Commencement Speech at Hampshire

BY EDWARD HUMES
AT My ALMA MATER, HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE
(continued)

Graduates! Thank you for inviting me to share this day with you and your families and all of the Hampshire community, staff, faculty and administrators.

It’s quite an honor to return here after 22 years. As I say that number, I can scarcely believe it has been so long ­— 22 years since I stood where you now stand, on a spring day much like this one, about to move on into a world and a time not at all like this one.

I see so much that is familiar here, and so much that is new, all the many additions and accomplishments you and your predecessors have woven into the fabric of Hampshire College since that day a quarter century ago when I first drove past the Red Barn. I remember wondering: What am I getting into, at this school that had only just been accredited, that had a student body smaller than my high school graduating class, that had all these odd terminals and outlets in the walls of every dorm room that were supposed to network our computers, except of course, none of us had computers in 1975. IBM wouldn’t sell its first PC for another six years. But there was Hampshire, out in front as always, wired for the Internet before there was an Internet.

I must confess something to you, though: I almost didn’t make it into Hampshire in the first place. I hold the unique distinction of having authored an application for admission that was almost too weird even for Hampshire College.

I had gotten it into my head that this bold new experiment in education required an equally bold, novel and irresistibly clever application. So I wrote an essay for my admission application that purported to be not an essay at all, but a desperate and covert plea for help. I wrote that I had just stumbled on an earthshaking discovery, one of such global significance — yet so alarming to the powers that be — that I was being pursued, threatened with imprisonment, and intimidated into silence. The only way I could get word out, I wrote, was to disguise my findings as a college application. The details grow a bit foggy now, mercifully, but it had something do with an archaeological dig and the unearthing of a find that would completely unravel our understanding of our origins and our very future, and it had aroused a whole conspiracy of government, corporate and religious interests who would stop at nothing to stop me. Dear Admissions Director: Please help!

I thought this quite original, but I made the fatal mistake of not letting anyone read my essay before I sent it on its merry way. So there was no one to tell me that it essentially met all the diagnostic criteria for a variety of psychiatric disorders, paranoid delusions being chief among them.

It wasn’t long before my guidance counselor hauled me into her office and started shouting, "What did you write in that essay?" She’d heard from someone in Hampshire admissions, a former student of hers, fortunately for me, who wanted to know why she had written such a glowing recommendation for such an obvious lunatic. She managed to persuade him that I was okay, more or less, and after a few nail-biting weeks of indecision, I was admitted. Apparently it was a close call, because shortly after arriving here, I attended one of those wine and cheese affairs they used to have, where new students are rendered apoplectic by being forced to address the college president by first name, and there filling up his little cheese plate was the same fellow from admissions. When I introduced myself, his jaw dropped and all he could say, before scurrying away with his Jarlsberg, was: “You’re the one with the essay!“

This is a true story. Personally, I like to think that this represents a testament to what Hampshire stands for: a school willing to take a chance on me even though those making that call were uncertain whether to praise my creativity or question my mental status. It would have been far easier —­ and far more the norm — ­ to simply toss that application aside as too much, too weird, too risky. But then —­ and I don’t really have to tell you graduates who made the decision to come here ­— Hampshire is all about taking risks, isn’t it?

I have often wondered, though, whether Hampshire itself was at risk as time wore on, as the world changed, and as one by one, the experimental colleges that flourished in the same era of Hampshire’s birth closed their doors, or retreated from their founding philosophies, or simply came to be viewed as vaguely amusing anachronism. As you might imagine, the Hampshire I experienced was part of a very different moment in history and culture than your Hampshire is and will be.

The Vietnam War had only just ended, its national scar still livid, marking us all. Twice in my high school years I had watched men in uniform arrive on my block in Philadelphia to visit the homes of boys just a few years older than me, guys I had thrown footballs with and envied for their cars or girlfriends —­ and whose parents, as I stood there and watched, had to learn from strangers that their sons would not ever come home. That war shaped so much of who we were then, and what we feared: I arrived here among the first of my generation to turn eighteen without having to register for the draft.

Our last energy crisis was in full swing that year as well, another sort of war that brought lessons about oil dependence and conservation we thought we’d never forget — until we fell in love with our SUVs and said the hell with good mileage and the ozone layer. Saturday Night Live was a new idea that year, and we actually thought it was funny. We brought typewriters to campus with us, and actually used them. We didn’t know then, as we do now, what a Hampshire degree would be worth once we left (it’s worth quite a bit, it turns out). No one had heard of AIDS or crack cocaine or imposing life sentences on thirteen year olds. Star Wars was still just a popcorn movie, not Ronald Reagan’s 70-billion dollar pipe dream that won’t die. The burning political cause on campus back then was our demand that the college renounce investments in South Africa, the South Africa of apartheid ­ another area where Hampshire, happily, was out in front.

And, perhaps more than anything else, it was a time when Richard Nixon’s shame was fresh in our minds, driving us in myriad ways, in my case, toward a career in journalism, which in the wake of Watergate seemed a most high and noble calling ­ an opinion then shared, however briefly, by a surprisingly large segment of the public. We had not yet sensed the cancers of disillusionment and apathy planted within us by Nixon’s crimes, his most lasting and damaging legacy.

