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Past Commencement Speeches 1998

Hazel Barnes, August 1998
Thomas Cech, May 1998

CU Commencement Talk

by Hazel E. Barnes

August 8, 1998

During the thirty-three years that I taught here at the University of Colorado, I learned many things from my students. I have sometimes wondered just what I tried to teach them. I instructed them in subject matter–Greek and Latin, literature, philosophy, general humanities. But it has often been said that along with specific course content, all teachers, intentionally or not, teach values and beliefs, guiding principles that they themselves have lived by. I think this is true. In searching out what these have been in my case, I have found that the most basic were things that came to me from the past but which needed much modification if they were to work in my century. If you were to carry them into the coming century, no doubt they would again need to be restyled and recycled I have had five such assumptions. I give them to you–simply, briefly, without careful examination, defense, or guarantee.

First, despite all the claims of geneticists and deterministic psychologists, I am convinced that at the core of each individual there is a significant degree of responsible freedom. In the very face of Postmodernist claims that what we fondly call a self is nothing but the reflection of the language of others, I stubbornly maintain that–except perhaps where there has been severe brain damage–we are ultimately free agents. We are not just, as some Marxists say, the product of our product. We are our own product. I do not deny the pressure of all that twists and distorts our life worlds. But in spite of everything, I hold that we make ourselves. This is both the agony and the glory of our existence.

Second, I believe that our first responsibility in a world where there is no firm consensus as regards religion or philosophy is to create for ourselves a set of values, or an ethical system, in which we sincerely believe, one by which we are willing to appraise and choose our own actions –in short one to live by. The structure we create should not be so closed off that we lie buried in a cocoon, nor so open as to leave us perched on a weathervane. There will be infinite variation in content. But I am persuaded that a life without some sort of reflective, authentic belief system cannot have integrity, or coherence, or meaning.

Third, I continue to place a high premium on reason or rationality. Reason today does not automatically hold first place with everyone. It has been vigorously attacked as inadequate or even misleading. Personally, I think it is not reason itself but misconceptions of reason that are at fault. If reason is restricted to scientific interpretation of objective evidence, clearly its sphere is limited, however vital in this particular context. But I think only a caricature scientist would treat life situations as if they were laboratory experiments.

Some people confuse respect for reason with the hope of certainty. Postmodernists gleefully point out that, at least in human affairs, no absolute impersonal knowledge is possible. What we declare we know, we only believe. Perhaps so. But the fact that in a certain sense we can only believe does not justify our concluding that all beliefs are equally valid. Nor that persuasive fiction is an acceptable substitute for factual reporting.

A number of feminists have identified rationality with male thought, in a pejorative way,

naturally, not as a compliment. I agree that much of what has passed as self-evidently reasonable has been in reality a reflection of masculine prejudice–or, if we are to put it in the context of racial and ethnic minorities–of self-serving imperialistic calculation. I support the efforts of feminists and multiculturalists to rethink what we have taken to be axiomatic, including the nature and sphere of reason itself. But you note that I say "rethink" not "re-feel" (and I would do so even if such a word as "re-feel" existed). Feelings, emotions, should be taken into account making any decision. It would be irrational not to do so. But while passionate emotions may be the motivational mainspring in any struggle for justice, they cannot by themselves ensure constructive change. It is reason which lays bare the lies and deceptions of the false claims that support oppression. Clearly, reason and rational emotion (yes, I believe there is such a thing) are not mutually opposed and should work together.

Fourth, I cling to the old-fashioned view that concepts such as "humanity," and "human"are still meaningful and can be useful. They have been greatly abused, of course. To identify "humanity'' with the preferred type of any one group is vicious. This was the flaw in the otherwise positive image of the melting pot. Only the white race was allowed to jump into the pot, and it was expected that the final product would be a homogenized stew. It would be a dangerous mistake for any person or group to assume that we can adequately define what humanity is and ought to be–as if we had a blueprint–so as to feel justified in educating and legislating people to meet that ideal. But the notion of "humanity" as something that evolves, something to work toward, may be useful.

