Newswise — Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen urged Hamilton College graduates to "be not afraid" in her address at Hamilton's 194th commencement on Sunday, May 21. Bachelor of arts degrees were awarded to 503 Hamilton graduates at the ceremony, held in the Margaret Bundy Scott Field House.
Quindlen told graduates the phrase "be not afraid" is "a simple directive and an old and honorable one, found in both the Old and New Testaments. That is because it is truly the secret of life," she said.
She implored graduates not to be conformists. "People will tell you what you ought to think and how you ought to feel," Quindlen said. "They will tell you what to read and how to live." She acknowledged that while leaving friends and a familiar place are scary, "you must learn to put the fear aside or at least refuse to allow it to rule you"¦ No one does the right thing from fear," she added. "And so many of the wrong things are done in its long shadow.
"Our political atmosphere today is so dispiriting because so many of our leaders are leaders in name only," Quindlen noted. "They are terrorized by polls and focus groups, by the need to be all things to all people, which means that they are nothing at all.
"Our workplaces are full of fears: fear of innovations, fear of difference. The most widely used cliché in management today is to 'think outside the box.' The box is not only stale custom," Quindlen said, "it is terrified paralysis. It is not only that we need to think outside it. We need to flatten it and put it outside for the recyclers."
Quindlen added, "In my own business, fear is the ultimate enemy. It accounts for censorship, obfuscation, the homogenization of the news when sharp, free, fearless news is more necessary than ever before"¦ Too often our public discourse fears real engagement or intellectual intercourse; it pitches itself at the lowest possible level of homogenization, always preaching to the choir, so that no one will be angry. Which usually that means that no one will be interested.
"What is the point of free speech if we are always afraid to speak freely?" She recalled asking a professor of religion what she did to suit the comfort level of the diverse groups of students in her class. "'It is not my job to make people comfortable,' she said, 'it is to educate them.' I nearly stood up and cheered," Quindlen said. "If we fear competing viewpoints, if we fail to state the unpopular because of some sense of plain-vanilla civility, it is not civility at all. It is the denigration of the human capacity for thought, the suggestion that we are fragile flowers incapable of disagreement, argument or civil intellectual combat."
"Forget fragile flowers," Quindlen warned. "We must be smart and sure and strong enough to overcome the condescending notion that opposing viewpoints are too much for us to bear " in politics, in journalism, in business, in the academy. Open your mouths. Speak your piece. Fear not."
She concluded, "We live in a world in which the simple, the generous, the enjoyable, the completely present, above all the simply yourself sometimes seem as out of reach as the moon. Don't be fooled. The ultimate act of bravery does not take place on a battlefield," Quindlen said. "It takes place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations and yes, your soul by listening to its clean clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world."
Honorary degrees were awarded to Joseph S. Nye, Jr., the Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and the Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations, to Quindlen and to Bill and Judith Davidson Moyers. Bill Moyers is a public television producer and broadcast journalist and Judith is president of Public Affairs Television.
Moyers gave the baccalaureate address on May 20 and told graduates, "I'd like to be told that it's okay to love your country right or wrong, but it's not right to be silent when your country is wrong. And I would like to be encouraged not to give up on the American experience. To remember that the same culture which produced the Ku Klux Klan, Tom DeLay and Abu Ghraib, also brought forth the Peace Corps, Martin Luther King and Hamilton College," Moyers said.
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