Commencement Remarks
1 June 2000
Vice Chairman Schmidt, Chancellor Goldstein, graduating classes of Brooklyn College, honored guests, ladies and gentlemen.
We have entered a new century and embarked upon a new millennium, into which we launch today a new class of Brooklyn College graduates. And the College has acquired a new president. Ours is a rare commencement, a fourfold moment of new beginnings: for our era, for today's graduates, for Brooklyn College, and for me.
Our new beginnings -- the graduates', the College's, and mine -- perpetuate a tradition in which we all stand. That tradition, the patrimony of New York City's public colleges, has a short name that, while not our name, nonetheless describes a legacy that Brooklyn College has also inherited. Called "City College in the Thirties," it is, like all ruling traditions, part fact, part myth, and its mythical qualities only enhance its power over our present.
At City College in the Thirties, restless and ambitious young men, mostly Jewish, many from the Lower East Side, immigrants and sons of immigrants, acquired the knowledge and the culture of the New Country and, thus equipped, entered its economic, intellectual, and cultural marketplace, which their legendary success transformed. These students became, famously, the glory of City College, and, if less famously, they are also one of the glories of Brooklyn College, with us today in our Golden Anniversary class and with us also in such magnanimous gifts to the College as the Library Café, the Learning Center, and the hundreds of stipends that have softened the hardships of many of today's graduating seniors.
The American marketplace that these alumni of New York City's public colleges transformed at mid-century we find transformed again, in part by their efforts, here at the turn of the new century. Before mid-century, the relatively small and well-defined cadre of gifted and ambitious students who were graduated from New York City's public colleges entered a relatively narrow world of extraordinary privilege. But the barriers that have been falling throughout the second half of this century have changed all that. Competition has always been the American way, but today's competition has reached new levels, for it extends to a larger field of competitors than ever and it has grown correspondingly more fierce.
You -- our new Brooklyn College graduates -- enter a marketplace where you will compete, not with inherited privilege, but rather with others like yourselves, a large and ambitious young work force of both sexes and many colors. These young people do not assume their privilege -- nor can you; you will earn it anew every day. Brooklyn College, similarly -- caught up in the same historical change -- competes not only with the other New York City public colleges. The College too has entered a free-for-all, for the students it seeks out are sought out also by New York University, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
The Hobbesian fray that has broken out in the marketplace and in the groves of academe means but one thing for Brooklyn College, for you, and for me: We compete. Thus it is both appropriate and timely that the College now undertake nothing less than To be the Best.
To be the best for the sake of our students: To give you the technical skills and proficiencies that will enable you to compete for a job -- that is the minimum that we owe you and a banality. We want to introduce you to, to show you how and where to seek -- to have introduced you to and to have shown you how and where to seek -- those riches of the world that alone will satisfy you when you have, in due course, satisfied your material needs and provided for your children. Acquisitiveness has always been an evil: the ancient Romans complained of multimillion-dollar houses (piles, they called them) that destroyed the landscape and polluted the sea. But now acquisitiveness afflicts us on such a scale as never before, corrupting the quality of all our lives and of the world we must live in. We want to enable you to acquire, yes, but also to arm yourselves against acquisitiveness, its wastefulness and the way it wastes us, our talents and our efforts, and our lives.
And it is appropriate that we undertake to be the best for the sake of the College. New York City's public colleges won their place in academic life and in American cultural life by introducing young immigrants -- over decades, successive waves of young immigrants -- into the American mainstream. The public colleges had their work cut out for them. Here at the turn of the new century, old barriers fallen and our marketplace newly opened, the mold has broken and Brooklyn College has a shot at attracting the best students in any quarter -- of competing with all the other colleges that are after the best students -- and of offering these students a college experience -- academic, cultural, social -- that ranks among the very best.
To do this we must make Brooklyn College a model public urban liberal arts college. We commit the College to the pursuit of academic excellence. We must recruit new faculty of the highest quality, promote the professional development of our current faculty, and attract the best high school graduates in the City -- and outside the City. We must offer our students a curriculum that meets their needs, and by that I mean not only their need to find a job eventually. I also and more emphatically mean the specific needs of urban students who enjoy no great wealth. We must take account of their need to work while they earn their degrees, of their larger-than-usual responsibilities to their families, of the particular obstacles they must surmount to satisfy our requirements for a degree.
We must cultivate a campus of great physical beauty that has been given us quasi by birthright -- in that respect Brooklyn College knows few rivals in the City. And there rises now before your eyes a new library no less beautiful than the campus, and soon the quadrangle that is our signature will extend across Bedford Avenue to a new building dedicated to student services at the far western end of the quad.
We must cultivate the polity of the Brooklyn College community. We are, all of us -- students, faculty, administrators, and staff -- engaged in a common enterprise whose dimensions are both academic and social. Ours is a common lot and, on the campus, a common fate. Therefore we know one another as neighbors and companions. We treat one another civilly, even courteously, and where someone among us needs help or support, we extend the needed help. We know one another as friends, both now and in the decades you will live out after graduation, and when we meet again, we will recognize and honor each other. For we have all grown up in the same house.
On this threshold of a new millennium, you, our new graduates, and I, a new president, with the College, enter the fray of a newly opened and enlarged marketplace. I do so, as you also have reason to, with good hope and high courage. Like many of you, I, too, am an immigrant, and I know, as you know and as you will discover, that this is still a land of opportunity, relatively unburdened by the past, extremely open to the future. Anything is possible.
As you go on to new lives of material success and, I hope, of meaning that renews itself, that grows with you and your experience and justifies the enormous efforts that your lives will cost you -- that all our lives cost us -- I hope you will remember
your years at Brooklyn College -- for most of you a passage between your parents' home and your own home -- as an experience that has made you anew. I hope you will remember that experience, and the College, with gratitude and affection. And I hope, finally, that in time you will come back to us, as Brooklyn College alumni have before you, to offer the generations that will come after you the chance that you have enjoyed to build a better life, to work productively throughout your life, and to inform your labor, the things you love, and life itself with value that endures.
Good luck and godspeed.
