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Past Commencement Speeches 2002

• Jane Menken, December 20, 2002
• Charles F. Wilkinson, August 2002
• Dr. Carl Wieman, May 2002

Commencement Address

Jane Menken

December 20, 2002

It is a special honor and a great privilege to be here with you today.

I'm relatively new to Colorado, having arrived only five years ago, escaping hot and muggy summers and cold and dreary winters of the East. The first year, as I walked across this beautiful campus, I frequently crossed paths with another faculty member, also a transplant -- from the frozen north of Wisconsin. We developed a routine -- as we approached one another, I'd look up and point to the beautiful blue sky. He would always shrug and say "Just another day in Paradise". I want to welcome all of you to Paradise.

To our graduates: I congratulate you for the hard work and, I hope, good times that brought you to this day, and offer you my very best wishes as you move into the wider world.

But no one of us could graduate from college or obtain an advanced degree without the support of our parents, family, spouses, partners, friends, children.

To all of you who have been part of our graduates' support system, you have our deepest appreciation. I hope reaching this day brings you great pleasure and a great feeling of connection with your graduate.

Graduates, look around and find your family and friends. Please stand and give them a cheer of thanks and appreciation!

I am struck, as I look around, by the interconnectedness that joins us together. And that brings me to my theme for today -- our interconnectedness -- and the responsibility that that entails.

These two themes - interconnectedness and responsibility - have, for several decades, been part of my life and work in the developing world, in Bangladesh, in Kenya, and in South Africa. That's a world very far from Paradise. For many, it is a world characterized by poverty and ill health, by insecurity, and by the struggle to raise children and care for family in circumstances that are difficult to imagine as we go about our daily lives here. The family is the only source of assistance, without backup from pensions, health insurance, unemployment benefits. The scourge of AIDS in Africa has reversed all the gains of the past 50 years in length of life. Old people not only have lost the support they expected from their children, but have to care for ill and dying children and assume responsibility for orphaned grandchildren. It has been a sobering experience to see the conditions under which the great majority of people in the world live out their lives.

But there is also hope. I have learned, in traveling and working far from home, that people are very much the same everywhere and very much like us. And when we differ, it is sometimes in ways we can learn from. I have learned that the human spirit everywhere is self-reliant and resilient. Sometimes we forget about this and see only the differences between us and the rest of the world.

This sense of connectedness with humanity and the feeling of responsibility is what sustains my work on health and population issues.

I am not alone. Colleagues within those countries and around the world - we all have sought to understand how conditions can be improved and to translate that understanding into effective policies and programs. There have been many successes. Family planning programs that are not coercive now help people have the number of children they want. These programs save women's lives by reducing their chances of dying from childbearing under circumstances dangerous to their health. They save children's lives, since motherless children are at much greater risk of dying. Even AIDS is being confronted with some success. Uganda, for example, has been able to reduce HIV/AIDS prevalence through its frank approach to a public health problem. Much more has been done, and even more needs to be done. And that's what will become part of your responsibility.

I hope that your time at CU has been a good experience and know it has sometimes been a struggle for most of you to get to this point - to this commencement – and that we, and you, face hard times. But in contrast to much of the world, we all have to count ourselves fortunate. As you leave the University of Colorado, I hope that you will reflect on that good fortune and dedicate even a small part of your life and resources to celebrating connectedness and to fulfilling responsibility - to family, friends, and community, and to others less fortunate - whether nearby or across the globe.

So, in conclusion, my hope for you is a successful, healthy, happy, but also responsible and contributory future. All of us here salute you and wish you well. Come back frequently, and keep the University of Colorado a continuing part of your life!

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Commencement Address

Charles F. Wilkinson

August 10, 2002

I'd like to take a few moments to speak with the graduates about this place, this university, not to compare it with any other, whether on the east coast or the west, or in between. Just this place, all by itself.

Perhaps like yourselves I quickly appreciated this campus for its beauty and electric vitality, but my love, my passion for this place came only gradually, with the accretions of a few years. By now, one of my secret joys is a meeting somewhere across campus. No, not the meeting — not even a meeting's mother could love a meeting — but the chance to leave a little early and choose one of the many routes from the law school, the university's southernmost building.

For every walk reminds you and me that this is not a collection of buildings but truly a campus, a unified place knit together by the Charles Klauder architecture with its burnished red tiled roofs, white limestone trim, and the pink, ever the pink, of the local Boulder sandstone. Were I to walk north from the law school toward here, I could pass by the Dalton Trumbo Fountain, born and preserved as an emblem to free speech; make my way through the sandstone and evergreen Mary Rippon Outdoor Theater just behind you to the south, a magical place where the old enduring words come to life on midsummer's nights; then I would look over to the library out to your right, peopled by those who want to serve us by bringing books to us and graced by words that never grow trite, "HE WHO KNOWS ONLY HIS OWN GENERATION REMAINS EVER A CHILD" then I would arrive at the structure out in front of you, which stands for another kind of history, a building crafted in 1876 out on the wild bare plains of the West as a bold, uplifting invitation to learning. Before going in, I would look toward the northeast where we can see another message, an eternal one, one made during your time here and writ in gold and black across the horizon: BUFFALOES 62, CORNDOGS 36.

We, your faculty, have had, shall we say, our down moments. We have bored you and confused you, and made you roll your eyes and climb the walls. But your teachers almost always gave their best, hardly ever just mailed it in. They challenged you, broadened you, inspired you, and allowed you to see the white-hot love of knowledge up close. Some of your professors have become role models or mentors or friends for life.

