Been working on my commencement speech. You know; just in case. Not that any establishment of higher learning has asked, or that any have the position still open.
As for my qualifications: There is evidence that a person need not be a Nobel or Pulitzer Prize winner, a politician, activist, academic, actor, film producer, motivational speaker, or business leader to get the gig. A frog (Kermit) once spoke to the Southampton College grads here on Long Island.
Montana State University invited Flint Rasmussen, a former professional rodeo clown, to address its graduating class in early May. Michigan’s Hillsdale College presented television game-show host Pat Sajak to its students. Graduates at D’Youville University, a small private school in upstate New York, were addressed by an artificial intelligence robot named Sophia. Even a football placekicker with 1940s political and social values was enlisted by Kansas’ Benedictine College.
A lot of schools recruit an alum. I checked; my alma mater, the University of Missouri, already had a series of ceremonies for its various schools earlier this month. So I will have no role in bringing down the curtain for those departing scholars.
It’s just that Dartmouth is going to have former tennis star Roger Federer speak and, well, I covered tennis for more than 40 years during my sportswriting career at Newsday. I also chronicled a number of Mets games, and I noticed that Seton Hall had Gary Cohen, the Mets’ play-by-play man, deliver its commencement address. Maybe if tennis or baseball knowledge can be related to advice for the future leaders of the world….
Where to go with that, though? The thing about college commencement speeches is how ephemeral they tend to be, how easily forgotten they are. Only via some hand-me-down recollection from a former Mizzou colleague (who had to be reminded by another grad) was I recently informed that the acclaimed playwright Tennessee Williams had addressed our 1969 class. And for all I remember about what he said—which is not a word—it could have been Tennessee Ernie Ford who did the honors.
I wonder if Williams mentioned that day how, during his two years taking courses in my alma mater’s journalism school—the first in the world and still highly ranked—he was said to be so bored (and distracted by unrequited love for a girl) that his father brought him home.
I have polled several people about this, and the general sense—with no disrespect to the prominent folks who work so hard to produce their words of inspiration and instruction—is that commencement addresses essentially are boiler plate. Guidance that is no more revelatory than “Be Prepared.” “Take notes.” “Don’t count your chickens.” “Wear sunscreen.”
When I think about it, some of the best life wisdom can be found in the lyrics of the late John Prine. His tune “Safety Joe” counsels how it was “too bad” that the protagonist “never got too sad” but also “never got too happy,” wearing “a seat belt around his heart.” Prine sang
If you don’t loosen up the buckle
On your heart and start to chuckle
You’re gonna die of boredom, Safety Joe.
In “That’s the Way That the World Goes ‘Round,” Prine cautioned
You’re up one day, the next, you’re down
It’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.
And he put in a good word for the benefits of education in “It’s a Big Old Goofy World.”
So I’m sitting in a hotel
Trying to write a song
My head is just as empty
As the day is long
Why it’s clear as a bell
I should have gone to school
I’d be wise as an owl
‘Stead of stubborn as a mule.
In one of those regular New York Times liberal vs. conservative editorial “conversations” between staffers Gail Collins and Bret Stephens, Collins noted that in past commencement addresses she had given, “I could tell that most of the audience was hoping I’d make them laugh. Just in a way that made them feel it was OK to celebrate their achievements by having a good time with their families and friends.”
Stephens took more of an ivory-tower approach, writing that he would urge grads to cultivate an inner life, memorize poetry, imitate writers and artists they admired. And—maybe a bit more down-to-earth—”please stop photographing your damn meals.”
All right. There it is. There’s the speech. Wear sunscreen.