A Matter of Degrees
Commencement Address
Dr. Caryn McTighe Musil
Mercer University
College of Continuing and Professional Studies
Atlanta, Georgia
Saturday, May 17, 2008
To President Underwood, Provost Fleming, Dean Kail, distinguished guests, to the faculty and administrators of Mercer University’s College of Continuing and Professional Studies, to friends and family of the graduates, and most importantly—to the graduating class of 2008
I am deeply honored to be part of this glorious day of celebration for the graduates assembled for this ceremony this morning.
What a proud moment for you and for your family and friends.
To honor this milestone, I offer this short commencement address, which I am calling, “A Matter of Degrees.”
You are here today poised to make history. And you are here today as the beneficiaries of those before you who made history themselves, history that brought you to this time and to this place.
For most of America’s history, college has not been within the grasp of the majority of Americans, whose academic talents were not cultivated because laws and practices and expectations and finances barred them from entering.
For as we know, who goes to college has historically been a matter of degrees.
Degree of wealth
Degree of privilege
Degree of pigment in one’s skin
Degree of Christian practice
Degree of Y chromosomes.
When my father was born in1902, less than 4% of Americans went to college.
But by the time his granddaughters went to college in the last decade of that same century, 75% of students who graduated from high school went on to college for at least some period of time.
What a monumental change with enormous consequences, especially for our democracy and its economic well being.
One of the most significant achievements of the 20th century, then, was not the invention of the car or the airplane or even the computer—but the invention of access to a college education.
As the distinguished sociologist and scholar W. E. B. DuBois said, “Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental” (The Freedom to Learn, 1949).
You sitting out here today are a living testimony to the triumph of those who worked so tirelessly to remove the barricades and instead create pathways to college; to unlock the wrought iron gates, open the doors, the classrooms, the labs, the dorms, the libraries, --and yes, the degrees.
These changes came about because extraordinary people stood up and chose to act, and because ordinary people worked right there beside them. History, of course, doesn’t just happen when time passes; history is made.
Opening American campuses to American people came about because those in and outside of traditional sources of power worked to make that occur. It happened in waves of reform, especially in the last half of the twentieth century: in petitioning for the GI Bill after World War II, in an end to racial apartheid in our colleges and universities, in the elimination of quotas for Jews and Catholics, and in giving women the same chance as men to go to college.
To make all this happen, citizens worked in courtrooms, board rooms, faculty senates, and lobbied state and federal legislators. They advocated from synagogues, church pulpits, and bully pulpits; from street corners and college quads, using the media, marches, and scholarly research to argue their case. Citizens used, as you can see, the tools of democracy to make democratic principles democratic practice.
Higher education today is the legacy bequeathed to you by those who opened the doors to transformative, life changing experiences like you have had at Mercer University.
But we are not finished yet—and we need your help to do the next part.
Moving from exclusive institutions that shut people out to inclusive ones that let people in is hard work. It’s hard because we have often confused exclusivity with merit. It’s hard because we in academia have to break a lot of old habits. It’s hard because we still have the residue of earlier practices, structures, and norms that can dull the surface like a thick film of dust.
The College of Continuing and Professional Studies is part of the dynamic transformation of higher education as our institutions catch up with who our students are, what you need to thrive, and how much you yourselves have to teach us. We need you to help higher education understand even more about how to do its job of educating a nation even better. I urge you to stay involved with Mercer after you graduate. Be an active alum. Keep the transformations going. You have already contributed to that process while earning your degree.
Through those wrought iron gates left ajar and welcoming you in, you brought onto Mercer’s campus the accumulated wisdom and knowledge from your families and communities, and you brought your own wisdom and knowledge earned the hard way--by getting up every morning, living responsible lives, holding down one, maybe two jobs at a time, struggling—sometimes against the odds--to hold you or your family together.
You also brought determination, persistence, a desire to advance, a commitment to make a difference with your gifts.
