Speech Transcript

Lensing addresses Carolina graduates 
in December commencement speech

Following are excerpts from Dr. George S. Lensing’s prepared remarks for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s mid-year commencement ceremony, held Dec. 19 in the Dean E. Smith Center. Lensing is a noted author and the Bowman and Gordon Gray professor of English in UNC's College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Office of Distinguished Scholarships.

My warmest congratulations to the Class of 2004.5! To Abby Spector, who I understand is in the audience today and who has courageously overcome severe and life-threatening health problems to arrive at this day in her life—a special greeting and congratulation.

To those of you who have been hanging out at He’s Not Here and giving that phone number to Mom and Dad so that, when they call, the bartender can say, "He’s not here," perhaps today you can explain to them what that establishment really is! And to Mom and Dad and step-Moms and step-Dads and all the family and friends of the graduates, a most gracious welcome. I know the graduates join me in thanking you for the difficult sacrifices you have made and the support and encouragement you have given them in order to bring them to this grand day. Welcome to this House of Dean Smith, currently presided over by Roy Williams and a very good nationally-ranked men’s basketball team and in Carmichael Auditorium, a very good and nationally-ranked women’s basketball team!

Much has happened to our campus since you undergraduates arrived four years ago—well, I’ll say approximately four years ago! Many of you graduate and professional students have also been here several years. You are really the first graduating class of the new century. Carolina, our "priceless gem," is in a special way your "priceless gem" today. You have dodged barriers and detour-signs seemingly everywhere on campus as the physical structure of this place is undergoing a reinvention. UNC--what my colleague Chris Armitage has renamed as the University of Never-Ending Construction! Cell phones have invaded and totally conquered the campus -- single-handedly! Not long ago I noted a pair of students coming out of Davis Library, hand-in-hand, but in each of the other hands was a cell phone held to their ears, and I don’t think they were talking via phone to each other. I just hope there weren’t other romances simultaneously in progress on those cell phones. Such is 21^st-century romance.

A little metallic and cold, wouldn’t you say? You, like me, observed the public objections to the assigned summer reading books, especially Approaching The Qur-an and Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. We as a university quite rightly stood up for our right to explore works that presented other religions and other parts of the world different from the ones that the majority of us know, even if those books fomented some pretty heated controversy. We have enacted important changes in our student honor code that have both strengthened the student-run judicial system and reawakened our personal commitments to the role of honor in our community. The oldest honorary society on campus, The Order of the Golden Fleece, celebrated its centennial anniversary in March, and Rebecca Williford, one of its leaders, is here today. Congratulations, Rebecca. Some of you have protested tuition increases in the halls of the General Assembly in Raleigh as the costs of your education seemed yearly to soar ever higher.

I wonder how many of you were in Kenan Stadium that Saturday night in 2001 when our football team defeated then sixth-ranked Florida State by a score of 41-9 — and this past October when we beat fourth-ranked Miami.

Of course each of us will remember where we were that beautiful late summer morning, September 11, 2001, when we first heard of the terrorist attacks. I remember thinking that morning that this was the real beginning of the new century. Our country was permanently changed following those events and so were our lives here. Some good things were born on that tragic day. It may interest you to learn that the number of students here studying first-year Arabic has tripled in the last three years.

This fall, Carl Ernst’s Introduction to Islamic Civilization class had 120 students, with dozens of others, as he says, turned away. I think there is a healthy new interest among our students in studying foreign languages generally. Your generation understands perhaps better than mine that we as Americans cannot live in haughty isolation from the other languages and cultures of the world. [Interrupted by applause] The growing number of Hispanic immigrants into our state and region has brought home to you the need to learn their language — and some of you out there experienced how difficult it was to get into Spanish 1 and 2. Of those of you graduating today, at least one in three of you has spent a semester, a summer, or longer studying abroad -- 34.6 percent of last year’s class studied abroad--up from 21 percent only three years earlier. UNC is now ranked seventh in the U.S. among all institutions of higher education, public and private, in total number of undergraduates studying abroad. [Interrupted by applause]

And so, as you look over your shoulder in bidding your farewells to Carolina, what lies ahead? I will speak briefly to you as a professor of twentieth-century poetry who has taught Carolina students for more than three decades — the whole of my career. What a privilege that has been! As we have read and pondered many of the great poets and great poems of the century, I am confident that I as the professor and they as the students have learned from each other because all readers bring their unique life-experiences to a work of art.

