Transcript of Chancellor Martin’s address

Taken from the address delivered on Sunday morning, May 17.

Good morning! What a great day! What a beautiful morning for your commencement. I want to send a special welcome to all the families and friends of the graduates, our faculty, staff and distinguished guests.

I confess to being especially excited to celebrate master’s and bachelor’s degree candidates from Letters and Science.

You’re receiving your degree from Letters and Science at one of the finest universities in the country – a university with an extraordinary combination of quality, breadth, and contribution. A university that was ranked 17th in the world by Shanghai Jaio Tong’s rankings of world universities.

You’re also graduating, as you know, at a time when higher education has never been more important, and the education you’ve received here will grow in value, not only for you, but your communities over time. And our responsibility here, as I’ve been saying to you all year, is to preserve and enhance the value of your degree by preserving the university’s world class status and keeping the university accessible to students from every background.

I’m hoping that as graduates you’re going to help us advocate for higher education in general and for the University of Wisconsin-Madison in particular – that you’re going to argue for its importance to the state, to the nation, and to the world. It’s hard to imagine economic growth or social and cultural progress without our great public research universities, and yet they are increasingly at risk.

Now you’ve already contributed greatly to this institution just by being here, by marking out your own unique path through the university. You’ve shown news ways of combining various disciplines. You’ve made us aware of what you think is needed in the 21st century and the way of such combinations. You’ve held our feet to the fire in all kinds of ways.

Everyone in this hall is extremely proud of you, and many of the people in this hall have contributed to making this education possible for you. So I’m going to ask all the graduates to stand and thank their families, friends, faculty and supporters. (Applause)

Good job!

All of you are about to enter a challenging world. I don’t need to tell you that we’re in the throes of a world economic recession and we are in need of solutions to urgent problems -- medical, environmental, social, cultural --and a great deal is going to be required of all of you and we place enormous hope in all of you, too.

In the short term, you’re no doubt going to need a lot of patience and perseverance and a lot of hope for the future. But with the talents and the creativity and the public spiritedness that you’ve shown while you were here as students, we’re confident not only that you’re going to succeed in whatever you choose to pursue, but that you’re also going to provide what the world needs most. Those things include wisdom in what we decide to value, respect for evidence and reasoned argument, love and respect for other human beings and for the environment, the willingness to understand problems and their complexities and the drive to provide novel solutions to those problems.

As liberal arts majors and master’s candidates, you have what it takes to help heal the world on small scales and on large scales. And while we’re celebrating your achievements, let’s just take a few minutes to celebrate the liberal arts and liberal arts education.

We live in a culture that historically has prided itself on practicality and on doing. It has also become increasingly focused on short-term gain and immediate results, sometimes on taking action without serious thoughtful debate and engagement. But I’m going to focus here on the issue of practicality.

When I went to college, I had grown up in what was then a rural part of Virginia and neither parent had graduated from college and neither one really liked higher education particularly, especially for girls. And when I announced at the age of 19 that I was going to major in English, their worst fears had been realized in their view.

“What in the world are you going to do with an English degree?” they said. Does that sound familiar to anybody here? When I told them I was going to grad school in German studies they were more baffled than ever, and at the time I couldn’t tell them that what I was going to do with it was become chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to show them that before they died. I urge all parents and families in the audience to realize that that’s where some of these people will end up.

Now, what can you do with a degree in English? Well, you could become an astronaut – Sally Ride was an English major. You could become a CEO – Michael Eisner of Disney majored in English. You could become a Nobel laureate in biology. Harold Varmus, the former head of the National Institutes for Health was an English major. You could become the football coach for Penn State. Joe Paterno was an English major.

I rest my case.

You could’ve been a baseball commissioner. A. Bartlett Giamatti was an English major.

A particular major guarantees nothing, but neither does it constrain you from being whatever you want to be. The cultural theorist Christopher Bollas said. “The best moments in formal education are composed of evocative occasions when an object, a theory, another perspective radically alter one’s way of imagining the world.” And that’s what liberal arts education aims to make possible.

Let me tell you just briefly the story of John Muir, the famous naturalist who was the father of the national park system. He received his degree here in the 19th century. He got his first botany lesson beneath a black locust tree next to North Hall. A fellow student named Griswold plucked a flower from the tree and used it to explain how the grand locust is a member of the pea family.

