University of Southern Maine

Ellen Goodman's Commencement Address

Listen to Goodman's address

Whenever I’m introduced I think of my favorite credentialing  story that happened to me the morning after I won the Pulitzer Prize.

I opened up the New York Times where they had all these pictures of the winners. And under mine it said that I had graduated summa cum laude. I thought this was very nice of the New York Times to give me a summa since Radcliffe had neglected to. So I wrote the managing editor of the times thanking him very much for my summa and he sent me back a letter saying it is our pleasure. You are now the first person in American History to have won a Pulitzer and a summa on the same day.

So take heart your opportunities for grade inflation are not over.

Since my highest academic award was actually a typographical error, I had to figure out why I was invited to deliver what may be the last USM  lecture many of the undergraduates will ever have to hear.

I am here in multiple roles I suspect. I am here as an observer of social change, every journalist is that. And this is we know a period of profound change when everyone here is taking a course in Uncertainty 101 this semester.

There is a tradition that people who deliver commencement day speeches are those who have made it in the wider world. We are the designated successes, men and women who are chosen because you think they are through with the messy business of screwing up and growing up, of making mistakes and recouping losses.

I've given a few of these speeches most of all to reassure graduates that these have not, I promise you, been the best years of your life. People who say that have had the dreariest of adulthoods. I would not wish that on any of you.

This is not called a finishing day although you have finished your degrees. The idea that you are finished would be too depressing. It’s  afterall your commencement day.

But this year I thought I would begin by telling you the most memorable commencement day that I ever repressed.

Some years ago,  I was invited to Philadelphia to be the commencement speaker at the University of Pennsylvania. I figured I was the first woman to have been invited there since maybe Margaret Mead.

I arrived at the airport for a 7 a.m. flight that morning. I took my seat, in a decaffeinated state, and opened up the paper, and as we taxied away from the gate, the flight attendant cheerily welcomed us all onto the plane to….Albany.

Somewhere even in the recesses of my absent mind, the word Albany registered and in a full-fledge panic I was on my feet, saying, “Albany? Albany?

I swear to you I am not a person who makes scenes. Bostonians do not make scenes except of course in traffic. Nor do we  scream except of course at the Yankees. But at that moment I did a perfect imitation of a crazy person, explaining sweatily to the attendant that there were 10,000 students, faculty, family who would enter a stadium in Philadelphia without a commencement speaker. No woman would ever again be invited to speak there.

At that moment she said two crucial things as every graduate student in criminology here today will understand. 1) “Didn’t anyone check your ticket?” 2) “Miss, please sit down, we can’t take off until you sit down.” Bingo.

And while an entire planeload of people who wanted very badly to go to Albany glared at me—where oh where was the paper bag to put over my head?—I literally STOOD my ground.

In a few minutes and blessedly without the FBI —this was a pre 9/11 America—the plane taxied me back to the gate. I raced to the right flight and stopped shaking when the plane landed in Philadelphia.

I never told a soul. We commenced happily. I left with my honorary degree and my honor intact.  I learned again that day the thin line between success and utter disaster. The way one dumb error and one desperate recovery can change everything.

Some years later, my daughter decided that she wanted to go to University of Pennsylvania.  Need I say that if I’d spent that day in Albany I would never have shown my face within a hundred miles of that admission office. My daughter, by the way, met her husband there. Had I missed the plane, well…you get the idea.

I tell you this story because there is a small moral here. Especially for those of you who are commencing into a time of uncertainty in an economy that does not, to put it mildly have it’s arms wide open in welcome.

Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson gives adults an exercise I often think of this time of year. She asks us to compose two narratives of our life.

Narrative One? “Everything I have ever done has led me inexorably to where I am today.”

Narrative Two? “It’s only after many surprises and choices, interruptions and disappointments that I have arrived somewhere I could never have imagined.

Her point is not that one story is right and other wrong, but that both can be true.

Now my guess is that many of you who are here, graduates and their families,  here can compose those two narratives about their own life. Only one of them is the straight line narrative of a success story that leads to this degree. We tend to forget  the second story.

I think it’s a wonderful exercise to do every five or ten years of your life to look at both of those scripts. But it’s especially  good for all of you getting degrees today. Remember the person you were at 15 or 30 looking forward instead of backward. And then sometime later today turn around and interview the people who are with you today, parents, grandparents, families, and friends. I promise you that this will give you some perspective on an uncertain future, because uncertainty and the future go together.

Young graduates often see their elder’s lives as a straight line. These are the public stories that we see in biographies..including my own. We need to remember life works the other way: You make plans. You have accidents. You move straight ahead. You have to take a detour. You make a mistake. Your recover. You try hard. You get lucky. You carefully make a five year plan. God laughs. You succeed because you can improvise. You keep composing your own life.

So there are two ways that  led somehow to this day. You always wanted to be a nurse, teacher. You went through a maze, changing interests and majors that miraculously, mysteriously, ended up at this place. You wanted to be a rock star. You were on welfare. You never expected to be able to or have to leave your homelands.

