Home >> Past Commencement Speeches >>

Past Commencement Speeches 1999

• David M. Prescott, December 1999
• David Hawkins, August 1999
• Dennis Van Gerven, May 1999

On Learning, Wisdom and the Game of Pinball

David M. Prescott

December 18, 1999

Forty-nine and a half years ago, I sat where you're sitting now, but at a different university. Travel from that commencement forty-nine and a half years ago to this platform has been circuitous, varied, interesting, sometimes meandering. Goals change, plans change and circumstances change. Sometimes, life seemed and seems like a pinball game. You're a steel ball bouncing around from one cushion or obstacle to the next, sometimes coming to rest briefly in some pocket, only to be suddenly propelled out of that pocket back into the field of events. The game of pinball may be unknown to some of you — it was a mindless amusement of yesterday that preceded today's mindless amusement of video games. My own professional life proceeded in a zigzag course, without much apparent plan, and I suspect that for many of you, it's going to be the same way. Random events seem to push one first in one direction and then in another, and I'll tell you a little story about that. Many, many years ago during September, I was sitting by a lake in a park in Copenhagen pondering my future, feeding pieces of bread to the swans. I was living in the youth hostel at that time in Copenhagen, and someone had stolen my winter coat. That coat had seen good service through the previous north European winter, and that was my problem. I didn't have money to buy another one, but I'm not going to finish that story now. You'll have to wait until the end and see how the theft of that coat changed my life. Going back to my professional journey, my overriding sense is that it's been a very brief one. When one is young, the years seem to stretch endlessly in front of one. There is plenty of time for everything one dreams of doing. But one's life is not nearly long enough to achieve and experience all of the things that we vaguely plan or want to do. Perhaps during the next century, biological research may give humans more time with longer life spans by conquering various diseases. Just think. A child born a hundred years ago in 1900 could expect to live on average 48 years. A child born this year can expect to live 77 years. More than a 50% increase. But for you, life expectancy is over 80 because you have already passed by many of the hazards that reduce our numbers. Scientists now seriously theorize that the aging process could be slowed, and humans could live to an age of 150 or 200 years, in which case a 50-year-old would be like a 25-year-old today, and a 100-year-old would be like a 50-year-old today. Is that good or bad? What would the world be like if the average life span were 200 years? Considering all the stresses of living in the modern world, would the brain suffer overload and most people go crazy by age 120 or 130, or would living so long give us time to become truly wise?

I ask you to think back a little bit on your years at CU. You have been through four or more years of hard intellectual work, hoarding up a great store of knowledge. By any measure you have completed a major achievement. It was never easy, I think you will agree. It demanded discipline of the mind to focus on goal after goal in course after course, overcoming time after time the chaos of thoughts that relentlessly takes over as soon as discipline over the mind takes a little holiday. The mind, in a sense, has a mind of its own, with a strong predilection to chaos and to laziness. Making it do honest, hard work and to perform rationally is a constant struggle, and thinking of all the knowledge that you acquired in these last few years reminds me of an amusing comment Mark Twain made about the education of his own father. When Mark Twain was 17, he thought his father was about the stupidest man he had ever met. Four years later when Mark Twain was 21, he then thought his father was one of the smartest men he had ever met. And Mark Twain was absolutely amazed at how much his father had learned in just four years.

So, what have you learned in your years at CU? Reflect a little on how you have changed, if you can remember back to what you were when you entered CU. What, if anything, inspired or excited you? What values and perhaps passions did you acquire? How has your intellect changed? How have your attitudes about anything and everything changed? Knowing what you know now, would you do it again or would you do it differently? You have hoarded away a remarkable amount of knowledge from your CU experience. But if we on the faculty have served you well, we've made your world a far more interesting place than you thought it to be when you came here. If we the faculty have succeeded, you have become infected with greater curiosity, and we have driven you to a lifelong addiction to the enjoyment of learning and thinking.

