Matriculation Address 2009

Lawrence S. Bacow
Matriculation Address
September 2, 2009

To the class of 2013, welcome! September 2nd, a date that you have had circled on your calendar since receiving your acceptance letter from Tufts, is finally here. No more questions about where you are going to school. No more endless conversations about what to pack and what to leave at home. No more worries about whether you will make friends, what it will be like doing your own laundry, or even whether you are up to the competition. (Trust me, you are.) Your time has come. Congratulations. High school is history. You are now officially college students, and Tufts students at that. Welcome.

Today is not only a special day for you, but also for me and for my wife Adele. Exactly 40 years ago this week, we were sitting where you are - not at Tufts - but as freshmen at other Boston area schools. I remember that day vividly. I was absolutely convinced that the admissions office had made a mistake and it was only a matter of time before someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Excuse me, but you don't belong here." It was only many years later that I realized that this was a common fear. Rest assured, our admissions office does not make mistakes. You are all here because you have earned your place in this class through hard work and exceptional accomplishment during your high school years. If you are equally diligent over the next four years, you will also do well at Tufts. I have great confidence in you.

Last week while on one of my morning runs, my mind turned to the parallels between your experience as first-year college students and mine. As I was mulling this question over, a song started to play on my iPod (I keep it on shuffle play when I run). Once I heard the song, I knew what I wanted to talk about. Let me play a bit of it for you. I suspect most of you will recognize it, but if you don't, I guarantee that your parents will.

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'. †

Bob Dylan had it right. 1969 and 2009 - both years of great change.

1969 was a very tumultuous year. The year began with the inauguration of a new President, Richard Nixon, and the continuation of an unpopular war. 250,000 people marched in protest on Washington. Both Yassir Arafat and Muhammar Qadaffi came to power. Sirhan Sirhan confessed to assassinating Bobby Kennedy. The draft lottery was instituted. Ask your parents about it.

1969 also marked a period of great technological change and achievement. Man landed on the moon. The first microprocessor was invented, paving the way for the digital revolution that followed. The first messages ever to be exchanged by two computers occurred over ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet. Just imagine, the seeds of so much that now define your life - personal computers, cell phones, and the web - were sown the year that my generation went off to college.

1969 was also a time of great cultural change. The Beatles gave their last public performance. A police raid on a gay bar in New York, the Stonewall Inn, gave rise to the gay rights movement. Sesame Street was broadcast for the first time. And for the New Yorkers in the crowd, the Amazing Mets won the World Series and Joe Namath and the Jets won the Super Bowl in the upset of the century.

In many ways, my generation, or should I say your parents' generation, has spent the last 40 years coping with the changes set in motion in 1969. We are still debating the lessons of Vietnam. Terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy is still with us. Both software developers and sociologists continue to explore the capabilities and consequences of our digital world. The struggle for gays and lesbians to achieve true equality in society continues to this day. And of course, you guys are still listening to our music.

You are also entering college during a period of enormous change. The face of American leadership is literally changing before our eyes. In 1969 it would have been impossible to imagine a black man in the White House. Today it is a reality and we also have a Latina woman on the Supreme Court. The old global economic order has been turned upside down by the financial crisis of the past 12 months. The issues confronting the nation and the world have never seemed more challenging: climate change, health care, HIV, swine flu, nuclear proliferation, religious extremism. I could go on.

What makes Bob Dylan's words so true today is that change seems to be the only constant. You are fortunate, however, that you do not need to confront all these changes immediately. Rather, you have the luxury of using the next four years to prepare yourself for this changing world that you will inhabit when you graduate. Tufts is where you will acquire the knowledge, wisdom, skills, and relationships that will equip you to lead a meaningful and productive life in a time of change.

How should you take advantage of these next four years to get the most out of your Tufts education?

First, play to your weakness, not to your strength. I would encourage you to take at least one course each semester in a subject that you know nothing about. Explore music, art, philosophy, psychology, math and the sciences, just to name a few. Our Engineering School offers a number of courses for non-engineers that will expose you to the engineering design process. Who knows? You might like it. We are among the few schools in the nation that often graduates more students from engineering than we enrolled as freshmen, which is another way of saying that a lot of kids figure out they want to be engineers while at Tufts.

