On April 18, 2006, The Daily printed a column by Weinberg senior Elaine Meyer that asked Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) to challenge the senior class in his address at Northwestern’s 148th Commencement.
Two months later, in front of the graduates of the class of 2006 and their families, Obama, a Hawaii native who was elected a U.S. Senator in 2004, offered six words in response: “This seemed like a fair request.”
Instead of talking about politics, which Meyer said was a no-no at graduation, Obama focused on personal responsibility.
“One hundred and fifty classes have sat where you sit, some in good times, others in bad,” Obama said at the ceremony Friday at Ryan Field. “The class of 1860 would find their country torn apart by civil war. The class of 1932 would look out in a nation mired in depression. The class of 1960 would find themselves at the beginning of a decade where social and racial strife threatened to tear apart the very fabric of the nation. They would answer the call.”
Obama was one of seven recipients of honorary degrees from NU this year.
“When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things,” he said, quoting Corinthians 13:11. “There is an assumption that growing up is just a function of age. In fact, I know a whole lot of 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 50-year-olds who are not yet full-grown.”
Obama, a Columbia University graduate and former editor of the Harvard Law Review, became a U.S. Senator for Illinois in 2004 and made national news in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention.
“I didn’t go to my own commencement,” Obama admitted beforehand. “I’m not sure what young people take away from it. What I try to do is give some small sense of what has inspired me in my life.”
During the speech, Obama recounted a few events in his life that inspired him and the lessons he learned from them.
“The world does not revolve around you,” he said. “There’s a lot of talk about the federal deficit. We should talk more about our empathy deficit – the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. We live in a culture that discourages empathy, a culture where those in power encourage these selfish impulses.”
No one forces a person to care, Obama said, and so cultivating that quality of empathy becomes harder with age.
In his first year of college, Obama was “a bit casual about the future,” he said. “After one long evening of debauchery, the mess was so bad that when one of the cleaning ladies saw it, she began to tear up. (My girlfriend at the time told me), ‘That woman could have been my grandmother.'”
The second lesson he told graduates, then, was to take some risks and dare to be challenged.
“You can take your diploma, walk off this stage and chase after the big house and the nice suits,” he said, borrowing a line from his Knox College speech. But he said that “focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. Challenge yourself. Take some risks.”
“Decide what it is you care about so much you are willing to sacrifice anything,” he said. “Sometimes you just have to persevere. Making you mark in the world is hard. It takes patience and commitment.”
While Obama did not talk about foreign policy, like last year’s Commencement speaker, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), he did touch on a few problems here at home.
“America needs a sense of purpose, a maturity we seem to have lost somewhere along the way,” he said. “When we measure the success of a nation by how far the stock market rises or falls instead of how many opportunities we’ve opened up for children, we’re displaying a preference for childish ways.”
Ten beach balls floated around the field as the deans of seven schools – Weinberg, Medill, Communication, Music, Education, McCormick and Graduate – recommended to University President Henry Bienen the students to receive their degrees. The graduates received their diplomas in school convocations the following day.
Bienen also recognized 21 newly appointed emeritus faculty who had offered the school a combined 652 years of service to the school.
Graduates also recognized their parents at the event. Russ Armstrong, Communications ’06, was voted to address parents and family members on behalf of the graduating class.”We have waged epic wars,” Armstrong said after Senator Obama left the stage. “We have taken walks out to the lake in February and screamed for the waves to listen. We have had our hearts broken in public, and wept in the middle of Chipotle. We fall because we know to grasp our dreams, and you have helped us get back up.”
For these students, though, it is time to answer the call, Obama said.
“Here you sit, facing challenges as great as any in the past,” Obama said. “I expect a lot out of you.”
The six other recipients of honorary degrees were Elijah Anderson, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania (doctor of science); James Fallows, correspondent for Atlantic Monthly (doctor of humane letters); Lynn A. Hunt, professor of modern European history at UCLA (doctor of humane letters); engineer Robert Samuel Langer (doctor of science); Nathan Rosenberg, the chair of the United Nations Institute for New Technology advisory board (doctor of science); and Susan SoloMonday, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (doctor of science).
Reach Emmet Sullivan at [email protected].