Fifty years later John Muir described that day in his autobiography and he said, “This fine lesson charmed me and sent me flying to the woods and the meadows in wild enthusiasm.” A new understanding of taxonomy opened his eyes to the interconnectedness and the inner beauty of the plant world and the world in general, and he began to make what he called long excursions around the lake gathering specimens.

Those breakthrough moments are what we live for here and they’re what liberal arts education is all about. We could say that four years of specialization in any one subject hardly makes sense, given the rapidity of change in the world. What we really need is people capable of innovation, adaptability and thoughtfulness. We need creativity. Creativity does not belong to any one major. It cannot be forced. The best we can do is create the conditions for creativity, and those conditions do include discipline and knowledge and hard work, but they also take a hovering attentiveness and an openness to the unexpected – the not yet known.

Liberal arts education is not the only thing that fosters creativity, but it’s one of the best. This university has a long history of creating leaders in every domain – the environment, health and medicine, business, engineering, policy-making, and many of them were graduates of Letters and Science.

UW-Madison has produced more Fortune 500 CEOs than any other university, other than Harvard, and many of them graduated from Letters and Science.

UW-Madison also produces more Peace Corps volunteers and more applicants for Teach For America than any other university.

The producer of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” graduated from UW-Madison. John Stewart majored in psychology, by the way. I don’t know if that’s helped him or not. It’s not clear.

Numerous state legislators, governors, senators, Congress people are alumni of this institution and many of them are history and philosophy majors. Many fine athletes, school teachers, nurses, pharmacists, boxers, urban planners, Tiger Woods majored in economics. Ok, but Katharine Hepburn majored in history. Lee Iacocca majored in history, too, by the way. Do you all know who Lee Iacocca is? Sorry – automobile executive of another generation.

You leave with more than a degree. You leave with lifelong memories and friends and they will secure your attachment to the university forever. So much happened while you were here. I don’t know what things you’ll remember particularly.

New buildings certainly went up, faculty continued to rank second and third in the amount of research dollars they bring in a year because they are so great. Your faculty in L & S published countless books and articles, and on the more light-hearted side, “Jeopardy!” came here for their 2008 College Championship, and Suchita Shah represented us very well.

“American Idol” showed images of our campus’ idol competition on one of their shows, and on a more serious note, UW-Madison welcomed the Dalai Lama in 2007, right here in the Kohl Center. Barack Obama brought his campaign to this facility in February 2008, and for people of my generation it was very exciting last week when Elton John and Billy Joel came to this facility.

On a personal note I want to end simply by telling you that it has been a great privilege for me to work for you and with you and to get to know at least some of you personally. I have marveled at your spiritedness, which you display in all sorts of ways. My personal favorite remains the Jump-Around in Camp Randall, but you’ve displayed it in other ways – the snowball fight on Bascom Hill, your redisplay of the Statue of Liberty on Lake Mendota, your alcohol-free parties – those are the only ones I’ve seen.

I have seen the outstanding quality of your academic work and the pride that you take in it – from the research poster sessions in Memorial Union to the research poster sessions at the Capitol. I’ve been amazed by your achievements and I’ve also been amazed by your openness and your friendliness to a new chancellor, as well as to others.

I’ve listened to one of you rehearse the speech you were going to give in class the next day. I’ve been in the audience for performances by our concert choir, our extraordinary a capella groups, our First Wave Spoken Word artists, our outstanding marching band.

I have witnessed your remarkable command of parliamentary procedure at student council meetings, heard your remarks to the Regents about the Madison Initiative for and against. I’ve read your columns in the student newspapers. I’ve taken your advice on having a Facebook page, only to find that there are several Biddy Martin pages that someone else put up.

I’ve been amazed again and again by your talent and your creativity. I hope you leave here with a strong sense of your abilities and your worth, as we have about your abilities and your worth.

I conclude with a very short poem by one of America’s great poets, Archie Ammons. It’s called “Salute.”

May happiness pursue you,
Catch you often,
And should it lose you,
Be waiting ahead,
Making a clearing for you.

Congratulations. I wish you all the best.