A
farewell to the Princeton Class of Destiny The
2007 Baccalaureate address delivered by professor emeritus John
Fleming *63
Class of 2007, soon to bear a name yet greater, I greet you with
a paternal affection. I greet also your parents, grandparents, and
friends who have done so much to bring you to this day. And I greet
my faculty colleagues, the administrative officers, and the trustees
who work tirelessly and sometimes effectively to advance the truly
noble aims of our common cause. On the lintel of a hearth in Proctor
Hall in the Graduate College is a Latin inscription that reads “Enter
Good; Exit Even Better.” The positioning of the epigraph is
perhaps ambiguous, as I presume that it is the graduate school experience
rather than the actual fireplace that is meant to effect the amelioration,
but you get the idea. And that is just our graduate students.
One day chiseled into the stone wall of this holy place will be
an inscription that reads: “They entered this sacred fane
on Baccalaureate Sunday as the Great Class of 2007. They marched
out the Princeton Class of Destiny!”
You have done me a very great honor in inviting me to give this
baccalaureate address. Ordinarily the invitation follows the fame
of the speaker. You have reversed this process, making me famous
by issuing your invitation. Truth in advertising requires a somewhat
fuller statement. In years gone by, I was actually a non-voting
adviser to the student committee that recommends the Baccalaureate
speaker. (I hasten to add that unlike President Tilghman, who was
a member of the selection committee that chose herself, I was not
a member of this year’s committee.) But I know how things
work. The committee makes three recommendations, and the president
chooses by single transferable vote. There is one intergalactically
famous political figure. There is one internationally famous media
celebrity. Then there is a safety candidate whose modest virtues
are minimal ambulatory power and availability. My guess is that
Hillary’s pollsters were skittish, and Larry King laughed
at the honorarium. The rest is history – and you are there.
Unless I mistake myself this is actually the second time I have
had the honor of addressing you as a class. On a warm September
evening in 2003, from a temporary podium facing Cannon Green, I
was the warm-up act for an eminent politician and alumnus who talked
to you at an “Integrity Assembly”. I remember the event
but dimly, and the fact that you have invited me here today suggests
that you remember it not at all. Still, I regard it as a great success.
I told you to be good, and lo, you have been good, very good. Can
it work a second time?
This talk will be about you, but it must begin with a few words
about me. I am 71 years old. Last June I retired after 40 years
on the Princeton faculty. I suppose that means that you are swifter
than I am by a ratio of 10-to-one. In retirement the sense of vital
connection with the daily life of the institution erodes rapidly.
I shall spend the whole of the next academic year away, and when
I return that sense will be wholly erased. Hence, 2007, you are
the last Princeton class I ever will really know. Some of you were
my freshman or sophomore academic advisees. Some of you took a freshman
seminar on Dante with me. Quite a few of you took upper-division
courses with me. Hence I am swimming in the same bittersweet sea
of emotionality in which you are bobbing about during this long
weekend.
The word “baccalaureate” of course refers to the bachelor’s
degree you will receive on Front Campus two days hence. This will
be a sacramental action, a sacrament being the “outward and
visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” The degree
is an inward and spiritual grace conveyed by President Tilghman
by the authority granted to her by the trustees. Its outward and
visible sign, the diploma, you will pick up on Cannon Green. Don’t
forget to get yours. Even though it’s only outward and visible,
it did cost well over a hundred grand. Baccalaureate is
a Latin word invented in the Middle Ages by translating the Old
French bachelier. A bachelier was an apprentice
knight, a warrior of such modest means that he fought beneath the
banner of a superior knight. The etymology of bachelier
is obscure, but we think it might derive from sub plus
chevalier. This would mean “someone beneath a horseman.”
Being beneath a horseman, though perhaps preferable to being beneath
a horse, still strikes me as a less than exalted status. Other associations
of the bachelier are suggested by Chaucer’s description
of his squire, son of the knight, of whom he writes:
With hym ther was his sone a yong SQUIER
A lovyere and a lusty bacheler …
So hoote he lovede that by nyghtertale,
He sleep namore than dooth a nyghtyngale.
