Stanford University - Quad Yearbook (Palo Alto, CA)

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WORDS Robert Maynard Congratulations on your great achievements My empathy is with vou on this day because it was on a Sunday just like tfiis one, one year ago, when my three children and I were here at Stanford to witness a celebration. the graduation of my beloved bride Nancy from this fine Law School. That was the occasion of great joy for us for it marked the conclusion, as this day does to you, of a most important phase of life. In our case, Nancy's been joking on occasion about her Stanford Law School education, that the one thing she knows for sure that it's done is improve the quality of our arguments at dinner And I would add that it has done more than that. Stanford has, indeed, enriched and added a new dimension to our lives. So I am here as much as your commencement speaker as a member of the family. I warned President Kennedy that I came to speak here today as a mid-century person, born in the late 1930s but come of age in that grey, blighted decade of the 1950s when most of our communication was in black-and-white photographs or the disembodied voicosof the radioor the early flickeringsof black-and-white television. It was a time of transition to be followed by the decade of the 1960s, with its period of great explosions. But as I think about myself coming of age in the late 1950s, it occurs to me that my generation will live the majority of its life in the 20th centurv, and most of you who graduate in the Class of 1988 will live the majority of vour lives in the 21st century. bo you could say that our meeting here today is a meeting at the crossroads of the two centuries. Seen in that light, it is only fair to ask what was it our generation incurred as its legacy and what are the most likely features of the legacy we pass on to you to carry on into the 21st century. I have obviously several biases in this regard. I do not, for example, believe that my generation's contributions in fusion and fission necessarily made the world a better place. The sword of Damocles of the nuclear nightmare continues to hang over mankind, despite glasnoU and Reagan's Moscow spring. And so it is fair to say that one burden that we pass from one generation to the next is that we have yet to find a way to extinguish the nuclear nightmare. Nonetheless, I would like to confine myself to ... three other areas of our life, which concern the structure of our society, which, I think, raise great possibilities for what we two generations might say to each other about where we nave been and where we yet have to go. Let me say, before I name those three subjects, that whatever we think in a society, I am persuaded that the role of learning is pivotal to the solution of our problems. You have only begun yourcareerof learning into these issues. 1 encourage you to think of this merely as the beginning ot the next phase of your life of learning. Stanford is a very special place in that it prepares you well for what you must face in the future But I urge you to join that urgent erv in our society for a renaissance of learning, for a belief that solutions to our problems lie in a deeper understanding of the nature of our world and the challenges we face. So with that thought in mind, I wish to state briefly what we inherited in three areas and what 1 think we pass on as challenges remaining for you. And those three concerns are in the areas of race, gender equality, and age. Let me say a brief word about where we found each of those 30 years ago in my youth and where I think they are today and where they arc likely to be tomorrow- for you to solve the struggles that remain. The 1940s and 1950s were .. decades of terror for people of color all over the United States. It mav be difficult for those of you who were born in a later decade of the 1960s and even those who may be here from the 1970s to know that there was a time in the 1940s and 1950s when citizens routinely lost their lives in lynchings, particularly in the Deep South and southeastern part of the United States, where the denial of fundamental human rights was a way of life. And across the Great Southwest, Hispanic Americans were similarly abused. And in the Mountain West, so were Indians. Hereon the West Coast in the 1940s Japanese Americans, for no good reason, were deprived of their property and their liberty without due process of law. All this occurred in a time frame that is very difficult for those of you who came afterward to even recognize for the horror that it contained. And yet through the movement of persons such as Martin Luther King and through the dedication of civil rights and human rights workers across this land, the law changed. The Constitution recognized the need to compromise and. indeed, recognized that only through equal justice under the law could we keep faith with the good fortune the framers had already provided us and guarantee a future for this architecture of the country. The core of the issue was whether we could be a community or whether we would be really a nation governed by sectors We chose through law; we chose the Constitution as our guide, and .is a result... America has been made stronger as a society through the recognition of the rights of all of its citizens, regardless of race. But to see the times change as they have in 30 years is to be reminded of the blessings for the everlasting of a society such as ours, and a reminder to you that to preserve that liberty means to preserve the educated and learned society that can appreciate the blessings of freedom that have been passed on to us. In the 19th century there was a famous civil rights case called Drcd Scott, in which the Chief Justice of the United States, Roger Taney by name, articulated the