Speech Transcript

Three-time Carolina degree holder J. Walker Smith
delivers doctoral hooding address

Following is the text of, "Finding Your Way," the Doctoral Hooding Address given by J. Walker Smith, President of Yankelovich, Inc., author and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumnus,  Saturday, May 14, on Polk Place.

Thank you for that generous introduction. I am honored by the invitation to speak here today. Thank you very much.

I would like to thank the University and the Graduate School for extending me this invitation to speak. Thanks, too, to Dean Richard Cole, Knight Chair Philip Meyer, and Knight Professor Jane Brown of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, each of whom played a vital role for me during my time here and beyond. Thanks to my parents and in-laws who are here today. And most especially to my wife Joy, a UNC graduate herself, who put me through graduate school and who has been my steadfast partner for almost 27 years, thank you.

I must admit that being on this side of the podium is something I never imagined when I was sitting where you sit today. I’m old enough to have lost all of my hair but not so old that I can’t remember the jubilation and anticipation that come with that final signature on the 100 percent cotton bond title page of your dissertation. And by the way, don’t worry if your doctoral research didn’t turn up anything. Take it from me, when your professors taught you that experiments should be reproducible, what they meant was that they should all fail in the same way! In fact, I always worried that if my graduate research succeeded, my professors would have concluded that I was just using the wrong equipment.

Congratulations to each of you on your great accomplishment. Today is your day. So, celebrate. Brag. Strut. Be proud of your success. Do not let this special day pass without commemorating it in a way that will keep it precious and fresh in your memory forever.

Often throughout my career, I have thought back to my doctoral graduation, although I must confess, with as much disbelief and amazement as with satisfaction and pride. I spent a lot of time in graduate school. Like, a lot of time. You know, Woody Allen joked once that infinity is a long time, especially towards the end. That’s about how long I was trying to stay here in graduate school. In fact, lots of people didn’t think I would ever finish. And were it not for some generous and timely guidance, I might still be here.

Fortunately, though, Dean Cole asked me into his office one crisp fall morning to let me know that my research fellowship would only be available through the end of that academic year. That was a big moment for me because that was the first day in my entire life that I had ever had to think seriously about getting a real job. For the want of six thousand dollars – that’s all it was back then – my long tenure as a UNC student came to an end.

But there was something else going on that day that I couldn’t see at the time. Dean Cole wasn’t just hurrying me along. He saw that I was having trouble finding my way. Not that I felt lost, mind you. Indeed, I felt quite comfortable. It’s only with experience that I’ve come to see that you can be so comfortable, so set in your ways that you can’t find your way forward. That’s where I was and I needed someone to give me a good hard push to get me moving again.

That morning, Dean Cole was offering me some counsel by indirection that prompted me to take a fresh look at the direction in which I was headed. Not only did I find a better path, I began a journey that, to this day, keeps me invigorated by challenging me everyday to keep finding my way.

As a matter of fact, I learned quickly that if I didn’t pay close attention to where I was headed I was going to find my way into some very odd situations.

My first business trip to Chicago was an overnighter, so a graduate school friend from Chicago, who was then living in Miami, insisted that I have dinner with her parents and see the historic house in which she’d grown up. When I got into town her parents told me which train to take to their suburb and said they’d meet me at the station.

I left my hotel early so I was able to get on the train before the one they’d told me to take. I figured I’d just get there and wait. When I got off at my stop, I saw a car across the tracks with an older couple in it staring hard at me. I’d met her parents only once before, so I wasn’t sure if I recognized this couple. They pointed at me quizzically and I shrugged, and that seemed to connect us. We hugged and shook hands and patted each other on the back. They said they were expecting me on the next train. Ah, I thought, this confirms it. I explained I’d left the hotel early. They said their daughter had talked so highly of me and they recognized me because I was as blonde as she’d said. (That’s when I had hair.) The only disquieting thing was that the woman kept calling me Mike. But I just thought my name had slipped her mind for a moment.

Then they said we should get to the restaurant. Well, that struck me as odd because we’d planned to eat at their house, which I’d come to see. But if that’s what they wanted to do, so be it.

As we were driving off, the next train was approaching, and just then the man leaned across his wife to point to another man standing on the platform. I looked over, too, and was so shocked I forgot to breathe for a second or two. There was my friend’s father! I recognized him instantly from the one time I’d met him. He was looking down the track at the train I was supposed to be on and here I was in the backseat of a moving car with two strangers!

