Vice-Chancellor’s Remarks and Charge to the Class of 2017
John M. McCardell, Jr.
May 14, 2017
“Cancellarie, licetne anglice loqui?”
“Licet.”
In a moment I will pronounce, as our ritual requires, a charge to each of you as graduates of the
University. But first, a word or two – in English.
If you were up early this morning (or simply had a long, long night), you experienced the
exhilaration that comes from a peaceful campus, in the cool of the morning, under a glorious
sunrise. This has been an exception Commencement Week, for which we have the weather gods
in part to thank. But we also have other thanks to render, and I hope, as you prepare to take your
leave, you will stop for a moment to offer those thanks –
… to your families, who nurtured you, and who lovingly, trustingly, committed you to this
University, who saw in you their own hope for immortality, who gave you life and opportunity,
and who now, surely, on this day wish for you the wisdom that springs from knowledge.
… to your friends, with whom you shared over these four years all manner of experiences, and
from whom you received a substantial part of your education.
… to your teachers, who gave you knowledge and who modeled wisdom: in the classroom and
across the campus, teachers who were called professors, yes, but who were also called coaches,
librarians, custodians, deans, dining hall workers, groundskeepers (many of whom have worked
very hard this week, even very early this morning, unsung and behind the scenes, to make these
ceremonies bright and beautiful).
In preparation for moments like this I keep a file, and recently, combing through that file,
I came across an essay written by John Updike. The title of the essay is “Coming Home,” and in
it Updike reflects on leaving home, attending college, putting down new roots, and then, later,
returning to his place of birth, only to discover both how much it had changed and how selective
his memory of his years spent there had been.
Surely, I though, an appropriate theme for Commencement remarks. And so I sought out
the poem that prompted Updike’s musings. Entitled “Shillington,” the name of the Pennsylvania
town in which Updike grew up, the poem was composed in 1958 for the town’s bicentennial
celebration. It is brief, and I share it with you in its entirety:
The vacant lots are occupied, the woods
Diminish, Slate Hill sinks beneath its crown
Of solvent homes, and marketable goods
On all sides crowd the good remembered town
Returning, we find our snapshots inexact.
Perhaps a condition of being alive
Is that the clothes which, setting out, we packed
With Love no longer fit when we arrive.
Yet sights that limited our truth were strange
To older eyes; the town that we have lost
Is being found by hands that still arrange
Horse-chestnut heaps and fingerpaint on frost.
Time shades these alleys; every pavement crack
Is mapped somewhere. A solid concrete ball,
On the gate post of a sold house, brings back
A waist leaning against a buckling wall.
The gutter-fires smoke, their burning done
Except for, fanned within, an orange feather;
We have one home, the first, and leave that one.
The having and the leaving go on together.
“We have one home, the first, and leave that one./ The having and the leaving go on
together.” The having and the leaving. Four years ago, each of you left your home, perhaps not
your first physically but certainly your first emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. Your
families and loved ones bade you farewell, and this campus, this community, became your new
home.
Now, four years later, you prepare to leave what, for your adult lives at least, has been
your “first home,” from which you now enter a world of challenge, uncertainty, and high
expectations. “The having and the leaving go on together.” Perhaps you, more than I or your
families, can today understand what that means. Because knowing that you are leaving makes
more vivid, and more precious, what for the last four years you have had. And the leaving thus
makes the desire for having, the need for having those things terribly urgent and compelling.
If the having and the leaving go on together, what is it that we hope you have had, and
leaving, will always have? Well, we certainly hope, and expect, that you have achieved a degree
of breadth and depth and discipline and maturity in your academic studies. You have completed
the College’s requirements, and today we certify that you have met our academic standards. You
have also participated in the life of this community outside the classroom. All this you have
learned, and all of this you take with you. An from this brief rehearsal of what it means to attend
the University of the South, we recognize that one of the principal links between “having” and
“leaving” is memory.
But memory alone is not enough, and if all you have as you leave is memory, then the
linkage between “having” and “leaving” is incomplete. To attend Sewanee is to build a store of
pleasant memories. To have attended Sewanee, however, is to have forged the other critical link
between “having” and “leaving.”
We call that link hope.
“Having” and “leaving,” memory and hope, what is past and what is to come. You take
with you hope along with memory, and not your hope alone, but ours as well. I would not
presume to articulate the hopes I am certain each of you in this Chapel today possesses,
especially on Mothers’ Day. But I will dare to state the hopes this University has for you,
expressed in terms of those values, or “habits of the heart,” as Tocqueville would call them, that
we hope you have learned here and that, with memory, you take with you as you leave.