As readers of Romeo and Juliet will remember, the nightingale
is a dirty bird. And you have Chaucer’s word for it that bachelors,
of whatever gender, are hot.
Within a hundred years of its first appearance in English, its
semantic field had expanded to include its academic meaning and
its more common and current sociological one – a man as yet
unmarried but ripe for the marital state. This suggests, doubtless,
that the closest social analogies to medieval warfare must have
been undergraduate life and matrimony. But the implication of a
preliminary stage, a transition beyond adolescence but not too far
beyond it, remains. Hence the perfect fit of Baccalaureate and Commencement
itself. In every commencement address I have ever heard –
or given, for that matter – it has been pointed out that the
word “commencement” clearly denotes a beginning, not
an ending.
Of course there is an ending, and I must warn you about
it. Beginning on Tuesday at noon, you are no longer the younger
generation – and it’s all downhill after that. The plenary
valorization of the youthful, the contemporary, the innovative,
the preference for 12-year-old violinists and 19-year-old metaphysicians,
and the appetite for all the daily Apple updates, are necessary
features of American dynamism; at your age I embraced it completely,
but I find I have grown in wisdom wonderfully in the last five decades,
and I think you will do so soon. I now realize that at the very
least the quintessence of the here-and-now must be tempered with
the wisdom of the ancients, meaning something written, thought,
or said sometime before the day before yesterday.
When I was an officer of the English department I went on occasion
to cocktail parties in New York at which I sometimes encountered
minor celebrities and glamorous young women in publishing. At one
such event, with one such glamorous woman, I fell into literary
conversation concerning various contemporary novelists. I read a
lot of books, and I did swimmingly for a medievalist – until
we arrived at John Updike. She asked my opinion of his latest book,
the title of which I shall not soon forget: The Coup. Now
just for the record I have – and had – read
several books by John Updike. But I had to tell her that I had not
read The Coup. “What a pity!” she said, all
tentative interest in me draining from her face. “It’s
been out for six weeks.” But even as she turned in search
of someone more interesting, I had the wit to pose a question of
my own. “Have you read the Consolation of Philosophy
of Boethius?” I asked. This actually stopped her in her tracks.
“The what of philosophy?” she asked. She hadn’t
even heard of it. “No? What a pity!” I replied. “It’s
been out for 1,453 years!”
From this elevated pulpit my view of the Class of 2007 is one of
extraordinary uniformity – hardly surprising, given the fact
that you are all wearing the same uniform, the uniform of a bachelor
of arts and sciences. Yet I know for a fact that the black robes
are covering a near riot of individuality. You are an allegorical
tableau of the philosophical problem of the one and the many, and
the social and spiritual challenge of the individual and society
– subjects which you have undoubtedly touched upon in your
careers here. Neither as a nation nor as a university have we got
this one fully worked out yet. It still says on the penny “E
pluribus unum,” with the emphasis clearly on the unity. For
at least 20 years in the academy, we have been extolling the “pluribus”
part.
The magic word here is “diversity.” “Diversity”
aspires to the status of a terminal good and therefore a terminal
goal. What does it mean, and what does it not mean? Actually,
academic “diversity” has a quite delimited range having
to do with obvious racial, ethnic, sexual, and religious distinctions:
Some folks are black, some white; some straight, some gay; some
are Hispanic-Americans, some Asian-Americans, Irish-Americans, some
Methodists, some Muslims. “Diversity” does not mean
that at Princeton we have many students of below average intelligence,
or many who are illiterate, or quite a few who are dying of AIDS.
I will not go on with a list of the underprivileged but very real
categories of world diversity, but I will ask you to think, as
Princeton graduates, how you are and how you are not like everybody
else in the world.
From the 18th century we have inherited, in 18th-century language,
the doctrine that “all men are created equal,” and “that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,
“ then enumerated as including “life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.” Incidentally, the feel-good phrase
“the pursuit of happiness” was a last-minute substitution
for “the possession of property”, and it was a mistake.
The pursuit of happiness is the stuff of dreamers. The possession
of property is the stuff of lawyers.
