One of my favorite novels by the contemporary writer Anne Tyler—like you, a graduate of Duke—is the book called The Ladder of Years. I take her title to mean that whatever stage or station we're at in life, we always seem firmly planted there, as firmly as others are at their different life stages. But through time we move from step to step, and will some day move through all the stages that others inhabit now.
Why am I offering this heavy truth on this happy day? You are so compelling just as you are, Duke class of "007"—who could believe you could ever be very different from the way you look today? As they say in Hollywood: you look marvelous! But all I have to do is hit the resume play button, and I can see you moving along through time.
Your whole class gathered in the Chapel on one other solemn occasion, your Freshman Convocation. Who were those people who sat here four years back, looking pretty much like you, but so young? They were you, no one else—if they seem strangers now, it's because you were on a different rung on the ladder of years. In April I greeted nearly a thousand admittees to the Class of 2011 who had come to visit for Blue Devil Days. (Yes, the reason you have to observe the check-out time at this hotel is that we have rented your rooms to others). They were an even earlier you you've probably long forgotten: still choosing which college to go to, with a month of high school still ahead.
That was rewind; now I'll press forward. This spring I attended the Duke reunions where 4,000 of your predecessors came back in five-year tranches: the class of '02. '97, '92, and so on back to the class of 1957. I went to 10 parties the Friday night of reunion weekend and saw Dukies spaced at five-year intervals of age. Again I had an uncanny thought: These people have all been exactly where you are now. They're you, you plus five, you plus 10, and numbers higher yet.
Having glimpsed your later life, I want to report that strange things go on out there, in case you didn't know. A very charming woman who graduated five years ago, rubbing her hugely pregnant belly, said to me with comic tone: "Are many of my classmates procreating yet?" (The president is supposed to know the answer to ever so many questions.) At the fifth reunion this was witty, but at the 10th reunion I had to pick my way through a tortured mass of strollers. And if I could tell you what I saw 20 years in your future . . . or 30. . . or 50. . . .
But what's the point? You won't be interested; you won't even believe what I have to tell. We change, we age, it's the most obvious fact of life; yet I've never known anyone capable of seriously entertaining the idea of ever being very different from the way we are now. The years may form a ladder, but we take it one step at a time.
But this weekend you're about to take a step and leave the rung of college life, so I want to dwell a little on the future, even if you do not. This year I've had an interesting experience involving future anticipation. You probably know that the Research Triangle, which you drove through every time you came to Duke from the airport, is one of the largest and most successful research parks in the world. It wasn't always so. In the early 1950s, some North Carolinians had the recognition that this area would need a different economic base than agriculture and manufacture, and they saw that a magnet for an emerging new economy—what we now call the knowledge economy—might be built on undeveloped pineland near the area's three research universities. Fifty years later, the Research Triangle has become home to the research and development activities of 150 enterprises, including major information technology and biotech companies as well as public research agencies like the National Institute of Environmental Health, and continues to draw high-end jobs in large numbers.
But given the dynamism of global competition, the Research Triangle has not assumed that its current success guarantees success for all time. So this past year, the Research Triangle Foundation created something called the Next Generation Task Force, which I was asked to chair, to identify steps we could take to assure the region's continuing competitiveness down the road. Through this exercise, I learned that a fair amount of intelligent writing has been done on the shape of emerging futurities. (I might start you with the research reports prepared by the Institute for the Future, www.iftf.org.) I also learned a great new phrase. The mission of the task force, a smart man suggested, was to take the Research Triangle and make it "future proof."
Future proof! Isn't that what your families are hoping Duke made of you? We waterproof our boots, we weatherproof our decks, might it not be possible to future proof our kids? Isn't that what higher education might be hoped to be: an ingenious compound applied to provide durable protection to a valued object, so that no matter what later life throws at you, you'll be sure to do alright?
If your Duke years turn out to have that effect, I will be very glad. But I admit I have my doubts. For one thing, security fantasies have always been among humanity's most stupendous delusions. (Think how well the French were protected by the Maginot Line in World War II.) For another, this notion involves an almost perfect misunderstanding of how education actually works.