notion that in view of the law of the United States, in the authority of the court, the black had no rights the white man was bound to obey or recognize. That notion, while articulated with respect to peoples of color, was to some extent an unspoken notion with respect to women in our society before men ... And so it was that in that same decade in the 1960s that saw the explosion in concern for the rights of persons of color there also began a great movement to change the way we perceived of women in our society. It was common in my mid-century upbringing for people to say. and be serious, that a woman's place is in the nomc. It neveroccurred to them to think of a woman's place in the House, or the Senate, or the White House. But, oh, the times they are a-changing. and that is a story in itself of signals significant for our time. Just as it is true that the resolution of problems of race in our society have |ust begun, so it is true that the full partici- Eation of women in our society has only- jsut begun to e recognized for the rich potential it will be in making us a better society-. But new problems are clear that will have to be solved. I am particularly struck as I see the new shape of the familv, by the desperate need for understanding how we wifi provide appropriate child care and early childhood development training in an entirely different arena from the one in which I was raised, when more than 70 percent of all the households in my growing up in the '50s were made up of a daddy who went out to work and a mommy who stayed home bv the hearth. The children expected to find mommy borne when they got home from school every day. As I said, the times have changed, but the preservation of family under these new circumstances will require us to engage in some careful policy planning as well as some rethinking of our own private agendas as we get to understand how to become a more inclusive society. That is a challenge that has only begun in my generation, and you surely will carry that one with you straight across the frontier of time into the 21st cent’ury. And when you get there, the issue of age will become ever more important as a social and political and economic challenge to our society. Consider this: Between 1900 and 1988, the life expectancy gains of American citizens have been on the order of a quarter century — almost 30 years. There has not been a similar gain in life expectancy between, say, 3,000 B.C. and the 20th centurv — 5,000 years. What this augurs is a longer life for ail of us presumably, but there are those who would argue that as we get older, our utility may diminish, and there is a question os to what society's obligations will be to our older citizens. Now I have to tell you the issue of age in our society is remarkable in the degree to which one's perspective on it changes over time. Those in their 20s an less likely to recognize the urgency of these questions as persons my age or older. In other words, the old saying applies: where you sit depends an awful lot on where you stand or vice versa. All the same, there are those who would argue that age and means should have much to do with the distribution of health care — that the rise of the new technologies that make extension of life possible raise questions as to whether you in your generation will face a new set of policy decisions called who shall live and who shall die. Now I have to tcllyou that not everyone agrees that the great problem of the next century will be the rationing of health care. There is a fair argument that the biggest costs in health care today are not in heroic surgeries but in long-term care, that as we get closer to understanding the problems associated with such illnesses as Alzheimer's, we will do a great deal to reduce the great costs of medical care for the aging population. But nonetheless, the point I wish to impress upon you is how we make these choices will depend to a ?;reat degree on how well we are informed, now care-ully we study the issues, how carefully we debate those questions, how much respect we have for the processes of knowledge as opposed to the prose of demagogues. When you see a society in which the video screen has become the great teacher and the university and the high school are struggling to find ways to attract the attention of students, you must worry about the erosion of that fundamental tenet that reading and learning are the precursors to any effective reasoning and that in a free society, a self-governing society, where the citizen is sovereign, an ill-informed and ignorant citizen may verv well be a danger to all of us. So os you leave this institution having been blessed with as fine an education as our society — or 1 suspect, the Western world — can provide, you go away not just with a special blessing but with a special obligation. I believe those obligations are to hold high the torch of the creed of learning as being vital to the survival and enhancement of our society, and that rational values that are based upon the notion that the stronger we are as a community the stronger we are as a nation; that with those understandings and with the understanding that ever - human being, regardless of color or gender, who is denied an opportunity in our society is a resource gone to waste, and we cannot afford to waste resources. Mr. President, graduates of 1988, members of the faculty and administration, and guests, I thank you for giving me the privilege of sharing in this extraordinary-occasion. I hope that as you leave here, as you count afl your blessings, that you will agree to share with the world the largest one'of all, the gift of the liberty that is only possible through learning, and I hope you'll pass it on to future generations. Robert Maynard is the editor of the Oakland Tribune SAIK 387