|
A Graduation
In Full
Award-wining journalist and author Tom Wolfe
told Duke's newest graduates that, contrary to what many pundits
may say, their future is bright. "It's not a jungle out there.
It's more of a honeymoon safari." At the May 13 graduation
exercises marking the beginning of that safari, degrees were conferred
on 1,608 undergraduates and 1,956 graduate and professional-school
students. The Wallace Wade Stadium crowd numbered more than 15,000.
Wolfe, the author of such acclaimed books as The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and, more
recently, A Man in Full, expanded on one of his familiar themes--status
in American society. "Fifteen minutes from now," he said,
"you will join one of the only two definable social classes
in America. There are, of course, all sorts of gradations of status,
of power, of wealth, influence, and comfort, but it is impossible
to break Americans down into classes in the old European sense.
But there is a... dividing line, and above that line are those people
who have bachelor degrees or better from a four-year college or
university. Below that are the people who don't. That line is becoming
a gulf that grows wider and wider."
Based on today's standards, Wolfe said, Thomas Edison would be
a computer repairman, famed test pilot Chuck Yeager would clean
jet-engine intakes, and Microsoft wouldn't consider hiring Bill
Gates. "He'd have to found the company," Wolfe said, eliciting
laughter from the crowd.
Wolfe, whose daughter Alexandra was among the graduating seniors,
said students had been trained to be the leaders of an extraordinary
nation at an extraordinary time. "There has never been anything
like it.... It is the only country I know of in which immigrants
with a totally different culture, a totally different language,
can in one-half of a generation, if they have the numbers and a
modicum of organization, take over politically a metropolis as large
as, say, Miami.
"It is the old dreams of the utopian socialists of the nineteenth
century--that the common working man would somehow have the free
time, the political freedom, the wherewithal to express himself
in any way he saw fit--that has come here, not in any socialist
nation, but in the United States."
In awarding Wolfe an honorary doctor of literature degree, President
Nannerl O. Keohane said, "Your career has been a fabulous exhibition
of wit and insight.... At The New York Herald-Tribune, you were
encouraged by your editor, Duke graduate Clay Felker, to explore
a new journalism, which, as you have described it, aims to be 'absolutely
truthful and yet have the absorbing quality of fiction.'"
John Chandler B.D. '52, Ph.D. '54, former president of Williams
College and of the Association of American Colleges and Universities,
received an honorary doctor of laws degree. Keohane noted that the
association's current president called Chandler, also a Duke trustee
emeritus, "the embodiment of intellectual and ethical commitments
that liberal education stands for." One of his enduring initiatives--which
enlisted Duke from the start--has paired graduate students at research
universities with faculty at liberal-arts colleges.
Shmuel Eisenstadt, the Rose Isaacs Professor of Sociology Emeritus
at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was given an honorary doctor
of humane letters degree. "Long before it became conventional
to think in terms of global forces," according to the citation,
"you were applying a comparative-studies approach and doing
influential research on Jewish, Japanese, and European cultures."
A sociologist known to be a synthesizer and a bridge-builder to
other disciplines, Eisenstadt has given several seminars at Duke.
Another doctor of humane letters went to Eleanor Elliott; her
father, James A. Thomas, was a close friend of university founder
James B. Duke and contributed an extensive collection of books dealing
with the Far East. Elliott, a longtime supporter of Women's Studies
at Duke, has chaired the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation
and was, for many years, a trustee of Barnard College, her alma
mater. Barnard College president Judith Shapiro, quoted by Keohane,
described her as "a perfect embodiment of what we call the
'Barnard Woman': courageous, independent, hard-working, and deep-thinking."
Beyond receiving a doctor of laws degree from Keohane, U.S. Representative
John R. Lewis received a standing ovation from the crowd. At the
height of the civil-rights era, Lewis joined the Freedom Rides to
help challenge segregation across the South, chaired the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and was one of the planners for
the historic March on Washington. He led the first march in Selma,
Alabama, that became known as "Bloody Sunday," following
a violent confrontation with the police at the Edmund T. Pettus
Bridge. Referring to Lewis' charge to young people to help mold
America into a single community, Keohane said, "Few took on
that obligation more seriously or strenuously than you."
|