Let me explain by reference to the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Most of you must have heard his famous line, "Hell is Others," and I suspect that all of us have too frequently recognized the large grain of truth in that statement. Most of the time, Sartre claims, I meet the Other as someone staring at me, making me an object, judging me, categorizing me. Unfortunately this is the case too often when one national, ethnic, or sexual group looks at another. But this alienating power is not the only aspect of the Look (as Sartre would agree). There is also the Look as Exchange, when in effect each one tries to understand the Other and to be understood by the Other. The proponents of Identity Politics may be correct in claiming that members of one group can never grasp totally, as if from within, the point of view of those differently situated. Still we should not underestimate the degree of empathy that is possible or our ability to appreciate difference. Moreover, the Look has still another dimension–looking at the world together. It is in working together to accomplish ever more inclusive goals that true humanity will emerge. Humankind, like individuals, makes itself.

Fifth and finally, as you might have guessed, I list faith I do not propose faith as the confident belief that some Providence or natural force will work out what is best for us, either as individuals or as a species. While I do not subscribe to the theory that the history of the human race is one of inevitable decline and fall, I do not believe either in the myth of necessary infinite progress. The tale of this century seems to me to preclude both of these extreme views. The faith I hold is more modest: the conviction that the future does not have to be like the past, and a belief in the possibility, not the certainty, that human beings will succeed in making this planet– or any other to which they may eventually go–a more satisfying place to live.

I will conclude by reference to the words of two writers, whose names must be familiar to you, and who have summed up this last point of mine better than I can. I once heard Thomas Mann, the German novelist, remark, "Poor little Man. He walks in the gutter with his eyes on the stars. No wonder he limps!" Albert Camus, the French writer, at the end of his novel The Plague has his leading character conclude that he has found more to admire in human beings than to despise. Camus himself once said that despair at human imperfection is an unjustified cynicism that destroys. "Because," Camus explained, "it deprives human beings of their just measure of meanness and magnificence." To reduce the meanness, to increase the magnificence –that strikes me as a good enough goal for most of us, both personally and collectively.

Vital Contradictions

by Thomas R. Cech

May 1998

Commencement-I've always appreciated the choice of this word for the graduation ceremony. Here you are, busily reflecting on how far you've come, on all that you've accomplished (or, at least endured), and the word "commencement" serves as a reminder that you're about to begin to use your education and the talents you've been developing.

In the spirit of helping you commence with the next stage of your life, I — who have taught many of you in the classroom — cannot bear to pass up the chance to give some advice (and to a largely captive audience!). Superficially, my advice will seem contradictory, but it is advice about life, so perhaps it is fitting.

First, I urge you to be both patient and impatient . On the one hand, patience is a virtue, because building a career, or a relationship takes continued commitment over time. On the other hand, unswerving patience with a flawed situation is a sure road to frustration and to mediocrity.

I'll illustrate with an excerpt from my own life. I was a chemistry major in college, and took great satisfaction with the course work and solving mathematical problems in physical chemistry. Graduate school at University of California at Berkeley was next. But between college and graduate school, I undertook two apprenticeships in physical chemistry, from which I learned one thing: the mechanics of experimental research in this field, when one spends years building a one-of-a-kind instrument before collecting any information about a chemical reaction, was not the sort of work that made me itching to come into the laboratory each morning. This put me in the uncomfortable position of being a first-year chemistry graduate student knowing that I disliked the only kind of chemistry I'd ever tried at the research level. Fortunately, I found a physical chemist who had switched to work on chromosomes and DNA, and the faster pace with which ideas could be tested in this area fit my temperament. To paraphrase Harold Varmus, now Director of the National Institutes of Health, "I came to know the intoxicating power of a measurement carefully made, and the sweet anticipation of testing my own ideas." Had I been much more patient, I might have become a decent physical chemise, but by exercising some impatience I entered a field much more suited to my strengths.

Second, I urge you to be both creative and self-disciplined. These may seem like opposites. Creativity means to do something original, to bring something into existence that was not there before. Self-discipline, on the other hand, means sticking to a task, even if it is long and repetitive, and doing it with precision. Creativity evokes the wild and the free, whereas self-discipline seems tedious and boring.

However, both of these attributes are necessary to achieve the highest levels of success Consider the solo violinist, playing with great individuality and so caught up in the music that he or she seems at one with the wood of the instrument. This requires great creativity, but self-discipline is essential in the long hours of daily practice that preceded the performance.

So, too, it is with scientific accomplishment, and my own story is no exception. When I set up my research program here at the University of Colorado in 1978, my goal was to understand how a particular gene (which is made up of the double helix of DNA) was copied into RNA. While performing these experiments, my research group and I stumbled on something unexpected: the RNA copy seemed to be rearranging its ordered array of subunits (called nucleotides), and doing it in a very specific manner. This appeared to be happening in the absence of any protein enzyme, which was perplexing because it was thought that all biochemical transformations had to be catalyzed by enzymes were proteins.