Among the 1500 people graduating today there are 3000 stories. Many of you were born here.  But among you are students who were born in warn-torn countries. Among you are single mothers and cancer survivors. Two of the graduating students started classes 30 years ago. Some are mid-career executives who started 18 months ago. Some came straight through. Many of you are Mainers through and through even as Maine has changed. Maybe some of you of who never would have dreamed it was possible to become Maine husbands and wives…or Maine husbands and husbands,  wives and wives.

 There are many who took a mid-life correction when the jobs they once held disappeared or when they wished those jobs would disappear. One graduate is celebrating her 50th reunion at her grandson’s commencement. Another watched social services cut by policy makers and decided to become a policy maker.

You each have stories to tell.  And these stories will help you see that a future of improvisation is not unique to your generation or this moment. It’s how we all have lived.

But while you are telling them,  let me suggest that you compose two other and different narratives of your life.

In this scenario—

Narrative One: Everything that I did to get me here today I did on my own, through hard work and achievement, overcoming obstacles in my way.

Narrative Two: Everything I did everyday is the result of the support I got from my teachers, my friends, my schools, my elders, my family, my community, my country.

This is  a day when you are celebrating a real personal achievement, a real passage in your own life. Only one person wrote the papers and took the exams and showed up. Nobody did this for you.

And yet there are many other people in the audience for every graduate. There is an entire university that was there for you. There was the night when somebody babysat for you and somebody else gave you a ride and some teacher said that yes, you can do it and somebody gave you the last few dollars that made all the difference.  There is a long line of people who came before you.

This second  set of narratives  also says a good deal about the American success story that you embody.  Especially today when this commencement rings with meaning in critical times.

It’s been said by everybody from Alexis deTocqueville on  that America has always had a tension between two sets of values. The values of individualism and the values of community. The I and the We.

On the one hand,  America upholds these values of the individualist, the belief, indeed the requirement, that we can and should pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps, make it on our own.

On the other hand, we pledge allegiance to  the values of community, connection, caring. We believe that life has no meaning unless it is shared with others. It takes a village to raise a scholar.

I think of this in part because I know as a woman I am standing  on the shoulders of my mothers and my grandmothers generations. My mother was born before suffrage. When I was born, the south was still segregated.  When I started to work it was still legal to discriminate against women.

My generation of women became the beachhead generation, getting our toes onto the treacherous uncertain ground of social change. But we did it in a wave. We did it together. We knew we had to make it on our own and we knew we couldn’t make it without each other.

I think of it as well because my 7-year-old granddaughter Cloe is here today and I wonder what the next generation of change, what your generation will do in the years between first grade and college. And how the wave that you are riding and directing will predict her future.

When this graduating class began their journey through USM, our country's values were out of wack. In the years when CEOS were our national heroes judged by their salaries, and greed was good, we were encouraged to think of only one narrative, that every individuals succeeds or fails on his or own. We were told to ignore all the other names written in invisible ink on every diploma—family, community, country.  Those were not the good old days. Don’t let anyone tell you they were.

I am not one of those people who sees the silver lining in every catastrophe and the current economic climate that you will commence to is pretty tarnished. I know the anxiety that many of you carry out into it, but I also know that if there is a silver lining it’s that we have regained the national sense that we are in IT together.

The narrative of American life that you choose can lead to very different journeys as you leave here. Narrative One: I leave here with an enormous debt to myself—an average of $20,000 in USM loans—which pay off in increments to the bank. Narrative Two: I leave here with an enormous gratitude and a debt to society to pay it forward.

Both of these are true. What you take here are not just classes but character, not just grades but a sense of resilience. 

You have also, hard as this may be to believe, widened the sense of possibility. A year ago Harvard's Drew Faust told the graduating class at Harvard  "If you don't pursue what you think will be most meaningful  you will regret it. Life is long. There is always time for Plan B. But don't begin with it."  But at the height of the go-go economy, an awful lot of students across the country and across the state slid into jobs they didn't actually choose. Many led lives they didn’t really want.

This year when I talked with Drew Faust again, she said wryly, that the recruiters were gone and students poorer but freer because, "Nowadays you can pick which sector you want to be unemployed in." Poetry anyone? 

If freedom is just another word for no high paid job left to lose it leaves room for risk-taking, for entrepreneurship, for innovation, for taking a chance.  And—dare I say it?—idealism.

From Washington to Augusta we are still in great need of community entrepreneurs who will create a new world for themselves and others. You are free to do this and in this new world with a new President and a new challenge, you are also committed to do this.

So I offer you my two double narratives to take with you as you take your shiny expensive degrees into the wider world. I would remind you that a life that looks seamless from the outside often feels like a patchwork from the inside. A life that feels independent is also interdependent. 

You never just achieve something—status, success, happiness—and hold it firm. It depends on the environment, on the world around you. You are never done, your life is never fixed. You are always commencing. And satisfaction at every stage of life—including my own—depends on how you keep composing and recomposing your life.

Finally I would remind everyone of the lesson that you have learned and that is truly continuing education. You can’t protect yourself from mistakes in life—although I would recommend checking the sign over the doorway before you board the next plane—but you can learn resilience. You have to go it alone—although preferably not to Albany—but you are also part of a community.

So I congratulate you. And remind you that when all else in life fails, stand up and scream.

Please Note: This is the latest available version of Goodman's speech. It does not reflect the exact wording of the speech she gave at Commencement.

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