The Morehead-Cain

Ben Cameron ’75 is Program Director for the Arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Click to hear an audio recording of this speech.

Commencement speeches are a culturally endorsed form of institutional sadism—a reminder that you’re not out from under our control yet, and we still have 15 last desperate minutes to impart to you whatever shreds of wisdom we failed to impart in the last four years—a goal every commencement speaker knows is doomed to fail.

When I graduated from high school in High Point North Carolina, for example, our principal had had the bright idea that we all line up and sit according to height—an idea that would afford the spectators to have the illusion of one large seamless mortarboard as they looked out over the assembled class. And although the rehearsal had gone well, we arrived at commencement night to find that none of us had worn the same shoes that we had worn at rehearsal—girls who had previously worn sandals now had on high heels, for example, and no one remembered where they had originally stood.

Standing now in order of our new height, we proceeded to a ceremony marked by chaos: no one got the correct diploma, and names were gradually drowned out as people stood and shouted, “Here Jerome, I have your diploma” and tossed them back and forth like so many frisbees above the crowd. To this day, I have no idea who my commencement speaker was, nor any recollection of anything he or she had to say.

At the University of North Carolina, my undergraduate alma mater, we were diverted at the last minute under ominous skies from an outdoor football stadium to a sweltering indoor basketball court. Things got so unbearably hot that we started removing our graduation gowns, and in some cases shirts and more. What had begun with collective dignity quickly disintegrated into a collective strip tease. And to this day, I have no idea who my graduation speaker was, nor any recollection of anything he or she had to say.

And at graduate school, all of us gathered first at our individual discipline schools before marching over en masse and merging in a kind of Busby Berkeley melding of lines to enter the Yale gates to intoned Latin singing and swinging censers. Our line from the Drama School met and walked beside the law school—those future paragons of society—who nonetheless showed their singular lack of amusement with our efforts to enliven the ceremony by singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” in loud Ethel Merman tones as we strode to our seats. And while I clearly remember the look of horror on the face of the University president, to this day I have no idea who my graduation speaker was, nor any recollection of anything he or she had to say.

In fact, the only worthwhile commencement remarks that I can recall at all came from comedian Rodney Dangerfield, who famously said, “These are the best years of your lives. Go back to your dorm rooms, unpack your bags and refuse to leave.”

But the dorms—even for those of you who had them—are now closed, and it is time for you to enter—or return, as the case may be—into your chosen fields—a step you take in an exciting, exhilarating, mystifying, terrifying, uncertain time.

The explosion of new technologies, the shifting balance of cultures in race and generation, and the cross fertilization of the two are producing entire new practices, new expectations, new possibilities in how we communicate, how we learn, with whom and in what proximity we engage and socialize with one another. Clearly what your fields have been and how they have behaved is unlikely to be synonymous with what they will need to be and how they must behave in the future.

You now inherit both the opportunity and the responsibility to define your fields and make new paths where none have existed before, a mission you will adopt in a social context where optimism for some is counterbalanced with fear for others, where new possibilities for some represent the end of much cherished traditions for others, and where we consequently operate in a context of increasingly polarized media, fractious political rancor and declining civic, and civil, discourse.

Those of us who work in the nonprofit sector—a sector whose most salient feature, studies show, is a work force driven by a sense of calling rather than by economic gain—typically respond to such challenges by doing more. Especially now, emperiled by a fragile national economy, working in fields that now find themselves fighting for funding in a world of heightened competition, the temptation will be to push ourselves further and further, doing more and more with less and less, and expecting those with whom we work to do the same.

But if the journey you have chosen is to be worth the travel, you must now find ways to sustain yourself for the long term. If my own experience is any indicator, our quest for knowledge and the pace at which we live can easily catch us up in a quest focused on how—how to improve our professional skills, how to position ourselves more competitively for advancement, how to better be of benefit to those organizations or to those stories that we choose to pursue—with less attention paid to the why.