And so, as the world of Hampshire’s origins has faded into the realm of ancient history, and as our culture has become increasingly corporate and regimented, dominated by a globalization that has not, as some of us once naively hoped, brought us a new unity so much as a numbing uniformity, it seems reasonable to ask the question: Is there a place in the world for Hampshire? And is there still a place for its insistently independent graduates, with their will to question everything, and their wonderful, eloquent, deliciously ambiguous philosophy, To Know is not Enough?

Well, the answer to that question is not only a resounding yes, but I believe now, more than ever, we need Hampshire. Urgently. Now, more than ever, we need your drive and passion and commitment to the notion that learning and knowledge, and, indeed, justice and liberty, are rooted not so much in knowing answers, but in finding ever better questions. In choosing a different course. In defying conventional wisdom. In pushing others to see through the same fresh eyes you use. In breaking out of the pack.

I can tell you that, throughout my life and work, I have drawn on my experiences and learning here at Hampshire time and again, in ways small and large. It turns out that a Hampshire education serves writers and journalists particularly well. This idea that knowledge lies in the search for questions others have missed, of embracing and putting to use the perspectives of different disciplines in crafting those questions, represents the common thread in my writing over the years.

I left this place filled with questions, ideals, enthusiasm. I landed in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, which had the distinction then of being home to the first newspaper to offer me a job, in a state then presided over by a young governor with big ambitions and bigger appetites, by the name of Bill Clinton. My boss dubbed him Slick Willie. Good times.

There were other newspapers, in Arizona and California, more worlds to explore, then a chance to realize a lifelong dream, to write books, to devote months and years instead of hours and days to the stories I sought, the questions that burned.

There were many things that contributed to this opportunity to strike out on my own; I will say that I first decided it was possible while I was here, watching so many others charting their own courses, leaving the pack. I’m sure is has been the same for many of you, or it will be soon. I should add one thing, however, about striking out on your own. It doesn’t hurt to have, as I did, a talented wife with a steady income.

I tend to think of my books as offering glimpses into hidden worlds that most people don’t get to visit, whether it is the world of a neonatal intensive care unit, unexpectedly human and humane, a part of the medical world that works the way we wish the rest of medicine would but rarely does. Or the gothic world of a murderously corrupt Mississippi town, where it became impossible to separate the pillars of the community from those who should be pilloried. Or the world of our juvenile courts, where the conventional wisdom that the system is broken because it fails to punish the worst offenders turns reality on its head. In fact, this most important part of our justice system, where young lives and fates hang in the balance every day, fails because ALL we care about is that handful of worst offenders, while more than a million others each year get little or no attention at all. Yet we blame those children for our failure.

As I tried to write about these worlds, I had a surprisingly similar experience in each, of sitting down among those who live and breathe these places and being asked by them: What book could you possibly write about us? We are so boring, we do the same things every day. This, from the doctor who brings life to an infant no bigger than a soda can, as you or I would change a Band-Aid. And this, from a prosecutor who, day in and day out, decides the fates of families and children, who determines if a young life is in danger, or if the child himself is dangerous to the rest of us — ­ and makes those decision to save or to punish one year out of law school, with a backlog of 40 other files on the desk, waiting for decisions of their own. Boring, he says to me. Bureaucracy. Paper work.

How can we not question such things? How can we not see how extraordinary such moments are, these miracles so casually wrought, these lives so easily discarded? Why is one life precious, the other, worthless? Asking such questions, I put to you, is our job, no matter your field or interest. That, my friends, is what Hampshire helps us all find: the need, the right, the desire to enter hidden worlds and see them with fresh eyes —­ to be both the fly on the wall, and the fly in the ointment.

We live ­— Hampshire lives —­ in an era where the pack mentality seems increasingly the norm, be it in politics, where our two major parties have made differences without distinctions their way of life, or in the financial sector, where the lemming rushes of recent times would be laughable were it not for the damage done us all, or in the media, which members of the public no longer hold in high esteem — and who can blame them? — with its fixation on the small and the mean, and its embrace of such abominations as reality TV that is anything but. If it stands for anything, Hampshire stands for resisting the pack, questioning the pack, rising above the pack.

I know it is traditional for the commencement speaker to offer advice, though I don’t believe you need to hear mine. You already have accepted what I would advise, lived it, made it a part of you. You would not be here otherwise. Whatever it is that you do next after you leave this place that has nurtured and tortured and frustrated and urged you on, be it in the arts or the sciences, commerce or teaching, you must know that you are uniquely situated to defy the conventional wisdom, to find the hard questions, and the questions others miss — and to have the courage to ask them and ask them loudly, because it does take courage.

Yes, there is risk in this, this business of making a difference, but Hampshire, I think we can agree, is about taking risks. You have taken them already, by choosing this path and navigating it successfully to this grand day, and my advice to you now is to make that gamble pay.

This is your day, graduates, with many more to come. Congratulations!

May 2001, Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts