Commencement 2018: Living in a Faithless World
Good morning! Let me add my own greetings to parents, family members, trustees, members of the faculty, and honored guests in attendance at this celebratory event: Skidmore’s 107th Commencement. Above all, to the members of the Skidmore College Class of 2018, heartfelt congratulations!
Heck, I’m just glad you are here today! I mean, what a dilemma: Commencement or the Royal Wedding? I think you made the right choice.
You have just heard from Mr. Scott McGraw, chair of Skidmore’s Board of Trustees. Many other Skidmore trustees and members of our Alumni Board are with us today, and I would like us to acknowledge them for the many kinds of service and support they provide to the College.
We invest significant transitional moments in our lives with visible symbols: In addition to the American flag, there are 26 other national flags arrayed on either side of the stage, representing the homelands of those graduating seniors who have traveled far to learn with us and who, in turn, have enriched the Skidmore community with their presence and their perspectives. Collectively, you members of the Class of 2018 also have studied abroad in 50 countries.
The bagpipers who led you graduating seniors into the Opening Convocation in September of your first year at the College reappear today to herald your final moments as Skidmore students. Then, at the end of this ceremony, they will lead you out into your new lives as Skidmore alumni. Four years ago, at that Opening Convocation, those of you seniors who were new first-year students wore green class T-shirts with "2018" in red numerals. Those shirts signaled both the bonds you would soon establish with your classmates and your goal of completing a course of studies that would bring you to this day. Now, four years later, your academic robe and accompanying flourishes serve as outward signs of your hard-won accomplishments. I hope that each of you is proud of what your cap, gown, stole, or honor cords say about who you are and what you have done during your time at Skidmore. And by the way, your gowns are made of recycled materials, as one more symbol of your College’s commitment to environmental sustainability.
Those of us on stage wear our own academic robes to commemorate nine centuries of historical connection, reaching back to the Medieval university, and to signify, as well, that we too have made journeys similar to yours. This is your moment of transition, triumph, and no doubt, some trepidation, but you can take a measure of encouragement from the fact that we and countless others have traveled this path ahead of you.
Over the past four years, you graduates have spent a good deal of time working hard to learn things—working to be able to say, "I know." If we have done our jobs well, you in fact have learned a good deal. While you aren’t yet experts in some field of knowledge, you certainly have achieved a measure of expertise. And you are well positioned to build on that achievement—to develop that specific knowledge further over the coming years, or to master a new area of expertise in a job or in graduate or professional school.
Several years ago, the Skidmore faculty unanimously adopted a statement outlining our “Goals for Student Learning and Development.” The final goal of this ambitious statement is that you “develop an enduring passion for learning” and that passion will serve you well as you seek the new levels of expertise you will require to excel in your professional life. But this passion for learning is equally important for us as citizens of a democracy, in which we are called upon to participate in the informal political dialog that leads to being an informed, responsible, citizen. This goal seems especially significant today—not just for you, but for all of us—as you enter a world that is marked by so many troubling social attitudes toward knowledge itself.
Heather K. Gerken, a professor of law and dean of the Yale Law School, recently commented that we are at a strange moment in our political history when facts, evidence, and expertise are all under attack. The slide from “truthiness" to fake news has been lightning quick. We live in a time when expertise is not just challenged; it has become grounds for doubt.
As Dean Gerken says, we do seem to be living in a world in which faith in both expertise and those social institutions whose job it is to create knowledge—most notably, news media and colleges and universities themselves—has significantly eroded. In this faithless world, it has become fashionable to distrust sources of information that in previous times would have been accorded much higher regard.
Over the recorded history of western thought, various philosophers have embraced projects of radical skepticism—trying to reject all beliefs except for those that have some immovable foundation, what the writer G. K. Chesterton called “the floor of the universe.” Descartes is one notable example of someone who took up this project. He failed miserably, in part because he found it impossible to doubt not only a set of theological beliefs about the nature of God but also the meanings of the words he used to construct his epistemological project.
The twentieth-century American philosopher W. V. O. Quine pointed out that it is possible, in principle, to question any element in the web of beliefs that we use to understand the world, but it is not possible to question them all at once. Put more positively, he was saying that it is only possible to raise questions—to entertain doubts—against a background of unquestioned certainty.
The problem we encounter today, with society’s skepticism regarding previously respected sources of knowledge, is that we are forced to place our faith in something, and that something increasingly has become either political commentators or regions of the Internet that simply reinforce what we already believe. This phenomenon is well-known and doesn’t require further comment here. But the question is: What are we to do about it? How can we live—and think—responsibly in our faithless world?
Let me make three points in response to this question that are suggested by another of Skidmore’s “Goals for Student Learning and Development”: that our students learn to “embrace intellectual integrity, humility, and courage.”
First, I hope that over your time at Skidmore you have become more aware than perhaps you were at an earlier stage of life that we all are responsible for what we believe. We own our thoughts. We own the conclusions we draw from them and the judgments we make about one another and the world. This realization is one of the tenets of liberal education—that free persons are in charge of what they think. But this turns out to be a pretty heavy responsibility, and it’s one that many people work pretty hard to deny.
This realization is the foundation of intellectual integrity. Let me put this point more concretely. Each of us is responsible for seeking information, for knowing where that information comes from and what principles govern the way it is produced, and for deciding what claims to accept. For example, has your primary news source ever fired a reporter for having gotten the facts terribly wrong without acknowledging that error, or for having simply made up a story? Do you have the intellectual integrity to admit it when some cherished belief you have held runs up against a set of inconvenient contrary facts? I hope so.
Second, intellectual humility comes from the realization that we are not perfect knowers—that all of us, in fact, have been wrong on so many occasions. Another twentieth-century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, once wrote,
"One always forgets the expression, ‘I thought I knew’."
Mark Twain expressed this same point a bit more colorfully:
"It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."
Remembering those times when one was absolutely certain that some belief was true, an idea that later turned out to be false, can give one the intellectual humility to be more open to alternative beliefs—to what other people are thinking and saying. That humility helps us enter into what Michael Patrick Lynch called the “common space where we can listen to each other and trade reasons back and forth”—a space that is essential to a functioning democracy.
Lastly, intellectual courage. We began this ceremony with the words that Skidmore’s first president, Charles Henry Keyes, delivered to the graduating class of 1923:
"Education brings convictions, but unless it brings also the courage of those convictions it is but dangerous equipment."
His point is that, after you have considered the thoughts of others, after you have acknowledged that you have been wrong before, you still need to decide what you do, in fact, believe—and you need to own that decision. Having done so, you need to have the courage to let others know what you believe—even if what you are thinking turns out to be unpopular—and, even more importantly, you need to act on your beliefs. When we say "Creative Thought Matters," we mean, in part, that unless you make your creative thought material—unless you put it into practice in the world—it remains just an idea in your head. And to put our ideas into practice often does require courage.
So those are my three wishes for you, as you head off into your post-Skidmore lives: that you “embrace intellectual integrity, humility, and courage.” If you can carry with you those three gifts from your Skidmore education, you will be well-equipped to chart your course through our faithless world, not just to survive but to leave your mark on it and help to make it a better place for everyone.
We gather here in joy while people in other parts of the country are gathering in sorrow because of another school shooting. We just have to acknowledge that we need, collectively as a country, to work so that we never accept that as a normal situation. That is part of the world that you, graduating seniors, need to help us change. I hope you will do that.
Thank you for the work you have done during your time here and for your kind attention today.