Why have you committed yourself to this work? Why does this work matter to the larger world in which we live? Does pursuing this work keep you in harmony with the lives you individually want to lead? In essence, what do each of you want your lives to stand for-—and what are those individual values that undergird your larger life purpose?

I don’t wish to suggest that you all share the same priorities or values even within the same field—clearly, you don’t, and the wide range of possible responses and our failure to reach easy consensus on these questions are actually causes for celebration, rather than despair. Some of you will dedicate yourselves to the creation of new knowledge and will prize expertise—being good at something, spending hours in practice and study and exploration, and seeking mentors that can push and develop you further as you dedicate yourself to refining your practice.

Others may prize fame or financial stability—not my own primary value, but one that I daily thank God that my father had, one that not only put bread daily on our table but gave me the life that allowed me to choose the arts for my own future—and ultimately change professions or leave the nonprofit world altogether. Others may even seek simply to instill pleasure (something we often under-estimate as an ongoing value) and seek to create joy in others. And still others will value service, service that will lead you to teach others even as you yourself stay more in the background—answering what is to my mind one of the noblest callings of all.

Whatever the individual choice, being clear about your purpose, about the why and what you wish your life to stand for and about your own core values—the one or two you will go the mat for every single time—will allow you a framework for decision making, let you measure the many opportunities and crossroads you encounter to see whether the path ahead keeps your life on track or throws you off that center.

Clarity arms you to lead a life worth living. Without it, our lives are random, opportunistic, fragmented, ultimately more likely to lead to uncertainty, stress, confusion and despair. And in the day to day, it arms you against burnout (not a synonym for exhaustion). We all know the thrill of working 18 hours a day on things that connect to our cores—and the fatigue of two hours on projects unconnected.

Burnout is disconnect from core values. While it may be futile for me to urge you to do less, especially in these times, let me urge you to become clear about what you will give up, what you will stop doing, to make the time and space to renew yourselves—consistently, respectfully, not remedially—to nurture the values you wish your life to embody and find the energy to persevere.

For my own part, my journey lay through the arts—a journey that taught me commitment. The consequence of making choices. That through those piano scales I practiced for hours taught me delayed gratification, as I watched them bloom in ways that I could not have anticipated. That through singing in the church choir taught me team work, reminding me it was not how well I sang but how well I listened and blended with others. That through those acting classes I took, taught me to see the world, hear the world, taste the world through someone else’s eyes and ears and heart—a cultivation of collective imagination and social empathy that lies at the heart of every true arts experience.

In an age of Tea Party politics and vilification of different, of announcements in train stations and airports and even shopping malls that invite us to report suspicious behavior and individuals—subtle encouragement to view one another with fear and hostility and suspicion—all of you in your chosen fields essentially invite us to view our fellow human beings with generosity and curiosity. God knows if we have ever needed that capacity, we need it now.

As I come to a close in this election year, let me recall for you the words of our one of great politicians, President John Kennedy. In a ceremony celebrating Robert Frost, Kennedy said:

I look forward to a great future for America—a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral strength, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.

And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world, not only for its strength, but for its civilization as well.

You by virtue of your chosen paths do more than passively wait for this America to appear: you are activists, engaged in bringing this vision to fruition.

And so I salute each of you in historic preservation—those who daily remember the perils of a society who forgets where it has been; each of you in creative nonfiction, those deeply aware of the equal peril of not understanding where we are; those of you in education, to whom we trust the very future of our nation, saluting you, not only for what you disseminate but for what you lead out of each student charged to your care; and of course those of you in my own tribe, the arts. As a group, you honor the past, commemorate the present, and shape and change the future in a way that does honor to all and violence to none. For those of us spiritually inclined, it is God’s work we do.

Thank you for your role in doing God’s work, in whatever communities you choose to serve and whatever lives you touch.

Thank you for this truly unexpected honor: you’ve made a Southern boy humble and his mama proud.

And thank you for your kindness and patience in listening to me today. God speed in your work.