Just then, the woman turned and said to me, "Well, Mike…" I sat straight up and said I was sorry, but my name wasn’t Mike. My head whipsawed back and forth as the car jerked to a stop. I said I was supposed to meet that other man and I had to go. I closed the door on their stunned faces and sprinted up behind my friend’s father before he could see where I’d come from.

I hailed him and he turned to me with surprise. As we spoke, I had a moment of intense déjà vu as he and I began having exactly the same conversation I’d just finished: "Weren’t you supposed to be on the next train? Our daughter speaks so highly of you. I was looking for your blonde hair." I nodded to everything while slowly coaxing him to his car to make my getaway. Dinner that night was an out of body experience.

Back home, I swore my wife Joy to secrecy, sure that this would go undiscovered in a big city like Chicago. A week later, my friend phoned, saying she’d just gotten off the phone with her dad. She paused. He’d been to the barber that day. A casual acquaintance of his was there, too, who turned around on his way out the door and said that this really odd thing had happened to him at the train station the week before, at which point he proceeded to tell the story of this blond stranger who’d hugged his wife and gotten into his car to head off with them to dinner. I was found out!

I’ve never lived that down. In fact, that episode is a microcosm of my entire career since graduate school. I have discovered that it is all too easy in life to get off track, to get into the wrong car and almost not look out the window as you’re driving away. So, if I could humbly offer you one small bit of counsel about what to expect in the years to come, it is that your biggest challenge is going to be finding your way.

When I left graduate school, I thought that all I needed to conquer the world was the multivariate analysis of variance. Finding my way was going to be that simple. And in some respects it has been. Naïveté is certainly one way of simplifying hard decisions. But naïveté is not really the best approach. It took me time to learn to navigate. There are three guideposts I’ve discovered that I now tell others to look to in order to stay on course.

The first of these is pretty obvious. Look to curiosity not comfort to find your way. Which is to say that the driving force in your career, indeed, in your life, should be a commitment to discovery.

Not that comfort is unimportant. But comfort is best realized as the byproduct of a curious mind. In fact, the paradox of comfort is that when it takes precedence over everything else, it is least assured. When you put comfort first, you are actually in the least comfortable position.

The advance of any science or intellectual discipline requires that every new answer be followed by yet another tough question. What we learn in graduate school is not just the body of knowledge in our fields but a methodology of discovery and invention, too. First and foremost, we learn how to do research, how to answer questions in our fields of study, how to follow our curiosity. This is why you are here today – you have been following your curiosity – so keep homing in on that signal because it leads to true north.

If it sounds like I believe that being assertive is a virtue, that’s because I do. To find your way, you will have to put yourself in charge. This is the second guidepost, and it sits at a fork in the road that I missed the first time I came to it. I had to learn from experience to always ask for the job. Never wait for someone to hand it to you. Declare yourself. Ask for the job.

In my second job, I worked in the marketing research group for a consumer packaged goods company. The crown jewel of the company was a brand called Spray ‘N’ Wash. The most coveted job in middle management was the position of senior brand manager running this business.

One year, this position came open. Three people were generally regarded as the leading candidates for this job and speculation was rife about which one of them would be chosen. But weeks passed without a decision. At one point, just for fun, a chemist in R&D handicapped the three people being discussed and started an informal betting pool. Before put I my dollar down, though, I wanted better information, so I arranged a lunch date with the marketing VP who would make the final decision.

As Jim and I were driving back from lunch, I asked him outright who he was planning on promoting. A severe look came over his face as he answered me. "You know, Walker, I’m not really sure. The disappointing thing is that no one has come to me and asked for the job. You’d think that at least one person would step up and tell me that he or she was eager for this responsibility and challenge. Several people in this company have the right resume, but I want the person with the confidence and the brass to ask for the job. So, to answer your question," he concluded, "I don’t know."

I have told this tale dozens of times. Steer your own ship. Otherwise, you’re just a victim of circumstance, buoyed along without a rudder wherever the currents carry you. You might get washed up on a tropical paradise, but more likely you’re going to get dashed on the reef.

And by the way, no one ever asked Jim for that Spray ‘N’ Wash job. So in the end, it was offered to a dark horse a level below that of the three leading candidates.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating conniving selfishness. In fact, I want to advocate just the opposite. I only mean that you must take a hand in finding your way, and as you do so, be sure to lend a hand along the way, too. This is the final guidepost for finding your way. Just as we are committed to ourselves, so, too, should we commit something of ourselves to others.