Knowledge is important. It is the foundation of wisdom, but it is not wisdom. I know knowledgeable people who lack wisdom, very knowledgeable people. The dictionary says wisdom is the exercising of good sense and good judgment. Of course, good sense and good judgment are defined by what people practice when they agree with you. It's sometimes difficult to understand why people disagree with you. These seemingly simple abilities of good sense and good judgment come through long experience in wrestling with the complexities of life. CU has given you a gentle, small push toward wisdom, toward disciplined, rational thinking and now, it's up to you. You're on your own. Wisdom is impaired and extinguished by mental inattention, indifference and laziness. When such behaviors become habit, they produce bias, prejudice, tunnel vision and preconceived notions of truth. I relate the crippling effect of mental inattention in scientific research by a personal experience I had years ago when I was a graduate student at the University of California in Berkeley. One of my fellow students needed to develop an assay for the activity of an enzyme in embryonic cells, an enzyme called DNase. This enzyme destroys DNA. The strategy was simple, grind up some cells, which contain DNase, add a known amount of DNA, wait a while, isolate any DNA that was left and see how much of the DNA had been destroyed. A simple idea. In trial after trial the result was the same; the student recovered more DNA than she had added. Very frustrating! All of us graduate students working in the same lab tried to help. Try this. Try that. But the result was always the same — too much DNA in the end. The student abandoned the project in frustration. All of us intelligent students were so blinded by our tunnel vision and preconceived ideas about how things ought to work that we failed to see the enormous importance of the results — this student had discovered a way to detect and measure the enzyme that makes DNA, not destroys it, an enzyme known as DNA polymerase, far more important than DNase. About 15 years later, a scientist at another university was awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA polymerase, the enzyme that makes DNA. How often is our reasoning trapped by laziness of the mind, by the self deception of preconceived notions about truth, by inattention and indifference, whether the context is science, the environment, politics, social issues, or the sometimes irrationality of authority.

About my winter coat. So it was September, and winter was imminent, and I didn't want to go through another Europe winter without a coat and I didn't have, as I said, money to buy another one so I was wrestling with whether to go to Southern Italy or Southern Spain for the winter. I decided on Spain and got up and started to walk to Spain. On the way out of Copenhagen I passed by the Zoology building and remembered that I knew a Professor of Zoology whom I had met at Yale University a year earlier. On an impulse, a whim, I decided to stop in and say hello and as I came into the building he was leaving. Thirty seconds later I would have missed him. In any case, we had lunch, he lent me a coat, persuaded me to stay, got a fellowship from the Danish government for me to work in his lab for a year, and then convinced me to go to graduate school at the University of California in Berkeley. So the theft of that winter coat was one of those little bounces in the pinball machine that changed the course of my life. I'm not sure what would have happened if I had managed to get to Southern Spain.

To sum up, develop and use that personal computer that sits on your shoulder. Use it to its fullest potential, it's better and more powerful than any computer that will sit in front of you. But don't be distressed if life is like a pinball machine. It's a lot more interesting that way, and in the long run you will succeed. And remember this comment by Robert Frost, by working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day. Be happy, do well and again, my sincere congratulations for your success and achievements at CU! We are really very, very proud of you.

Back to top

Graduation Address

David Hawkins

August 1999

I want to thank Chancellor Byyny for choosing me as your commencement speaker. And on this fine morning I wish first of all to congratulate you on the successful completion -or occasionally perhaps the successful avoidance, of your academic duties.

Commencements come every year; but this one, and the others of just this year, come in the last days of the twentieth century; what our computer types have taught us to call the Y2K. So you will be the young adults of a new century, indeed of a new millennium. It was a good many of us, not just our computer programmers, who thought our century was all of history. None of that has been your doing, so I'll bestow on you a new title, if you wish an add-on to the diploma: I'll dub you Kids of the Y2K. There you will be in that new age, with all your four-digit chips in place: two for the century, two for the year.

We need, in short, a sense of history, and a sense for the future. You all have read the words of CU's former great President, George Norlin, over the west face of the library: "He who knows only his own time remains always a child." Norlin was a classics scholar and historian. He knew more of the past than most, and he knew, better than most, the needs of the future. When many still did not, he got the full measure of the Ku Klux Klan. Far sooner than most he very early read the full intent of Adolf Hitler., The Nazi movement, he said, was a religion of lost souls.

And now, as you well know, the processes of history have speeded up. Robert Oppenheimer put it so: the greatest novelty of our age is the sheer fact of novelty itself. You Y2K kids know many of these, but here is one small beginning I'll bet you don't know about, that of our present-day computers, about to take over the whole world. Computers of one kind or another are ancient, as old as the Chinese abacus. But their programs always had to be hardwired , as we say.

It was the idea of John von Neuman, a famous mathematician, that you could write any program you wished, along with the job of computation it would do, at the same time on the same electronic typewriter. Like many important ideas, it came from one who could cast a wide net. Von Neuman got the idea from a study of the behavior of the jellyfish. It has no nervous system, nothing hardwired. I heard Von Neuman describe this computer in 1944. Well before it actually existed. It didn't use jellyfish, of course; but instead a big electronic array with many vacuum tubes, so many the room it filled had to be air-conditioned. Then came the extraordinary miniaturization, and the labors of Silicon Valley. From that beginning its little more than half a century to the worldwide computer network of today. And to what novelties, in turn, does that lead us?