The first of these is SERVICE. To recognize and to attempt to meet the needs of one’s
fellow human beings is to step beyond self and to begin to make that linkage between ourselves
and society at large. From the impulse to help another there develops an awareness of other
experiences, other points of view, new possibilities, and, from that, a willingness from time to
time to see ourselves as others see us. And, in the selflessness that characterizes service, come
forms of self-discovery and awareness that constitute not the preoccupation of the contemplative
narcissist but the healthy recognition that our community, no matter how large or small,
homogeneous or diverse, needs us, one and all.
The second of these is TRUST. As our lives grow more complex and as the communities
we inhabit grow and become larger and more diverse, trust can become more difficult. Trust
requires knowledge, comfort, familiarity. Where trust abounds, rules and procedures are simple
and few; when trust is absent, ever thickening handbooks and manuals attest to a belief that
people will treat one another shabbily in the absence of clear and elaborate regulations and
guidelines. Too many contemporary institutions – perhaps most conspicuously government and
education – spend far more time discussing and debating and promulgating procedural rules than
they do defining common ends. There is little evidence to suggest that this approach has had only
intended consequences. There is a great deal of evidence to indicate a diminution of a sense of
common purpose. Instead there is a hypersensitivity to offenses large and small, real and
imagined. If we expect the worst from our fellow human beings, we are likely to get it.
And when the bitter and the untethered resort to social media postings, which only those
who have been “approved” can access, the result is not just a breakdown of trust, but its toxic
byproduct, fake news.
Trust in personal relationships – husbands and wives, parents and children, teachers and
students – is the first step toward trust in public and professional relationships. Trust does not
imply, or require, perfection. Because we are human, we err and offend. Genuine trust tolerates
ambiguity; genuine trust forgives; and genuine trust can come only when we encourage, nurture,
and expect honorable behavior in ourselves and others.
The third of these is COMMITMENT. It is another characteristic of contemporary life
to be reluctant to make a commitment, a word whose unattractiveness is frequently enhanced
when it is preceded by “long-term.” We prefer to keep our options open, to think about the next
move, the next employer, he next rung on the ladder. An unwillingness to commit may imply a
belief that something better may turn up; or it could indicate a lack of self-confidence if
commitment is not reciprocated; or it may simply reflect a fear of missing something more
exciting or important.
But whatever its source, a lack of commitment, or an unwillingness to commit, is, like an
aversion to service or a refusal to trust, an essentially selfish thing. It is difficult to identify a
single success story – however you may choose to define success – that is not primarily a story
of commitment.
Fourth and finally, GRATITUDE. The ultimate form of service, of trust, and of
commitment, is gratitude. The ability, and willingness, to give thanks is far more than a mere
display of good manners. It is a recognition that one does not take things for granted and that we
are what we are not as a result of our own efforts alone. Gratitude acknowledges an obligation to
give something back – to community, to school, to country – so as to help one’s successors
along.
And so we hope that, as you leave, you will have these things. But we also hope that you
will return, and there is a message for the new alum in Updike’s poem. He speaks of Shillington
as “the good remembered town.” Sewanee will be, we hope, your “good remembered college.”
But when you return in one, or five, or ten, or fifty years, this good remembered Sewanee will
not be exactly as you left it, and even less as you remember leaving it. “Returning,” writes
Updike, “we find our snapshots inexact.” For like Shillington, and like you, Sewanee will appear
to have changed.
Yet Updike wisely cautions us not to be deceived by appearances, nor by the mistaken
belief that history began the day we arrived on the scene:
Sights that limited our truths were strange
To older eyes; the town that we have lost
Is being found by hands that still arrange
Horse-chestnut heaps and fingerpaint on frost
In this simple stanza is summarized what, for this University, has been almost 150 years
of continuity. The poet Wordsworth writes, “What we have loved, others will love, and we may
teach them how.” Sights that were commonplace to you were strange to older eyes. The Sewanee
they had lost was found by your hands, even as the Sewanee you are leaving will be found fresh,
and exciting, and new, by the Class of 2021, when year one of their history begins. And that
Sewanee, changed though it may be in certain outward forms, will remain its same essential—
stronger, truer—self.
What you have loved, they, too, will love, but you must teach them how: by the way you
live your lives you will remind them, and us, what it means to have attended the University of
the South; and by the support you return to these your successors, and to this your alma mater,
you will impart a love for what you have and what, in leaving, you have more fully, and for all
time.
The having and the leaving go on together. What you have, as you leave, you will have
for as long as you live. And because of what you have, for as long as you have it, you will never
fully leave. For the having and the leaving do go on forever. Memory and hope are now forever
conjoined.
May you continue to seek wisdom, to know true happiness, to continue to discern the
better angels of your own nature; and remember that you caught your first glimpses of those
angels here; so that all your works, in the words of St. Paul, will show “thought for what is noble
in the sight of all.”
Graduates please rise for the charge, at the end of which may all rise for the singing of the alma
mater.