Second, get to know the faculty well. I believe the single greatest predictor of whether a student has a terrific experience in college - any college - is whether they get to know at least one faculty member well enough so that they stay in touch for the rest of their life. This is not hard at Tufts. Our faculty love students. They want you to seek them out, to attend office hours, to linger after class with a question. Don't be intimidated by them. If you want to start a conversation with a professor, just ask her how she decided to become a physicist, or a poet, or a sociologist. Talk to faculty about their research - they are all working at the cutting edge of their disciplines. Invite them to have a cup of coffee with you in the Library Café. As long as you go there with a faculty member, anything you both order to drink is on the house.

Third, get to know your classmates and seek out people who are different from you. As Lee Coffin has already described, your class is made up of an incredibly diverse group of talented individuals. If you hang out with people just like you, you will deprive yourself of the opportunity to learn from others. Never forget, we learn from our differences. Seek out your classmate who grew up on the other side of the country, the other side of the world, or the other side of the tracks. And don't be bashful. Everyone else is just as anxious about making new friends as you are.

Fourth, read voraciously. For the next four years you will be living in a community of scholars. Our currency in trade is ideas. If you are to get the most out of your time at Tufts, you must be active in this marketplace. You cannot expect to get all of your information from tweets and texts. Most successful people I know read all the time. Get in the habit of reading serious journalism: The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, just to name a few.

Fifth, get used to being uncomfortable. You are here to have your ideas challenged, to be exposed to new ways of thinking, new ways of knowing, and new ways of understanding the world.

Sixth, get off campus. You are going to school in one of the great cities of the world. Get to know Boston. Go to the Museum of Fine Arts - it is free for Tufts students. Attend a concert at Symphony Hall, home to one of the greatest orchestras in the world, the Boston Symphony. Visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, an Italian Renaissance Villa on the Fenway that houses one of the greatest art collections ever amassed by one individual. And then there is that unique Boston shrine, or should I say cathedral - Fenway Park. Even Yankee fans are welcome.

If you really want to get to know Boston, come run the Boston Marathon with me. This year I will once again lead the Tufts team. It will be my sixth marathon. I guarantee that by training with us you will get to know the streets of Medford, Somerville, Winchester, and the course from Hopkinton to Boston intimately. By the way, parents are also welcome. Running a marathon with your child gives new meaning to the phrase, "family time."

Seventh, learn time management skills. Many students fall into the trap of staying up too late, dragging themselves out of bed just in time for their first class, then stumbling to lunch, killing more time until their afternoon classes. They hang out with friends until dinner, and then don't start doing their homework until 11:00 PM. Before they know it, it is 3:00 AM and they still have not gone to bed. The next morning, they get up and repeat the cycle. They are always tired and always behind. Try to treat your school work like a 9:00 to 5:00 job. If you are not in class between 9:00 and 5:00, you should be studying. If you do so, you will have only a modest amount of work to do on the evenings and weekends. Trust me. This system works.

Eighth, exploit the entire university. Tufts is more than just Arts, Sciences and Engineering. We are a research university with seven schools on three campuses. On any given day, you will find lectures and seminars on every possible topic. Take advantage of them. Visit our professional schools especially if you might be interested in medicine, dentistry, nutrition, veterinary medicine or international relations. If you are interested in one of these fields, seek out a faculty member and see if you might collaborate with them on their research. Our Summer Scholars Program will actually pay you a stipend to do so.

Finally, get involved! At Tufts we expect every graduate to be an active, engaged, effective citizen not just of this community but of the world at large. Try to make a difference during your time here and beyond. Those who founded this university in 1852, the Universalists, believed passionately that with education comes responsibility. They were very forward thinking. They were early abolitionists and also believed in the power of those who were educated to transform the lives of those less fortunate. I hope you will embrace and be faithful to their founding vision.

Class of 2013, in a few hours you will say goodbye to your friends and family. You are going to be on your own - with lots of support, but on your own nonetheless. If you want to eat a diet of Ramen noodles, Doritos and Diet Coke, no one will stop you. If your roommate does not object, you never have to make your bed, clean up your room or even wash your clothes. If you come down with the flu, especially this season, it will be up to you to stay in your dorm so that you do not infect others. We will do our part to try to take care of you - to get your meals to you and see that others take notes for you, but you must do your part as well. Part of what you are here to learn is to make these choices responsibly. We have great faith in your ability to do so.