Year after year I have gone back to the poems of an Irish poet of the past century, William Butler Yeats, and the poem "Among School Children" has been a particular favorite. I tend to take it up in class very near the end of the semester because it captures many of the themes of the course.

The poem presents Yeats as a senator in the newly formed Irish Free State in the 1920s, standing among school children whom he is inspecting in his role as a senator. He is conscious of his advancing age, and, there amid the schoolgirls, his thoughts go back to his passion of many years for Maud Gonne, the beautiful but stubborn political radical who refused every one of his marriage proposals because of her first and fiery dedication to the cause of Irish independence. Then, with something of a letdown, he remembers her in the disfigurements of her present old age. He thinks also of a mother, giving birth to a son, but imagining the mother’s own disappointment at seeing the son years later with the "winters" of old age upon his head. Finally, he thinks of nuns, one of whom is instructing the schoolchildren before him — nuns who create their own images of religious hope but whose statues and icons commemorate only a cold "marble or bronze repose." In this very dark mood, Yeats, reflecting on his own life and its disappointments, then speaks in summary fashion of "passion, piety and affection." He recalls the passion of his own love of Maud Gonne, the piety of the nuns, and the affection of a mother for her newly-born child. All lead to some disappointments and frustration. But, he adds, passion, piety and affection, which seem to mock us and our earthly human actions, also -- as the poem says -- "symbolize all heavenly glory," as if to say that these workings of the human heart may cast us down in defeat but they also raise us up toward heavenly glory and triumph.

I mention this about "Among School Children" today because I feel sure that each of you has already experienced in your own life and in your own heart the stirrings of passion, piety, and affection. I want to suggest that your education at Carolina has been successful if your studies, along with your personal life experiences, have offered you some glimpses of insight into the workings of these three great human actions.

Perhaps you have been in love or are in love. I could wish nothing better for you. Perhaps you are contemplating marriage or a permanently committed relationship, or perhaps marriage seems to you that gigantic, weighty, crushing ball-and-chain to be avoided as long as possible! How, you may be asking, can I incorporate passion as a vital part of my life and, at the same time, honor its commitments and necessary self-sacrifices? How can I temper passion with reason and good judgment so that, if I choose to make a lifetime commitment, I can make the right choice? Perhaps you have learned something about passion, its dangers and its joys, from Shakespeare, or Tolstoy, or Dante, or The Odyssey, or the stories of Abelard and Heloise or even, in the last century, Edward VIII who gave up the British throne to marry Mrs. Simpson, or, closer to home, the lovers-partners-spouses you have observed among your own family and friends.

Another example of the triumph of passion could be cited, and it is from our University’s own history. At the end of the Civil War and following the surrender of the Confederacy, the thirty-year-old Brigadier General Smith B. Atkins of Illinois, representing the conquering army, occupied the town of Chapel Hill. One of his first actions was to call on the president of the University, David L. Swain, after whom our Swain Hall is named. In the President’s home that evening he met Ellie, aged twenty-one, Swain’s beautiful daughter, and he fell immediately in love. So taken was he by this fetching young beauty that he sent the regimental band to serenade her each evening in President Swain’s front yard. The romance and courtship flourished in what might have been an ideal model for political reconciliation in post-Civil War America instead of the years of bitter Reconstruction that otherwise lay ahead. The couple was wed in Chapel Hill about three months later, but, as you might suspect, not without controversy and opposition. Cornelia Spencer attended the ceremony and recorded: "Invitations were spat upon in one or two houses. . . . The only way one can find an apology for it all is to believe honestly in the love which appears to have brought it about. Let us think and speak respectfully of a genuine love affair."

Our passions in life can take many forms. They may involve a commitment to another person, but they can also define a deep devotion to our work, to one of the arts, to a sport or hobby, or to working for greater justice in the world. I suspect that many of you graduate and professional students in a special way have come to love the study of your discipline, and that love, too, will perhaps become a life-time commitment.