It was less than half a century from the discovery of radioactivity to Hiroshima. So of course we must ask, what novelties are yet to come?

The Greek goddess of wisdom, Minerva, had an owl, an owl that would overfly the world and report back to her, on its achievements and its tragedies. But that story, of Minerva and her owl, was an ironic one. Owls sleep in the day and fly off only with the setting sun; they come home to roost in the early morn. So Minerva's owl brings wisdom, but it often comes too late.

Robert Oppenheimer, leader of those who made the bomb, also gave the rest of his life to persuade the work that nuclear weapons were too big to be used in war. But it took fifty years of the Cold War, of hair-trigger danger, for us to learn that; almost too late. So you won't soon be rid of the twentieth century, even when it's past.

But now go back still further, way back to the end of the last great ice age. If we number the centuries form those times, our chips would need five digits, not just four. If we count them up from the time of the cave-painters of Lascaux, in southern France, our century upcoming would not be Y2K, but more like Y25K, two hundred fifty centuries. In human generations, it's about a thousand of them.

Frances Hawkins and I went to the ice-age caves of Lascaux many years ago, luckily before they had to close them to visitors. We spent a whole day studying the paintings in those caves; and we knew we were in the presence, that far back in time, of great art.

But let me return to your years here with us.

Some economists think the cost of your higher education is just for job training, and that's just an enormous howler! MIT students who didn't just train for jobs but had fun along the way, with other kinds of interests, also had better jobs twenty years later; they had helped create them!

So as I finish I want to say one more thing about your life in Y25K. It will be the first time since the ice age that the number of human beings will stop increasing. We can pretty well project that, and the planet's not big enough for more. That's challenge for all, rich countries and poor alike. We can conjure up sad images of self-destruction when food is not enough. We've already seen some that, in tropical Africa.

But there is one of our novelties that can profoundly help, along the way. It is, again, the Internet. Many of you, I'm sure are already addicted to it. It can be fun, it can bring enlightenment or wickedness, but it can't be suppressed by governments; and against tyranny it can be subversive. It is utterly democratic. Think what this means as it spreads, even in countries where news is now rigidly controlled. It is incurably democratic, and that's something we'll always need more of.

And now, at the end do these few remarks, let me finally go back to the words of George Norlin. To a graduating class long ago, he said something like this: "When we bid you farewell, it is not to say Good-bye, but to express our great hope: that you may fare well!"

Back to top

Life and the Sockeye Salmon

by Dennis Van Gerven

Commencement Address to the Class of 1999

I am fascinated by sockeye salmon. In the prime of their lives they become compelled to swim up great rives from the sea where their bodies are smashed by rocks and torrents of rushing water. They swim and swim and swim and all they get out of it is a brief moment to mate and then die. I suspect that the only urge in all of nature more powerful than the urge calling sockeye salmon to their doom is the urge calling old people to give young people advice at graduation.

I am fighting that urge right now by imagining you as bright new automobiles leaving some Detroit auto-plant. The image is not without its terrors. First of all, CU would be required to provide some sort of warranty. Now there is a frightening thought. I can see the news releases — Sociologists discover faulty theory — 5,000 CU graduates recalled. New fossil ancestor discovered in Kenya 10,000 paleontology degrees recalled nationwide.

But the image also leaves me wondering about your equipment. What should we have installed in you as standard equipment? I can think of three things that you should all have in working order.

First and foremost, I hope you are equipped to make a fuss.

This is a tough installation for us because it requires deactivating part of the equipment you came here with. Every one of you came to CU with two powerful beliefs and your parents installed these beliefs early in your childhood:

First, always wear clean underwear in case you get in an accident and have to go to the hospital and

Second, don’t make a fuss.

I can live with the clean underwear requirement, but I hope that you have now been installed with a serious capacity for fuss-making. From now on, I want politicians and newscasters everywhere afraid to talk about silly issues in the presence of any CU graduate for fear that you will make a fuss. I want that fear to flourish until Americans have solved the pressing problems of overpopulation, over-consumption, pollution, sexism, genderism, and racism.

Think about just one piece of the racism puzzle. The average difference in life expectancy between Black and White Americans today is on the order of 5 years. That difference is smaller that in the past but lets use it. Add to that number another number. There is presently some 33.5 million Black people in the US. Putting aside the staggering accumulation of lost years since the slave trade, the shortened life span of these 33.5 million Americans is equal to obliterating the total lives of over 2 million people.

Calculating similar numbers many years ago, an anthropologist named S. L. Washburn made this point and it is still true today, the great evil of racism is that it kills every day and it kills by custom. I hope that you are equipped to MAKE A FUSS ABOUT THAT.