The breadth and depth of pursuits here is stunning. They include the many bodies of classic knowledge that have transformed groups of individuals into civilizations as well as the daring, cutting-edge, as-yet-unproven theories that may — depending on the judgments your generation makes in years hence — guide society in the future. In some cases, those of us outside of specialized programs literally cannot comprehend what goes on inside of them. Theoretical astrophysics. The National Snow and Ice Data Center. Water rights transfers. The study of African languages, some never before written down.

The Center for Entrepreneurship. The Lab for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Space in general and global warming in general. Many, many others, all programs that cannot be comprehended from the outside but that a few of you found your destinies in; that many of you took a course or did related research in; or that led many of you to a chance conversation, perhaps just a social one, that made you feel fuller and see the world more completely. And, for all of us, the knowledge that those programs exist reminds us of the quality, integrity, and racing innovation that are the bloodstream of this place. And look at the nearby off-campus institutions that have become part and parcel of the university experience. I'm not speaking only of the West End, the Rio, the Dark Horse, and Trilogy. I'll list just a few of the many others that enrich us here. NCAR. NOAA. Warren Miller Entertainment. Naropa. The Nature Conservancy. National Institutes of Standards and Technology. Events at Chautauqua and literary readings at the Boulder Bookstore. The Native American Rights Fund.

We have, too, the everlasting gift of our campus being here, exactly here, on the edge of an ancient sea where the pressures of eons have angled the shores up to their startling 45 degree cant, where the winds of the plains break upon the base of the Rocky Mountains, where our eyes and minds lift above the red tile roofs toward that tableau and the imagination that lies beyond.

Please come back when you can. For us and for yourselves. Leave some extra time to be alone and to reflect. Bring just one person. Have your partner be a younger person, have your partner then be the person you are now.

Then take a grand long walk around this campus with the person you are now, going languidly to the nooks and crannies you love, catching the distinctive light of this place where you cherish that light the most — slanting through the windows of Macky or the library reading room, or caught in the sandstone architecture of your favorite building or the faces of the Flatirons. Go to where you studied and researched and hung out and played. And my guess is you will find quite a lot to admire in your partner, for the person you will be then is likely to be taken aback by how many diverse things the person you are now accomplished here and also admiring of the idealism of that person from years ago. The person you are then may learn quite a lot from that visit and from that younger person.

Congratulations to all of you. Our hearts are with you.

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Commencement Address

Dr. Carl Wieman

May 10, 2002

As a professor who is used to talking to physics classes or small groups of scientists, it is a bit overwhelming to talk to a crowd like this. Actually a few years ago I was asked to give the commencement address and I refused. I thought about it for a while before I said no, since it really did not seem like a good career move for a faculty member to turn down a request like that from the Chancellor. But, I've never been crazy about ceremonies and speeches, and I am not great at telling jokes, which of course is the only part of a commencement speech anyone remembers. So I ended up saying no. The Chancellor was actually quite nice about it. I am sure that the installation of that big noisy fan outside my window that vents chemical vapors was entirely a coincidence.

So how did I end up here today? Well, that actually has a lot to do with the message I want to pass on to you. When I was a simple physics professor happily toiling away in obscurity I could get away with things like not giving the commencement speech, but then I got a Nobel Prize and all that changed. Suddenly all these students and faculty that I don’t know come up and congratulate me. I even got a special pass that lets me park anywhere on campus without being towed or ticketed! Anybody who has been a student or faculty member here knows how special that is! I am planning to test how good this pass really is by parking in the football coaches spot, but I figure I better at least wait until they have a losing season. Anyway, I realized that along with this new status and privilege comes responsibility; including the responsibility to do things like speaking at commencement to our graduating students and their families as a representative of all the proud faculty.

Now in much the same way as I have had status, privilege and the accompanying responsibility thrust upon me, each of you graduates is now stepping into a position of very special status and privilege as a CU graduate. And with that also comes responsibility. If you look at the numbers (we physicists always like to look at numbers) you can appreciate how special you are. There are about 6 billion people in the world and somewhat less than 6000 of you graduates sitting here, which makes you 1 in a million! So for each one of you there are about a million people out there in the world that have not had the good fortune to receive a CU education and degree. A lucky few of that million were able to get some kind of higher education, for example at some inferior place like Nebraska, but the vast majority are much worse off, they are just trying to survive each day with little or no education. With your new status as a CU graduate comes the responsibility on behalf of that less fortunate million to use your education to accomplish something meaningful in the rest of your life.

I know that it is easy to think, "but I worked really hard and paid a bunch of money to earn this degree, I don’t owe anybody anything!" It is especially easy to feel that way right after taking finals! Of course you worked hard to earn it, and you should be proud of it. If it had not been such a struggle it would not mean so much. But you have to think beyond that. I happen to think I worked pretty darn hard to win a Nobel Prize too! And it was really expensive to pay off all those people on the selection committee (Just kidding.). But I also know that out there are people out there just as smart and hardworking as me, but they never got the opportunities and luck that I did. Likewise, each of you needs to remember you really are one in a million, and out of that million there are quite a few who would have worked even harder than you did to be in your position, but they never got the chance. Maybe it was because they happened to be born in the wrong country, or the wrong state, or maybe they did not have as good teachers in school as you did, or maybe they just did not have families who were as willing and able as yours to give you all the encouragement and support you needed to get through college.

So while you have a lot to be proud of in earning a CU degree, you also have to be grateful that you are that one in a million. So wear your status as a CU graduate proudly, but do not forget that with it comes the responsibility to accomplish something with that status and education. And on the subject of accomplishments, I will leave you with the reminder that CU is one of the top public universities now in number of Nobel Prize winning faculty, but we are overdue for having some Nobel Prize winning alumni. Thank-you.

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