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Scholar of modern Southern history urges graduates to ‘hold fast’ to dreams

Following are the prepared remarks for the speech Dr. James Leloudis gave as the mid-year commencement keynote speaker Dec. 20 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Leloudis is associate professor of history, associate dean for honors and director of the James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence at UNC.

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Chancellor Moeser, distinguished members of the platform party, parents and guests: Good afternoon. And to the Class of 2002: Congratulations! You worked hard to get into Carolina, and we have worked you even harder to get out. This is your day. Celebrate and enjoy!

Protocol demands that I, like every commencement speaker, begin by acknowledging what an honor it is to have been invited to deliver this address. But I want to reach beyond protocol, because this is, indeed, a very special day for me. Twenty-five years ago, I sat in your seat—like you, stylin’ in one of those oh-so-chic blue gowns and mortarboards. Who would have thought that I would be standing here today? Certainly not me. And if truth be told, some of my professors might also be counted among the doubters—especially the one, who to this day, reminds me of the not-so-distinguished grade that I earned in his class.

I also want you to know how effectively you’ve turned the table on one of your teachers. You have given me the most daunting assignment I could ever imagine. Think for a moment about the situation. Here I stand in front of my faculty colleagues, a number of whom were also my undergraduate teachers. Here I stand before you, many of whom are former students. And what is my assignment? To convey wisdom that will guide you through life, to share insights that will stay with you beyond tomorrow’s morning news. And all of that in the span of 15 minutes! That, my fellow alumni, gives new meaning to exam anxiety. You can’t imagine how, at this moment, I long for a simple blue book or bubble sheet!

But here I am. The task is at hand. And so, let me be about it.

What wisdom can I offer that has not been offered more eloquently by many others before me? Probably none. So let me speak from the heart and invite you to reflect on some concerns that fill my own private thoughts these days.

First, the times in which we live. You are headed into the world at a particularly challenging, exhilarating, and difficult moment. Yes, the economy is in a downturn and jobs are scarce—you hardly need for me to deliver that news bulletin—but the challenges I have in mind are on a larger scale. Our world is shrinking, we are being brought ever closer together by new global instruments of communication and trade, yet, in many respects, we live more divergent lives than ever.

Jimmy Carter noted last week in his Nobel Peace Prize address that "citizens of the ten wealthiest countries are now seventy-five times richer than those who live in the ten poorest ones, and the separation is increasing every year." The human reality of that divide was revealed in a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. In Africa, Latin American, and Russia, overwhelming majorities of respondents to the survey said that there have been times in the past year when they could not afford to feed their families or to pay for clothing and health care. Only in industrialized nations like ours were reports of doing without the basics of life limited to a distinct minority of the population.

This disparity is at the root of many of the world’s most vexing problems, including starvation, illiteracy, environmental degradation, violent conflict, and the unnecessary illnesses that each year take the lives of 6 million children. The Pew survey revealed that here in the United States, we worry most about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and more generally, terrorism, as the leading threats to the world. But in Africa, where in some nations the AIDS epidemic has taken hold of nearly a third of the population, fully 98 percent of respondents report that their number one concern is the spread of disease—something far down the list for most Americans. We inhabit the same shrinking planet, but we are living exceedingly different lives. And too often, we understand very little of one another’s experiences.

Much the same might also be said right here, in our own back yard. The recent report of the Rural Prosperity Task Force makes clear that we are increasingly two North Carolinas. One North Carolina centered here in the Piedmont, urban, riding the wave of the new economy, rich with opportunity and resources for its schools and communities. The other North Carolina predominantly rural, wrestling with the decline of traditional industries, often finding prosperity just beyond arm’s reach.

Such challenges can easily overwhelm us. Our first impulse is often to pull inward, to avert our eyes, to grow mistrustful and protective of our own, to compromise our ideals, to settle rather than to strive. We do so not only in our national life, but in our personal lives and careers as well.

Yet these times, more than any other, demand that we hold fast to our dreams—that you pursue your aspirations, that you energize and revitalize this world, that you take responsibility not only for your own future but for the future that belongs to all of us. At the end of the 18^th century, a generation of young revolutionaries founded the American republic and established this university, each as part of a grand experiment designed, in the words of historian Bernard Bailyn, "to begin the world anew." In the mid 19^th century, another generation of young men and women led the battle to abolish slavery and to heal the union after a fratricidal war. Young people of your grandparents’ generation defeated fascism.

And in your parents’ time, the young made the Civil Rights Movement and proffered the radical notion that men and women come into this world with equal ability and should therefore make their way through it with equal opportunity.

Now, it is your turn. The writer Norman Cousins once observed that there are two types of people in this world. There are those who look at great challenges and answer, no, it isn’t possible. And there are those who look at that same challenges, who see in them hope and possibility, and who answer that none of us knows enough to be pessimistic. Count yourself among the latter. Hold fast to your dreams, strive for excellence in all that you do, and ask yourself daily where, with this one life, you wish to leave your mark. Start your businesses; write your books; turn your ideas into new inventions, new and better ways of doing whatever work you choose. Fill the world with art and music; involve yourself in the life of your community; raise families that reflect who you are and the ideals that you hold closest to your heart. The going will not always be easy. Even so, I urge you to persist—remembering all the while that failure is the handmaiden to success, and that the future is your responsibility.