Some years ago one of my honors students studied health care among the urban poor in Denver. One of the things she discovered was this. Young women often wait in the parking lots of hospitals until they are far enough into labor to be admitted as emergencies because they cannot be admitted without insurance as obstetric patients. I what you to MAKE A FUSS ABOUT THAT.

A few weeks ago one of the news channels did a feature on a young Albanian child who had lost everything including her parents. She was sitting in a camp somewhere in Macedonia. As the TV camera closed in on her sweet face the reporter made a touching statement. He said this — this child’s face is the face of every child trapped in this horror.

Here is my diversity plan for the University of Colorado. I want to send 2,000 young men and women out of here every year who see the face of a young woman waiting in a Parking lot of some hospital as every woman’s face. I want 2,000 CU graduates to see the face of one young man tied to a fence and beaten to death because he was gay as every person’s face. And when you see those faces I want you well equipped to make a fuss.

As for your second piece of equipment, I hope that you are well equipped to use your time well.

Here is some interesting news. If you work 8 hours a day 5 days a week with a 3-week vacation each year until you are 70, your time at work will only represent 16% of your remaining.

In other words, you need to be equipped for a life 84% of which won’t involve your work.

If you have only thought of your education as a way of developing some great skills that can be bargained into a great job, this can be sobering news, but there is hope. As an anthropologist I can suggest that there are some wonderful role models out there in the form of simple human societies. For example an anthropologist by the name of Marvin Harris has observed that among the few societies that continue to practice hunting and gathering, the average adult works only about 2 hours per day at making a living. This is of potential interest because we also know that 99% of all of our shared history involved making a living as hunter-gatherers which means that most of what we are developed under those conditions.

In short, we are the sons and daughters of a long ancestry in which making a living wasn’t the major event of the day, or the week or the year for that matter. If that is the case, we might ask what in the world our ancestors did with their time because being their descendants we ought to be good at those things too. The things that I suspect our ancestors did a lot of to fill their time included the following:

• They talked with each other a lot
• They played with their children a lot
• They taught their children a lot
• They relaxed a lot

What troubles me is that we now do these things poorly but being such an important part of our history we may be hardwired. to need to do them well.

What happens when we don’t do them well? We feel like there is a great dark hole in our very center and so do our children. We then spend our lives trying to fill that hole with the one thing we learn to do well which is work. We also try to fill the hole with the things that work can buy.

In fact, some people are working so hard to fill their lives with things that they lose track of the difference between persons and things. Without the right equipment your work and your drive for material success can become so much a part of you that you run the risk of letting that drive become the end and you, then, become nothing more that the means for achieving that end. You risk thinking of yourself in thing-like terms. The day your career, your prestige, and the things your success can buy become the ends, you as a person become nothing more than the means and that is the day you are truly lost.

In the most fundamental sense I hope that your education has equipped you to spend a lot of time — indeed the majority of your time left on earth:

• Talking to others and helping make your and their lives interesting and worth while.
• Playing with children.
• Teaching children and just
• Relaxing and being with yourself.

You see, I am going to make a prediction — which is another thing old people do when talking to young people at graduation. I predict that we are on the verge of a discovery that may make E = mc² seem like so much arithmetic. I think we are about to discover that doing the things I just mentioned well — things which by the way cost absolutely nothing — may be more important to keeping our children safe than all of the wealth in the universe.

In other words, drawing our children to us and caring for them may be more powerful than all of the stuff we could ever hope to buy for them. If my prediction is true, it is going to come as sobering news to a lot of people. But if you are properly equipped you will do just fine.

There is one last piece of equipment worth having and if we haven’t installed it I hope you got it somewhere else. It is an irrepressible capacity for skylarking.

In his address to the Graduating Class at Bennington College back in 1970, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. offered the following advice that I would like to repeat:

You have been swindled, if people have persuaded you that it is now up to you to save the world. It isn’t up to you [yet]. You don’t have the money and power. You don’t have the appearance of grave maturity — even though you may be gravely mature… don’t take the entire world on your shoulders. Do a certain amount of skylarking, as befits people your age. "Skylarking" incidentally, used to be a minor offense under Naval Regulations… it means "intolerable lack of seriousness."

What a wonderful crime!

I sincerely hope that you will always be well equipped to skylark.

And, by the way, wearing clean underwear is a good idea even if you don’t get in an accident and have to go to the hospital.

Back to top

FAQs  |  Resources  |   Future Dates  |  Traditions  |  Mission  |  Speeches  |  Contact Us
© Regents of the University of Colorado