Now, you are only minutes away from having a college degree officially conferred upon you. College, as I said earlier, has always been a matter of degrees: Let me end my remarks with just three matters that have to do with degrees.
First. Having a college degree matters
I hardly have to tell you that!
A degree represents the promise of economic mobility, typically higher pay, and a significant income accumulation over a lifetime far above those without a college degree. It also means job mobility and job choices as new career opportunities open up, and it means you are establishing a model for your children, if you have them, since there is a greater likelihood that children of college graduates will go to college.
Having a degree also matters because college is no longer elective—it’s essential.
In this global information age, for example, you are likely to be asked to do a job ten years from now that has not yet even been invented. You will need to be able to adapt to those changes, manage those changes, and perhaps even invent those changes, which leads me to the second matter on my mind.
Two. The quality of degrees matter
Mercer has committed to helping each of you transition or advance in professional fields, but it has done so not by shortchanging you with some quick fix training program. It has offered you instead a powerful, lifelong, horizon expanding education because liberal education has been paired with professional studies.
The organization I work for, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) with over 1150 institutional members including Mercer University, believes liberal education is “the kind of learning needed to sustain a free society and to enable the full development of human talents.” (College Learning for the New Global Century, 2007). We argue this kind of learning “empowers the individual, liberates the mind, cultivates intellectual judgments, and fosters ethical and social responsibility”(AAC&U Statement on Liberal Education).
Because Mercer University threads liberal learning through and alongside professional education, your degree means you have been prepared in analysis, discovery, and problem solving; in engaging the big questions, in connecting knowledge with choices and action, and, especially through professional studies, in applying your knowledge to real world situations.
David Kerans, former CEO of Xerox, explains the relation between liberal and professional studies when he says, “. . .the only education that prepares us for change is liberal education. In periods of change, narrow specialization condemns us to inflexibility. We need the intellectual tools to be problem solvers. . .It is not simply what you know that counts, but the ability to use what you know” (Greater Expectation, 2002).
And using what you know brings me to my third and last matter.
Three: What you do with and because of your degree matters.
In the mission of The College of Continuing and Professional Studies, you probably remember that in addition to fostering leadership and professional advancement, the College also named a third goal: promoting “lives that have meaning and purpose.” I am guessing that you were drawn to Mercer not only because it would help you, but because you would be better equipped to help others.
As social worker Jane Addams, who worked to empower poor immigrant communities in Chicago put it, “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life”
What you can now do with your degree can make an enormous degree of difference:
to the people you will be serving as you provide the backbone of social services to people in crisis;
to the lives you will touch, the hope you can instill, the door you can open.
You can make a degree of difference:
to the neighborhoods that will be strengthened, safer, healthier, more caring, and economically more vibrant.
You can make a degree of difference:
to the workplaces where you bring technology and information systems to streamline how things are done and when you offer organizational leadership that can make work places more efficient, adaptive, creative, and inclusive.
What you do with your degree matters as you tackle collectively with others tough, persistent, complex challenges in our local and global communities, from poverty and its destabilizing effect on democracies to water, health care, food, climate change, wars, schools, and crime.
It matters what you do and that you do it. You can make a difference with your degree in little, every day ways, and in larger more momentous ways.
A young teenager taught us that. Her name was Anne Frank, and she was writing in her diary in the midst of one of the darkest periods in human history as the Nazis were consolidating their power all over Europe. Cramped in the small attic with other Jews hiding for their lives and protected by Christians who risked their own security, she could write with unfathomable optimism, “How wonderful it is that nobody has to wait a single moment before starting to improve the world” (The Diary of a Young Girl, 1993).
Graduates of 2008, this is your moment. It matters that your Mercer degree has made you ready for it.
And as you start to make history, your history, let me send you off with a blessing out of my own Irish tradition, adapted a bit for this occasion.
May the road rise up to meet you,
May the wind ever be at your back,
May the sun shine warm upon your face
And the rain fall softly on your fields
And while you make a difference in the world,
May you be held in the hollow of God’s hand.
Congratulations, Class of 2008!