As you make your way in the world, let me also ask that you remember where you came from and that you reflect on what it means to have been educated at a public university. Let me say that again, so that it’s clear where I place the emphasis: I ask that you reflect on what it means to have been educated at a public university.

You and your families have worked hard for a Carolina education. You sacrificed, you worked summer jobs and sometimes year-round, and you took on debt that you will be repaying for years to come. All so that you could afford tuition, books, and a Carolina meal plan.

Many others whom you have never met sacrificed as well. Look around this gathering. These people, too, invested in your education. As did millions of other North Carolinians—rich and poor, from both North Carolinas—whose taxes support the work that you and I do here. The vast majority of them have never been to Chapel Hill, and in many cases their children will not come here either. Even so, they pay their share—because they love their university, and because they believe in you. You are indebted to those men and women, who ask not that you pay them back, but that you pay forward by living a purposeful and engaged life.

This is indeed the people’s university. Its charge to you was first articulated two hundred years ago at its founding. In 1789, this place was a backwater, a tiny wooded encampment on the margins of the Atlantic world. Even so, its founders held to the values of an enlightened and revolutionary age. They dreamed of a republic—a new social order governed by its citizens rather than a monarch and an hereditary aristocracy. And they recognized that this radical experiment in political and social life required a new form of education—a public university—and an equally new conception of education’s value.

The founders expressed their ideals eloquently in the university’s charter. This institution was established to "consult the happiness of a rising generation, and . . . to fit them for an honorable discharge of the social duties of life, by paying strictest attention to their education."

Those simple words offer a profound insight into the human condition. Our happiness is not merely a private emotion. It derives instead from engagement with others. Happiness is found in the social rituals of our lives: ceremonies such as this commencement, a marriage, the birth of a child, even a funeral’s celebration of life. Happiness is found in the simple, intimate gestures that bind us to one another: the touch of a partner’s hand, a child’s smile, the love of learning that joins student and teacher.

So, too, with education. Education is surely the key to individual opportunity—indeed, we often think of it in those terms and those terms alone—but it is also more than that. This public university is founded on the notion that education is just as much a social good—that the betterment of one life can make better the lives of us all. This is the people’s university, and you are the beneficiaries of its founding vision. You have been afforded here a privilege available to only a tiny fraction of a percentage of the world’s population. What will you make of that gift?

Edward Kidder Graham posed that same question nearly a century ago in a remarkable speech that he entitled "The College and Human Need." Edward Kidder Graham—not to be confused with his more famous cousin Frank Porter Graham—was Carolina’s 8^th president. He served from 1914 to 1919, when he was struck down by the great Spanish Influenza epidemic that followed World War I. In the autumn of 1915, he looked out on an audience of first-year students and asked why they had come to Chapel Hill. Most of his listeners must have thought that a most curious question, but he pressed on. Had they come to prepare for a career in business, medicine, or law? Had they come to win fame as a sports hero? Had they come to excel in the classroom and to claim a Phi Beta Kappa key? If the answer to either of those questions was ‘yes’ and nothing more, then they all, Graham suggested, might consider packing their bags and returning home. Those were all admirable goals, but they were, in Graham’s judgment, modest and incomplete. The higher purpose of a university education, Graham told his audience, was to develop what he called an "intellectual way of life"—one that was restless, always questioning, open to seeing the world in new ways. It was that habit of mind, Graham argued, that would ultimately guarantee individual success and at the same time make students—make you—into leaders capable of leaving their world better than they found it.

I can’t say it any better. To me, this idea defines the very core of the university’s mission. I ask that you hold it close in mind, and that now and then, perhaps during a quiet moment at the end of a busy day, you stop to reflect on its meaning for your own life’s work.

Now, permit me one final request. As you leave this place and make your way in the world, don’t become a stranger. Thomas Wolfe may have been, as he was often quick to remind his classmates, a genius—one of Carolina’s great gifts to the literary world. But he was wrong about one thing: you can come home again. Your parents may disagree—they already have plans for your room—but I ask not only that you come home, but that you come home often.

I tell my students that being a university professor is surely one of the most rewarding jobs anyone could have. We spend our days with you, pursuing ideas, admiring your potential, watching you grow and mature—then you leave. And most often, we never know what became of those encounters we remember so fondly, those heated discussions, those flashes of brilliance. Come home, share with us your triumphs—and your failures. Teach us from your experiences and nurture this institution, so that we might better prepare the way for the generations who follow. You will always be welcome in this place, you will always find family here.

Go and prosper. You are our inspiration and our hope. I wish you peace, love, and the happiness of an engaged and fruitful life. Once again, I congratulate you—and I thank you from a very special place in my heart. Hark the sound.

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