My grandfather received his medical degree in 1906 (although, from another Southern state university). He practiced for over fifty years in a small Alabama town. When he began his practice, this town was a bustling stop on a busy state highway. One year, though, a runaway barge crashed into the bridge to the south over which this highway crossed on its way to the biggest city in that part of the state. The bridge was never rebuilt. Commercial traffic was re-routed and the town never recovered. But my grandfather never left. He felt he was needed where he was and he preferred the comforts and kinship of that community to the possibility of riches elsewhere.

Times were often hard in that part of Alabama during the first half of the last century. My grandfather struggled as much as everyone else. One of my aunts described what it was like in an essay she wrote about him for an assignment in graduate school. "When Daddy was paid at all," she wrote, "he was paid largely in produce raised on farms. Some of my fondest childhood recollections are the times that my brother and I raced to the front gate to meet Daddy in order to see whether he had brought in, as his fee for the day, a pig, a goat, or another gallon of syrup." My grandfather raised cotton for cash to settle his debts. He practiced medicine to minister to the health and wellbeing of his neighbors in that little community. Whatever their position or status, whatever their race or religion, whatever their ability to pay, my grandfather doctored to them all.

In her essay, my aunt wrote, "Daddy never sought to lay up riches; he merely wanted to be independent." I have always regarded this as the best definition of success, financial or otherwise. It is the kind of ambition that puts greed to shame and that reminds us that selflessness is the only sure path to self-improvement. My grandfather was rich beyond compare not because of what he brought in but because of what he gave away.

Service is a huge part of the grand tradition of this university, too. Look around one more time before you bid adieu to this beautiful campus. Many of the buildings here are named for those whose achievements included a large measure of service and selflessness – Venable, Graham, Battle, Swain, Wilson, Bingham, Murphey, Phillips, Manning, Caldwell, Morehead, Kenan, just to name a few. And the commitment of this university to service is not just a thing of the past. It remains as strong as ever, which is why – just to mention one example – the Graduate School gives out the IMPACT awards, as they are called. The IMPACT awards recognize and honor graduate students whose research has had a direct impact on improving the wellbeing and quality of life for the citizens of North Carolina.

Your service and leadership will be crucial to our future. The challenges ahead of us are unprecedented and immense. You are the generation of leaders with the cutting edge skills and contemporary perspectives needed to take on these challenges. Old, balding baby boomers like me are looking to you for fresh ideas and new solutions. We welcome your leadership.

To meet these challenges you will all of your talents and training. Most of all, you will need every bit of what you have learned in graduate school about solving problems. The problems and opportunities ahead are going to require scrupulous, fact-based investigation and action. Yet, don’t take this for granted. Securing and shielding the independence to solve problems in this way is the challenge ahead that towers above the rest.

This challenge is not about a particular problem to solve; rather, it is about the nature of problem solving itself. Simply put, what you have learned here in graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is under mounting criticism and attack. From the fundamentals of doing research to the teaching and dissemination of the findings and applications of research, a new wave of anti-intellectualism is being fomented that seeks to subordinate the scientific advance of knowledge to political agendas and ideological creeds.

Reactionary, even benighted ideas are being given equal footing with the precise, methodical work that you have been taught to practice. This is just plain wrong.

So, you must not shirk from speaking out in support of science, of genuine, valid research, and of fact-based knowledge and decision-making. If you don’t ask for this job, you may find yourself thwarted in all of your jobs and professional endeavors by sanctimonious social pressures. You must insist on being allowed to find your way by following your curiosity, for this will determine the service you are able to give back to others.

Ensconced here in Chapel Hill, it’s easy to overlook just how special a place this is. But what makes it special should be employed to lift the lives of everyone, not just those of us lucky enough to have spent time here. The uncompromising commitment of this university to students, scholarship and service is a heritage that is now your inheritance to invest in the future. Please use it wisely and well.

Congratulations again to each of you on your achievements. I salute you and I thank you for your hard work and dedication. And whenever you feel lost, whenever your direction seems unsure, whenever you’re about to get into the wrong car, look here to this priceless gem in the old North State. Chapel Hill is with you forever. It will always be here to help you find your way.

Ladies and gentlemen, go Heels!

Thank you very much.

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