about what a Duke education has done for our seniors, and what our seniors can do for the future of Duke education, will perhaps ring hollow when coming from a member of our own Board.
A graduation address should not seek to spritz butane on the raging flames of Duke's self-congratulation.
I don't think that's the crux of it, though.
Princeton's Class Day speaker this year will be Bradley Whitford, the keenly intelligent Wesleyan graduate and actor from The West Wing; our friends at Stanford are playing host to renowned poet Dana Gioia, chairman for the National Endowment for the Arts. Yale welcomes back alum and foreign affairs genius Fareed Zakaria this spring to deliver a commencement weekend speech, while the University of Virginia has nabbed novelist John Grisham and Dave Matthews Band violinist Boyd Tinsley for its bon voyage addresses.
The scope and magnitude of the above-listed's accomplishments aren't greater than those of Wagoner-who, again, is by most accounts, a very smart and talented man. It is the nature of what those accomplishments are that is different. These poets, academics, writers, artists and musicians who will impart wisdom to some of the nation's most gifted 22-year-olds are people who have made career paths not out of interpreting bottom lines, but out of interpreting the human experience. The wisdom they can offer is not inherently better than Wagoner's wisdom, but it is different.
At a school that professes to uphold a civically engaged, socially active education model, it would seem we'd prefer the former's wisdom over the latter's.
Shouldn't the capstone Duke experience for the Class of 2007 reflect that institutional preference?
Sarah Ball is a Trinity junior and former editorial page editor of The Chronicle. Her column runs every Thursday.
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