The stealth appearance of the Deity in our Declaration of Independence
has proved something of a political embarrassment, abused by some
on the so-called religious right as a charter of theocracy and by
others on the so-called secular left as, apparently, a typographical
error. As a Christian believer, I am less bothered than some of
my colleagues by Jefferson’s mixing of genres. Our founders
were wise legislators, and one mark of wisdom in a legislator is
a healthy appreciation of what law cannot do, no less than of what
it can do. Legislation could not make of the whole world a family
of brother and sisters. The recognition of the universal fatherhood
of God one day might. Hence the messianic requirement to “respect
the dignity of every human being” belongs where it is in the
baptismal covenant, but not in the New Jersey statutes. Where do
Princetonians stand with regard to the universal equality of all
human kind?
I see from U.S. News and World Report that Princeton
is an “elite” university. The specter of elitism has
haunted all my years here. Who wants to be an elitist? Many of my
faculty colleagues are appalled by elitism. They combat it valiantly
by wearing blue jeans to work, by sharing first-name terms with
their students, and by maintaining rigorous neutrality concerning
the competing moral and aesthetic claims of Paradise Lost
and Spiderman III. But wait a minute. What “elite”
means is chosen, selected, or elected out of a group. Its adjectival
synonym is “choice.” An opening for an assistant professorship
in the humanities here may garner several hundred applications,
all from people with Ph.D.s. Of them four or five may be invited
to campus for public ordeals not unlike the old Iberian autos-da-fé.
This process yields one assistant professor who six years later
in the tenure process faces a scrutiny yet more intensive. If she
can walk on water, there is a good chance she will at least be proposed
for promotion by her department. The name then goes to a ferocious
committee in Nassau Hall. Its members are all hyper-elites, but
they do not act until they have weighed the solicited opinions of,
literally, the greatest experts in the world. It’s a little
hard to credit that a successful candidate is actually just one
of the boys and girls.
Not long ago I was on an appointments committee reading the recommendations
of job candidates. Concerning a certain candidate one letter said
that this person’s work was “always exciting and often
brilliant.” The adverb “often” spelled his doom.
What? Only often brilliant? Princeton professors are brilliant
24/7. Reee-jected! These are the professors who moan about the evils
of “elitism.”
And you people, you Class of Destiny, you are if anything even
worse – meaning in this instance, naturally, better. What
it took to get into this institution is exceeded only by what it
took you to get out. My career at Princeton was not paralyzed by
self-doubt. I modestly considered myself capable of handling not
merely my job, but any job in the place. But to one height I knew
I could never ascend. I could never, ever have gained admission
to the freshman class – yours, or any other Princeton class.
I simply don’t have what it takes. I had never done any of
those things you wrote about in the autobiographical statement of
your admissions packet. I never backpacked through the Carpathians.
I never made a papier-mâché model of the New York subway
system. Not even with an unrusted nail did I perform an emergency
tracheotomy on an asthmatic camel in the Gobi desert, thus saving
myself and my companions from certain death. I did not in fact ghostwrite
the enabling legislation for the most sweeping program of environmental
remediation ever undertaken by the Ohio State legislature. My big
“extracurricular” was the 4-H Club.
Under these circumstances, I have always been awed by Princeton
undergraduates. It didn’t use to surprise me that a lot of
them did very well in their course work. But the Class of Destiny
had been here but a single year when the powers-that-be determined
that you lacked one last full measure of elitism in the form of
dog-eat-dog competitive grade-grubbing. About a quarter or so of
you transcendental geniuses ought to be getting C’s. This
was called “combating grade inflation.” The combat was
brief but sharp. In relation to its peers, Princeton was suddenly
catapulted into a stratosphere of hyper-elitism. In an instant,
in the twinkling of an eye, faster than the dollar has fallen against
the euro, the Harvard “A” became the Princeton B+. The
famous Yale “gentleman’s C”, that capacious and
tolerant grade that has enabled the careers of our incumbent chief
executive and so many other great American leaders of state and
industry, disappeared from the Princeton scale altogether.
