Commentary

Commencement at Fisk University: We Need to Rebuild the Idea of the Common Wealth

Duke President Richard H. Brodhead
May 7, 2007

Madam President, trustees, faculty, friends, I thank you for including me in this great event. Exultant graduates, I congratulate you on your proud achievement, and I rejoice with all who supported you on the road to this great day. You had a dream for your life, a dream of training your powers through first-class education. Thanks to your commitment and hard work, that dream has come true. Now its time to dream your next dream, the dream of the service you can offer to the world with the knowledge youve acquired at Fisk. I wish you future success as splendid as todays.

I too am receiving a Fisk degree today; did you know? Im happy about that. Now, you may think its a little unfair that I get to collect the same reward as you without doing the work. How did he get to stick his face in the photo crossing the finish line when he didnt even run the race, you might rudely ask? I have two replies. First, I really did study at Fisk. I spent many a day in your library editing the unpublished journals of Charles Waddell Chesnutt, the principal African-American author of the post-Civil War generation. (And by the way: how he would have loved the chance to study at a place like Fisk.) And second, even if I didnt earn a diploma at Fisk, no one here is prouder to join the procession of those who have passed through this ceremony before. This is the same graduation that W. E. B. DuBois went through in 1888, on his way to his career as scholar, editor, and leader in the war for civil rights. We stand where John Hope Franklin stood in 1935, on his way to becoming the 20th centurys greatest African-American historian. We stand where Hazel OLeary stood in 1959 before going on to become the Secretary of Energy, the first woman and the first African-American to hold that post. We stand where Nikki Giovanni stood in 1967, before becoming one of the principal poets of her generation.

And now its your turn.

Ive been thinking of you and your future. This train of thought led me to the Fisk graduate I know best: John Hope Franklin, my friend and colleague at Duke. Dr. Franklin has won every award a historian and American citizen could win, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Kluge Prize, the Nobel Prize equivalent for work in the humanities and social sciences. At 92 he remains as sharp and forceful as any person I know; he gave the commencement address at Duke last May, and it was as inspiring as any I have ever heard.

What was it like when he stood where you stand, age 20, in 1935?

The name of that year conjures up a dark and menacing time. When John Hope Franklin graduated from Fisk, the United States had been in the grips of severe economic depression for six years with no end in sight. Domestically, official segregation was at its most brutal and pervasive: a young man from a nearby Nashville neighborhood was carried off and lynched during John Hopes junior year. Internationally, the Nazi party had already come to power in Germany, and the menace of international fascism was already on the horizon for those who had eyes to see.

Turn to 2007, and what a difference! We live in a period of sustained worldwide economic growth unrivalled in human history. Thanks in part to graduates of this university, we live in a country that has dismantled official barriers to opportunity and freed human potential to make its mark. Human well-being has made other notable advances: thanks to modern medical research, conditions are treated as routine that used to cause death, blindness, or disability. Most unimaginable of all, the whole world is now magically accessible on the easiest of terms. If you were not busy listening to me, you could be downloading news from around the world or broadcasting pictures of this ceremony to friends in any land—without leaving your seat.

But as you know, our time isnt quite as simple as these facts make it sound. These changes have made an undeniable difference, and life is immeasurably the better for them. But these improvements turn out to be compatible with persistent challenges, and even to create new ones. Worldwide prosperity has lifted billions out of poverty in recent years, but it has not eradicated the most basic forms of human need, and income disparities have grown steeper instead of disappearing. The doors of opportunity have been opened to a significant extent at the legal and institutional level, but other and more elemental forms of inequality continue to give children an unequal start in life: unequal access to a healthy environment, unequal access to family literacy, unequal access to quality schooling, and so on. New cures have been discovered, but not everyone has equal benefit from these discoveries. Meanwhile, the consumer habits and leisure lifestyle generated by our new prosperity have created new forms of ill health, diseases of plenty that now have epidemic force.

Plus were all connected, except that were mysteriously disconnected too. Paradoxically, the world where we can all call and text each other all day long has also hosted new forms of separation and division, including renewed school segregation and new hardening of partisan political bounds. We have more and more in common in some domains—we buy the same brands, hear the same news, know the same tunes. But this superficial sharing has turned out to be compatible with an erosion of a deep foundational common sense, a shared sense of what we owe each other and can expect of other as members of one community.

Our country has got out of the business of asking us to make collective sacrifices, not because were selfish, but because weve failed to refresh our sense of the values that lie beyond self-interest. We cant have new taxes, not because were too poor in money, but because we have grown poor at articulating the idea of a public good, a shared benefit that would be worth a shared cost. We follow the news of the criminal justice system, but it doesnt make us reflect on what it would actually mean to be just. We tune in each day to learn the latest outrage some celebrity or public figure has committed, but raging against insensitive others isnt the same as building the grounds for broad and deep mutual respect.

So if the battle lines arent as clear today as they were in the past, this is a time with its own abundant challenges. Among others, we need to rebuild the idea of the common wealth or the public good. This will be the work of many hands: it will take work from public officials but also from teachers, business leaders, ministers, doctors and health care administrators, developers and planners, and many more. I certainly hope youre up to doing your share. Well be in a mess if everyone leaves this work to others. But how are you going to get from here to there?

If the answer is unclear, dont feel bad. Not one of your predecessors marched out of the doors of Fisk straight on to their distinguished careers. They were young people with some hopes and much uncertainty who took their chances and followed their hunches until life gave them their opening. John Hope Franklin came to Fisk planning to become a lawyer until his studies seduced him onto another path. Following an interest that steadily grew in power, he trained as an academic historian and wrote seminal works in the field. When the great school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education came along, Franklin made the contribution that only a historian could make, recovering the relevant constitutional history for the crucial Supreme Court brief. He was able to contribute to one of the most decisive public events of the last century not because he planned to but because he developed his distinctive strengths and moved when he saw his chance.

Hazel OLeary was Secretary of Energy at a time when energy issues became ever more crucial to the economy, the environment, and international war and peace. But I bet she did not spend her Fisk afternoons daydreaming about a future cabinet post. For all I know, she never studied energy at all. She trained as a lawyer; found her way through a set of unfolding opportunities in law, government, and business, and so built the powers that would eventually equip her for her high public role.

Fisk students of the Class of 2007, so far so good. You had the talent, you had the ambition, you did the work, and today you win the prize. I congratulate you, but what youve done to date is just the promise that the rest of your life will fulfill. It wont be clear to you every day where youre going, and there will be days when youll wonder if youre going anywhere at all. But youll get there if you keep a few thoughts in front of you. Follow your passions and keep working to build your strengths; and remember that those gifts werent given you for your personal success only, but to serve and enrich the life of your time.

Now its your turn to write the future.

Have the courage to do it well.