At this point we allowed ourselves to be diverted from the original goal of the project, and to try to understand this unexpected phenomenon, even though there was no certainty that it would be important. What we found, after another year of painstaking research, was the first example of an RNA molecule that formed an active site to catalyze a biochemical reaction. All biological catalysts were not proteins, after all. Returning to the topic of creativity and self-discipline, they were equally important. Part of the creativity was knowing when to switch directions, while the self-discipline was evident in the long hours of work collecting precise data without knowing exactly where it would lead, and repeating experiments again and again in different variations until we could justify confidence in our conclusions.

My last bit of seemingly contradictory advice: be both respectful of others and appropriately disrespectful. On the one hand, if you disregard those who are more experienced than you, you'll find yourself repeating all the follies of previous generations. On the other hand, with age can come complacency, we learn to find an easy road, and before long we're stuck in a rut. Or, in the words of Mark Twain, "Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul." We of the older generation are counting on you to rethink our you to rethink our tired thoughts, rejuvenate our aging institutions, just as our parents counted on us to shake things up.

Enough personal advice. I'd now like to switch gears, and consider that we live our lives not just as individuals, but as members of a society. And its easy to be cynical about that society, especially about those who govern us, as government continues to provide so much fodder for our cynicism. Edward Everett Hale was once asked, "Do you pray for the Senators, Dr. Hale?", and he replied, "No, I look at the Senators and I pray for the country."

This brings me to our State Legislature. But in my next comments I will forsake saying "they" and use the pronoun "we", for it is we who elect our legislators and it is to us that they are ultimately responsible. We are sitting on the largest budgetary surplus likely to come our way in our lifetimes, and how are we dealing with this opportunity? We are sending each of our fellow taxpayers a refund check for around $50, about enough to buy a family dinner in Boulder, hardly a strategy for transforming our society. And we're considering improvements in our highways. Highways are attractive public works projects because almost all of us appreciate them. The goal is so concrete and predictable: for each thousand dollars you spend, you get a certain number of feet of highway. And the gratification is almost immediate.

Contrast this with spending more money on education, either K-12 or at the university level. The payback may be 20 years down the line, and the benefits of additional educational dollars are not so easily assessed. In fact, it's often said "you can't solve problems of the schools just by throwing money at them." And it's true that money by itself guarantees nothing towards good education. But in all my visits to elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and colleges around the state, I find that the things that money cannot buy –dedicated teachers with energy and innovation, concerned parents anxious to participate in their children’s education–these things that money cannot buy, we already have in abundance. And the things that money can buy–lower student/teacher ratios, better classrooms and dormitories–are expensive, and their effect on education is more subtle than the effect of pavement on our ability to drive from point A to point B.

But if we don’t make an investment in our future now–when Colorado's economy is booming, when employment is about as low as it gets, when tax receipts are overflowing–then when will we make it? Economies are always cyclic, with an unpredictable periodicity. If we don’t invest in the education of our children now, are we going to make that investment during the next economic downturn? I visit California universities quite often, and have watched them go through a cycle of boom, bust and recovery over the past 20 years. The new buildings and even new campuses they built when times were good, the excellent teachers and scholars they recruited to their faculty, provided them the momentum not only to survive an economic downturn, but to emerge from it with full ability to teach children of the burgeoning population at a level unsurpassed in this country.

Now that you are taking up your positions as full members of society, these are the sorts of communal decisions in which you’ll participate, either through your actions or inaction. The decision to invest in education requires courage: there is no single moment of glory the way there are sometimes in a football game.

When I was in college, I heard the Rev. Martin Luther King speak. Both the words he chose and the power of his presentation were riveting. I lack that sort of verbal muscle. But my wishes for your future are no less heartfelt.

So as you commence with the next stage of your life, I urge you to be patient and also impatient, to be creative and at the same time self-disciplined, to be both respectful and appropriately disrespectful and just as I urge you on in you individual lives, I urge you to think and act for the sake of your community. For in this age of mass communication and expanding population, we are all passengers on the same ship.

Thomas R. Cech is distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry and of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where his work has included undergraduate teaching. Cech also is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989 and the National Medal of Science in 1995.