So I am afraid that your elite status is simply a fact beyond
dispute. For the moment, you are the most elite Princetonians in
history. And a Princeton degree comes in a package of privilege.
As compared with most Americans you will make more money, enjoy
better health, live in better housing, have better prospects for
your children, go to the Caribbean more often and to the state penitentiary
less often. Some of your privilege is defensible; much of it is
not. For I am not describing social justice, just sociology, something
altogether different. To deny the privilege is nonsense, to inveigh
against it churlish and usually hypocritical. No, what you have
to do is face up to it.
Some of you doubtless have parents who sometimes give you advice
even when unsolicited. My mother, dead these 20 years, was such
a parent. She used to say things like “You may live to regret
that!” and “Handsome is as handsome does.” Her
apothegms annoyed me intensely. What annoyed me most of all was
that what she said was invariably true. You may now marvel at the
effortless transition or seamless segue with which I move to the
heart of this baccalaureate address, the true and annoying part.
This involves the ancient maxim “Noblesse oblige.” That
meant, roughly, that social privilege demanded social obligation.
The English version is that from those to whom much has been given,
much will be expected.
Last year, in an odd reversal, a comedian gave a fluffy Baccalaureate
address, while a public figure, former president Bill Clinton, gave
a very profound Class Day address. Its theme was not partisan; the
Republican leader of the Senate, who was in the audience, applauded
with abandon. Mr. Clinton asked the seniors to reflect on three
questions. What kind of a world do you now live in? What kind of
world would you like to live in? Finally, what are you
– you personally – ready or able to do to move from
that first world in the direction of the second?
I can suggest an approach to the first question. The world as
a whole is very different from the one you view in this magnificent
cathedral or will view from beneath the pleached canopy of front
campus on Tuesday. For a very quick summary of the world you live
in, you could do worse than visit the United Nations Millennium
Development Web site.
I presume you have at least heard about the United Nations Millennium
Development Goals, the latest exhortation from the international
body that we should address the terrible problems of poverty in
much of the world. I shall mention only one goal, one of the easiest
to understand. The second Millennium Goal, solemnly undertaken by
the world’s leaders, with our national leaders prominent among
them, is that by the year 2015 – two Princeton student generations
from today – every boy and girl in the world will have the
opportunity to “complete a full course of primary education.”
If that’s the goal, what is the current reality? The current
reality is that in the developing world a quarter of the population
– approaching a billion people – is illiterate. There
are more than a hundred million children who never go to school
at all. Nearly half the girls in the world’s poorest countries
have no access to any education.
I fear there is not a ghost of a chance of fulfilling this second
goal by 2015. The problem is not money. The estimate is that it
would cost $10 billion a year. That is chump change. That is half
of what Americans spend each year on ice cream. No, the problem
is that my generation, though appalled by the statistics, is too
tired, or too timid, or too distracted to come up with the requisite
imagination and will. We don’t want to live in a
world where a hundred millions kids have no chance to go to school,
but we are leaving it up to you to do something about it.
Any of you who used to read my newspaper columns will recognize,
probably with the disapprobation that used to win me fulminating
e-mails, that I am not your typical faculty pious liberal. So set
aside for a moment everything preachy, warm, and fuzzy about the
second Millennium goal. Think locally and even think selfishly.
Is there anybody in this large audience who does not realize that
universal primary education for the children of the world would
be a far greater concrete contribution to the national security
of the United States than the war in Iraq? I hasten to add that
I am not so simple-minded as to think that the money, though a necessary
prerequisite of a solution, is itself a solution. The world’s
mess, like the world’s grandeur, is infinitely complex. Felix
qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. That great Virgilian line
– “Happy is the one who can know the causes of things”
– is mantle motto in Frick. It is a golden sentence, and it
is addressed to you Destinarians, you physical scientists and you
engineers, you probers of complex systems, and to you economists,
and political and social scientists, you explorers of human community,
and to you historians and students of art and literature, cartographers
of the human past and the human heart.
One mark of the mature elite sensibility is the capacity to experience
genuine gratitude and the power to express it generously –
in action as well as in word. So I hope even amid so much exuberant
emotion you are grateful for this place and, above all, to those
in many generations whose support, encouragement, and not infrequently
sacrifice allowed you to be here. I myself leave the place realizing
that for me it has been a kind of terrestrial paradise, surrounded
as I have been with marvelous colleagues and marvelous students.
For me the best that colleagueship has to offer is represented by
my friend of 40 years, Robert Hollander ’55, among the two
or three elitest Danteiste in the world. Professor Hollander
yesterday issued you an indirect challenge when he received the
Alumni Council’s top award for service to the University.
Who in your class will be the first to merit that prize? And surely
you can do it in less than the 52 years it took him.
In thanking you students, too, I must mention a few representatives
of the larger whole. You probably have no idea what pleasure you
bring to your classmates and faculty friends, quite apart from your
official academic work, through your talents as displayed in public
performances, of which I have seldom experienced fewer than three
a week for the last four decades. I thank all you Princeton athletes,
and especially the members of the football and baseball teams, men’s
and women’s basketball, women’s softball – which
happen to be the groups whose exertions I have most often viewed.
I thank all you theater people, actors, designers, technicians,
producers of plays, musicals, dance recitals, at “Intime,”
at 185 Nassau Street, in the Berlind Theatre, in the college theaters.
I thank all you writers and editors at The Daily Princetonian,
the Nassau Weekly, and the numerous fugitive literary magazines.
My final and most special thanks go to the musicians – beginning
with the Marching Band but (thank God!) not long lingering there.
There are the many singing groups with cheesy names, the Tigerspoofs
and the Nassaloonies. Above all there are the amazingly accomplished
classical musicians who have turned the Taplin Auditorium into a
kind of permanent Princeton Festival, and who have created within
the University a symphony orchestra that is the worthy peer of any
to be found in the cultural centers of our country. One group –
our superb Chapel Choir – is here to be thanked in person.
So, Class of Destiny, we must be on our separate ways. As you
go, be sure to take with you not merely your diploma but your whole
education. I shall hope to see you around. That is a platitude,
but then this is a Baccalaureate address. Besides, it’s a
platitude plus. One of the particular pleasures of long service
as a Princeton professor is that just about half the time I am in
or on my way to a really interesting place, I am likely to have
a chance meeting with an old Princeton student. I have had such
encounters at the Louvre, at the Santa Fe opera, at the Cleveland
art museum, on a jogger’s trail in Holland Park, at a tiny
trattoria in Siena. Sometimes these sudden meetings are as mysterious
as they are strange. Once, in O’Hare Airport, a man in a business
suit practically jumped over the security barrier to accost me.
“Professor, uh, professor!” he screamed. “You
changed my life, professor uh!”, he continued, as a crowd
formed. “You taught me ‘Money and Banking’!”
Well, I try to take the larger view. You cannot expect that a fellow
who takes a course called ‘Money and Banking’ when he
is 19 years old will be particularly sharp when he is 49. Perhaps
the firing of the synapses was slightly out of time, but the heart
was in the right place. He knew that I was from Princeton, and that
someone there had taught him something. Another
time, in London, I was walking along the street next to one of those
Victorian hospitals that look strikingly like the abandoned factories
observable from the train just south of Secaucus Junction. A doctor
in complete gear – green scrubs, rubber gloves, nifty hairnet,
and dangling stethoscope – rushed out of the building and
accosted me. “Professor Fleming,” he began, “You
probably don’t remember me, but ...” Chances of remembering
him would have been slightly better without the surgical mask.
So, Class of 2007, I shall hope to see you, unmasked, around the
Rialto in Venice, and at Angkor Wat. I’ll hope to see you
in the Library of Congress, if you read books, and, if not, I can
look for you in Congress itself. I’ll hope to see you at Yankee
Stadium, or maybe at the speaker’s podium of the General Assembly
of the United Nations, and naturally I’ll be looking for you
in the P-rade. Until then, Destinarians, take my advice: Be good.
In Domino vos saluto. ”
John Fleming *63 is the Louis W. Fairchild ’24 Professor
of English and Comparative Literature emeritus.