Why are you different now from the self who sat here at your Freshman Convocation? Because you've grown and developed through your experience in this place. But how did that happen, exactly? Certainly not by your clinging to some adequacy acquired in a prior life. To the extent that you shut yourself into the shelter of things you were already familiar with, you inhibited your growth at Duke. You developed your powers just in the measure that you invested yourself in the new opportunities Duke brought you: new intellectual challenges, new friends, new forms of fun, new hardships and trials, new involvements beyond this campus, new chances for action and initiative, chances to work together in unexpected ways. Nothing you did as an officially appointed chore in the last four years will leave any trace on your mind. But every new person and situation that called forth a living response from you brought a new energy of selfhood into play, which could then be transformed into new understanding and power.
So too going forward: the way this place equipped you for the future is not by arming you in advance with all the weapons you'll turn out to need. It's by supporting the habits of active engagement by which you'll continue to learn and grow. In the Next Generation Task Force, we quickly recognized that there is no magic move anyone could make that could assure advantage in all possible circumstances. The only way to be future proof is to strengthen the culture of inventiveness, versatility, entrepreneurship, and creativity such that, whatever the future turns out to hold, smart minds will be here to seize the opportunities of that time. So with you: you'll be sufficiently protected from the future if you are prepared to meet the future in imaginative, constructive ways.
My time grows short, so let me ask three things in furtherance of this cause. First, keep looking for ways to open out your horizons. Economic historians have documented that societies flourish when they are open to new and mixed influences but stagnate in states of insularity and orthodoxy.[i] College made it easy to overcome such stagnation. Now you're going to have to assume some of the burden on your own. No one will assign the reading any more that will continue to complicate your understanding and stretch your mind—so unless you're content to descend into early-onset dullness, you'll have to assign it to yourself, or find others who can help you. There's no guarantee that life's next stage will contain the mix of various, spirited, surprising classmates who enlarged you every day you spent here. Now you'll have to work on your own to keep expanding your human acquaintance, lest your growth come to rest.
Second, as you write the story of your life, I hope you'll include some element of adventure. It's my guess that every one of you surprised yourself here by the things you've turned out to care about and be good at. This happened because you had the confidence to cross from known to unknown paths; and I hope you won't stop now. I know some of you who are going off to teach in places you have never visited; I know one of you who is going off to be an investigative reporter in Afghanistan; I know a person being commissioned as an officer in the marines. These are adventures and I wish you well, but in truth the new life every Duke student is going on to will be adventure enough at first. And wherever you're going on to, it's not the doom of a single one of you to follow that fixed path from here to retirement. Everything you do will give you skills that can later be put to other purposes, if you have the courage to build on your experience and reach for new challenges. The more fresh starts you make, the more you're going to learn and grow.
Last, as you work your way forward through this adventure, I hope you take time, every now and again, to ask where you're going and why. You have led the lives of the modern young success, which has many advantages but one big downside: it can promote the sense that "success" as defined all around you is the inevitable road for you to march along. But somewhere along the line, it's going to matter that your life is actually fulfilling, not just impressive-seeming; and to make it so, you'll need to evolve some personal sense of what gives value to a life and shape your life in that direction. As for the things we all know need doing in the world, don't leave those to others and gripe when they fail to perform. People can make a difference, but first they have to try. Those gifts you were given so abundantly weren't given you only for your personal success, but to improve and enrich the life of your time.
Duke Class of "007," I began by visualizing you on a ladder, but by now that metaphor has shown its limits. A ladder is rigid structure with the steps all fixed in advance. But if you bring some energy and pluck to the task, that's not the only thing you could find ahead. If you keep feeding the intelligence, thoughtfulness, spirit and heart you've shown on this campus, you can make your future a place for exploration and creation, and for active and continual growth. Procreation? Unimaginable career changes? These and much more await you, and here's a secret: the really rich part of life is just about to begin.
Thanks for the memories. Drive home safely. Have courage. Build a great life.
[i] Richard Florida, Gary Gates, Brian Knudsen, and Kevin Stolarick, "The University and the Creative Economy," (2006), citing the work of Joel Mokyr and Dean Keith Simonton.