If you look hard enough, you will find many temptations on a college campus - and Tufts is no exception. We admitted you because we thought you had good judgment. Please do not prove us wrong. If you would not be comfortable explaining to your parents why you did something, don't do it.

Let me give you some blunt advice about drinking. Nothing good ever happened to anyone while they were drunk. You are likely to embarrass yourself or worse, put yourself or others at risk. You are also likely to do things which you will later regret, perhaps for the rest of your life. Please be advised that Tufts is not a consequence-free zone. Your Tufts ID does not entitle you to flout the law or behave in ways that would get you arrested elsewhere. We expect you to be the type of person you described in your application. The Dean of Admissions assures me that none of you claimed to be loud, obnoxious, drunk, or offensive to your neighbors. We don't expect you to behave that way here either.

Going off to college is a big adjustment for each of you, but in some ways it is an even bigger adjustment for your families. You have lots of people to help you through this transition - advisors, deans, counselors, faculty and fellow students. By contrast, your parents are on their own. Since they brought you home from the hospital, you have been at the center of their lives. Indeed, you will not appreciate all they have done for you until you become parents yourselves. It is now up to you to help them adjust to a life where you are no longer a constant presence. Please keep in touch, and when you call home, please don't forget to ask your folks how they are doing.

And now a word to parents: You should be enormously proud of what your sons and daughters have already accomplished. The fact that they are sitting here today is but one sign that you have done your job well. But I suspect that as you prepare to say goodbye, your hopes and aspirations for them are tempered by more than a bit of anxiety. You are probably asking yourself, "Are they ready for all that awaits them? Will they act maturely? Will they use good judgment?" We raise our children to be independent, yet when they reach the moment when they are ready to spread their wings, our natural inclination is to cling to them.

I must now ask you to do the hardest thing you have ever done as parents - let go. Your kids will never chill out unless you do first. Let them fight their own battles. They don't need you to solve their registration problems, or to lobby to get a better housing assignment. If the refrigerator breaks in their suite, you shouldn't be calling my office to get it fixed. Learning to deal with a large organization is another useful life skill that your sons and daughters will master at Tufts, if you let them. You cannot be everywhere for them, and I assure you, your kids don't want you to be.

You must also trust your sons and daughters to make the right choices. Of course, they will make mistakes. Neither you nor I were perfect when we were their age. But you must give them the space and the opportunity to learn from their errors. Rest assured, they will remember the lessons that you, their first teachers, have taught them. And of course, we are here to help.

This is a good place, a caring place. All of us at Tufts are here to help your sons and daughters continue to grow and learn, to build upon the wonderful foundation that you have so lovingly provided to them.

Students: The last hurdle you have to clear before really starting your Tufts education is, "The Conversation." This is the awkward moment when you actually have to say goodbye to your families. I suspect both you and your parents have been anticipating this moment for some time. Some of you may have even extracted promises from your parents to avoid emotional farewells.

But I am a parent myself so that is where my sympathies lie. So, to the parents assembled here, I hereby grant you a special presidential release from all commitments to avoid emotional goodbyes. I know they were made under duress and so they are legally unenforceable. When the time comes, hold your kids close, give them a big hug, and as Lesley Gore said, "cry if you want to." I guarantee that no one will notice because they will all be doing the same.

Before I close, I would like to play just a little more Bob Dylan. Parents, his words from our time are just as relevant today, but now he is speaking to us. Listen carefully.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

Students, I would like to end on a very personal note. Earlier this summer, our youngest son got married. Adele and I were fortunate that eight of our college roommates attended his wedding. These were all friends that we met within two days of setting foot on campus as freshmen in 1969. My wish for each of you is that 40 years from now, you will still be getting together with lifelong friends that you will meet in the course of the next few days. They are out there among you. Go find them.

Class of 2013, your time has come. We have great expectations for you. May the next four years bring you challenge, growth, excitement, passion, opportunity, and fulfillment. I know I speak for all those assembled here today - your families, friends, faculty, and staff - we look forward to sharing this extraordinary journey with you. Good luck to you all.

 † Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'," (http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/times-they-are-changin)
  Copyright ©1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music.