Called to Lead Theodore E. Long. Commencement Address Elizabethtown College May 21, 2011

Transcription

1 Called to Lead Theodore E. Long Commencement Address Elizabethtown College May 21, 2011 Classmates! I am proud to be counted among your number as a member of Elizabethtown s Class of 2011, and I am delighted that my good friend Tom and my life partner Betty are now classmates too. Please accept my hearty congratulations and applause for your achievements, which are especially impressive considering that it took me 15 years to achieve an Elizabethtown diploma. It is an honor to graduate with you today and to be invited to deliver your commencement address. More than just a point of pride, that honor enables me to say a personal thank you for enriching my life and work and Betty s - - during your time at Elizabethtown. I have come to know many of you personally, and because of you, I can say with Michelangelo, Ancora Imparo I am still learning. From Kalie I have learned about the power of the human spirit to overcome adversity. From Steve, I learned more about what it means to be a citizen of the world today. From Travis, I experienced in new ways how the gift of song can lift the spirit. In Kurt I saw an amazing example of how to blend high professional aspiration with global service. Shaday s courage in the face of hurtful attacks gave me new hope for mutual understanding.

2 When Liz and Montana stood up for themselves and others, I saw what leadership is truly made of. Peter, people tell me a give a good speech, but last night, you showed me how much I still have to learn about speechmaking. And just when I m retiring, Allison, you taught me that I need a new resume of the soul! There are many more of you I could name, and I am deeply grateful for what all of you have shared with me and the College in our years together. Having gained so much from you, I want to use our last occasion together to focus your attention on the lasting meaning and significance of an Elizabethtown education for your future, and for the world s. People often assess the impact of college on its graduates by asking What are you going to do with your education? a question which treats college education as a credential that you must now exploit to your best advantage. That utilitarian framework provides a handy way to understand what college means, but it ignores the possibility that collegiate education could have any larger and continuing meaning than a first job or that being an educated person might actually entail responsibilities as well as rights. The better question would be the reverse: What is your Elizabethtown education going to do with you? Framing the issue that way emphasizes that education is not primarily a consumer good but a process of shaping lives, not a personal possession but a community asset, not a finished product but an ongoing agent of personal transformation. This question also implies that you graduates have a responsibility to your education itself, the responsibility to give expression to this college s distinctive philosophy of learning in your life and work. To

3 take this question seriously is to recognize that you all share a profound calling to live in a way that marks you as sons and daughters of Elizabethtown. I want to crystallize the claim that this college makes on your lives in a phrase from our own community: you are called to lead! That call comes not from some trumpeter in the sky or a utopian pied piper but from the philosophical heart of our educational program and your daily encounters with its ideals in our classrooms and campus life. It is an emergent call, one that has grown and deepened as your education here has matured toward this commencement day. Its culminating claim is that you take up a certain way of life, that of providing practical, effective Elizabethtown leadership to make our world a better place. It has certainly been satisfying to see so many of you catch the spirit of this place, but the call to lead is greater still - - to bring that spirit to life in practice, just as we have educated you to find the practical application for ideas. In the words of the poet Mary Oliver: All summations have a beginning, all effect has a story, all kindness begins with the sown seed. Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of light is the crossroads of indolence, or action. Be ignited, or be gone. Taking leadership is especially important because leaders are those who define direction, who initiate action, who set in motion the stories that create effects. You will likely be followers in some things, but Elizabethtown calls you to take the lead in advancing its signature approach to life, which the world desperately needs. We often think that leadership is reserved for the great, the famous, or those given authority to command and direct. But as Madeleine Albright has noted, true leadership comes

4 not from the sound of a commanding voice but from the nudging of an inner voice from our own realization that the time has come to go beyond dreaming to doing.... Opportunities for leadership are all around us. The capacity for leadership is deep within us. As he reported on Scholarship Day, Kurt Deschner saw that in Africa last year when he observed a Maasai woman without position or portfolio showing tribal women how to break through the traditional patriarchy of the tribe to claim their integrity as persons. So each of you, whatever your role or circumstance, can lead by initiating a new story, by planting a new seed, by stepping out toward new possibilities. The idea that there may be a distinctive brand of leadership associated with Elizabethtown was inspired by Alex Conte, whose Scholarship Day presentation assessed how different models of leadership align with Etown s ethos. Here I want to reverse that equation to suggest that the Elizabethtown ethos itself defines a particular type of leadership that constitutes the substance of your call to lead. The Etown leadership approach has four distinct elements, each displaying a central feature of our brand of education: 1) leading for others, b) leading through ideas, c) leading toward hope, and d) leading with integrity. You surely recognize these signatures, but each will now stretch you beyond your past experience toward some larger possibility, just as your faculty mentors have stretched you daily in the classroom. Taken together, these four define a unique approach that will make full use of all you have learned here to make a difference in a complex and changing world. Leading for Others The heart of our vision of education is that learning is most noble when used to benefit others. We naturally associate that ideal with all the many ways that we help others directly or serve our communities as volunteers. But the reach of

5 that proposition is much broader, encompassing every endeavor of life, including the many occupations you will enter. In business, in science, at home, and in your communities, you are now called to lead on behalf of a better life for the people around you, not primarily for your personal self interest or organizational advantage. Such a stance requires more than a good heart; it demands the personal discipline and professional will to put others before self, even to sacrifice self for the larger good. Leading Through Ideas Notice that what we consider most noble depends upon learning. Good intentions or passion for a cause are not enough to fulfill Elizabethtown s call to lead; our brand of leadership also requires good ideas, ones that are well founded and can be utilized productively. Good ideas span all the genres of learning, from the scientific to the poetic, from the capacity to recognize brute facts to the capacity to see with fresh eyes and insights. Most of all, good ideas help us see attainable new possibilities for human life, not just pipe dreams. As our Scholarship Day motto declares, Elizabethtown graduates are charged with making the world better: one idea at a time. The capacity for ongoing learning you have developed here will enable you to muster the best ideas available, a deep responsibility of those who would lead for others. Leading toward Hope The Irish poet Seamus Heaney has observed that history discourages us from hoping on this side of the grave, but he is encouraged by certain special times when hope and history rhyme. Elizabethtown s call to you is to lead history towards hope, to reach toward moments when new human possibilities eclipse a darker past. It focuses on realizing this college s historic hopes for peace, non- violence,

6 human dignity and social justice, in daily life as well as in world affairs. When you apply the best ideas you can to advance those values, you will surely realize that hope constantly struggles against history and that we are not going to achieve heaven on earth. But as Nobel Peace Prize Recipient David Trimble declared from this platform some years ago, the call of peacemakers is to make a working peace, not in some perfect world, that never was, but in this, the flawed world, which is our only workshop. Leading with Integrity On Scholarship Day, Kristin Mance reminded us of the importance of ethical leadership, the core of which is integrity. All of you know the importance of academic integrity here, but now the call of Elizabethtown is to broaden your sense of integrity toward ethical wholeness. As Stephen Carter suggests, integrity describes a person who a) discerns what is right and wrong in a given situation, b) who acts on that understanding in addressing the situation, and c) who then acts accountably to explain why he or she acted in that particular way. Every act of leadership, therefore, is also an exercise in integrity, which shapes how others respond to your leading. The success of good causes relies on leaders with such integrity, and few are inclined to trust a leader who lacks it. For leaders, then, integrity is both an ethical and a practical imperative. Fifteen years ago I answered the call to lead at Elizabethtown, and I came because I wanted to be part of a community that educated students for these high ideals. Since then I have tried to model that call in my work and to ensure that you received an education worthy of its claim on your lives to lead for others, to lead through ideas, to lead toward hope, and to lead with

7 integrity. As my work concludes, you are now called to lead as the newest heirs of the inspired vision that brought this college into being and animates our work to this day. As we depart together, each to a new and different future, reflect on the words of Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States: The future is an electrocuting thought That stuns the thinking reed to quiet, and heightens The sense that everything we make is mortal, Or part of some continuing epitaph. Our very sentences are like a cloth Cut shimmering from conventions of the dead Hung sometimes to flutter from a spar or gallant, Nudged forward like the paper boats of candy Launched for the gods down river, in the future. We all want to linger just a bit longer in the place we cherish and to share our joy with the people who have meant so much to us. But today we are being nudged forward to face the unknown down river. Our boats seem fragile, and the future looks a bit daunting. Nonetheless, we are being called to lead into that future, and we carry with us the sturdy and inspiring ideas of those who defined the character and mission of this splendid college. If we remember Elizabethtown not with nostalgia but as our source of energy and inspiration, we will each surely make of the future a place Pinsky describes as one where human possibility spreads and multiplies and exhausts itself in growing. Only then will we fully understand how each of us

8 has been transformed here, and only then will the world realize the full significance of what it means to be educated. Farewell classmates, lead well, and Godspeed to each of you!