Piety, or how we respond to the presence of a transcendent reality in our lives, is an intensely personal thing, for no two of us exactly the same and for all of us hard and exacting at times. Perhaps your studies here have shown you how excessive religious zeal can lead to intolerance and even great bloodshed, as it did during the Crusades, during the Reformation, and as it threatens to do in the decades before us now and is already doing in our own historical moment--from Northern Ireland to the Middle East and Iraq. Those of us who are Christians believe that faith is an unearned gift, and those of us who have tried to live by it know how it waxes and wanes in day-to-day and year-to-year living. For the poet Hopkins "the world is charged with the grandeur of God," while the philosopher Nietzsche declared Him dead. My wish for you would be that your search for the pieties of your life however you understand them, the God of your salvation however you define Him, and the peace that transcends the world as you know it would be one that you will always pursue freely and bravely.

No one will dispute the need for affection in our lives, and I can imagine that part of the sadness you feel on this day of celebration is the taking leave of friends who have become very special to you. If you will allow me to quote Yeats once more--this time as he reflected back on his long life: "Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, / And say my glory was I had such friends." Affection sustains us all, day after day; we could not survive without it. You mark this occasion as a new turning in your life, a new beginning; we call it a commencement. As you reach out to others in the months ahead to forge new friendships and affections, I want to encourage you to move outside your own comfortable world and make up your mind to seek out genuine personal bonds with people of other races, other sexual orientations, other nationalities and cultures, other ages and generations, other political and religious convictions, other social classes.

My own model for this kind of openness to others who are different is a friend I knew when he was a student here, Rye Barcott, Class of 2001. During the summer following his junior year, Rye traveled to Kenya and lived in East Africa’s largest slum, called Kibera. He had won a Burch Fellowship from UNC to do research there. Living among the poorest of the poor, he came to know many of the inhabitants there as personal friends, especially local youth leaders. They nicknamed him Omondi, meaning "born very early in the morning," because he would jog in the early morning hours throughout the slum. Before returning to Chapel Hill to write his honors thesis on the conditions of the slum, he made a resolution to himself. He knew he wanted to raise money to assist the kids in the slum to help their soccer league and to draw them into community service. The following Christmas he said to himself, "Let’s just start an organization." Thus was born "Carolina for Kibera," and with some funds from the UNC Center for International Studies, he returned there the following summer. His open and engaging personality, along with his dedication and hard work, has brought about a remarkable achievement. As the Carolina Alumni Review reports, "What started as an effort to find youths who could serve as core leaders and essentially run Carolina for Kibera from Kibera blossomed into an organization of 10,000 with spin-offs like a girls’ soccer league, a medical clinic, a library and a community center for young girls that teaches HIV/AIDS prevention. Carolina for Kibera operates with only three paid, full-time staff, all in Kibera: a program coordinator, a youth coordinator, and medical clinic director named Tabitha Festo. All of this on $50,000 a year."

We cannot all be Rye Barcotts, nor do we need to work in the slums of Africa. The ties of affection that we create can be far more local and responsive to the world as we know it just down the block, or where we work, or where we play--but, at the same time, embracing those who are different from and even contrary to our own familiar backgrounds and habits. I believe that in the more-or-less 120 hours of course-work you have completed as an undergraduate and its equivalent for you graduate students, all under the direction of our superb faculty, and in your exposure to a culture and population on this campus that is increasingly diverse and inclusive you are richly prepared to proceed to the next stages of your life. You do not leave Carolina but take it with you.

The words of St. Paul to Romans two thousand years ago can be a kind of guide for us in living our lives of passion, piety and affection today: "Let your love be without pretense. . . . Love one another with fraternal charity, anticipating one another with honor. . . . Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep. Be of one mind towards one another. . . . Be not wise in your own conceits. To no man render evil for evil, but provide good things not only in the sight of God, but also in the sight of all men."

Robert Frost says that "home is where/ when you go there, / they have to take you in." Carolina, is truly now your own home and will, not just take you in, but always welcome you back in the years ahead. As you leave us now, please take with you these final sentiments from all of us here on the platform, as well as faculty, family, and friends:

May your dreams be bold and audacious;

May you love and never count the cost;

May you heal a broken world with a passion for justice;

And may Carolina always be your priceless gem.

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Contact:  Lisa Katz, (919) 962-2093