Bard College President Leon Botstein’s Charge to the Class of 2020
Photo by Karl Rabe
Bard College held its one hundred sixtieth commencement on Saturday, August 22, 2020. At the commencement ceremony, Bard President Leon Botstein gave the following charge to the Class of 2020.
In all the years I have had the privilege and honor of serving Bard College as its president, I have never been prouder of a graduating class than I am of this class of 2020.
You are leaving the hallowed halls of a place of teaching and scholarship dedicated to the ideals of learning, debate, inquiry, curiosity, and skepticism at an unprecedented moment in history. There has never been a time quite so dark and so terrifying. The horror and carnage of both World War II and the Vietnam War remain far away and distant from most Americans. In the era of the Great Depression, this country was still a manufacturing nation and a densely agricultural one. No matter how long a recovery might take, there was a shared familiarity with what the future might look like. And in 1932, we elected, in a landslide, a new government, intent on breaking with the past and on realizing the power of government to help those most in need and to renew the spirit of the nation.
You are graduating Bard at a time when devastation is here at home, giving you and your family and friends every reason to be anxious and disconsolate. The reasons for fear are all too obvious.
First, the pandemic is still with us. Suffering and fear are all around us. Those poorest and least able to defend themselves have borne a disproportionate burden of the national pain. The threat of the disease has been exacerbated by the incompetence and cruelty of our leaders in our national government and our collective failure to design and implement a viable, consistent national strategy. The absence of a rational and fair health care system for all has become all too evident, as has the irresponsible neglect of our scientific community and its expertise and ingenuity that could have been marshalled in time to contain the damage.
Second, you face an economic crisis perhaps greater than that of the Great Depression. The rates of unemployment are skyrocketing. Jobs are disappearing, as are workplaces, companies, and traditional patterns of economic life. The much vaunted third industrial revolution, driven by technology, has gutted the need to employ our fellow citizens in large numbers, particularly those without a proper education or skills.
Third, amidst this perfect worldwide storm of economic collapse and dangers to our health, we are now confronted, and properly so as a consequence of violence against people of color and Black Lives Matter, with the necessity of coming to terms, finally, with the central question of race and discrimination that, as a consequence of slavery and unrelenting discrimination, has wounded this republic since its founding. We must, as a society, provide real and civic reparations to our fellow citizens of color in providing, now, genuine access to equality in housing, health, education, and a viable economic safety net.
Fourth, we must not ignore the poor, and the intolerable inequality of wealth in this country and throughout the rest of the world. No ethical defense of the right to property can be mounted on behalf of a society that permits 1 percent of the population to own 38.5 percent of the wealth, and where single individuals can amass a net worth larger than the GDP of sovereign nations. As you gaze beyond the confines of Bard, even close to us here in Dutchess County, much less far beyond in the heartland of the nation, you can discover how profoundly we have permitted governments, Democrat and Republican alike, to neglect, over decades, most of our fellow citizens, white and Black, and favor in the technological revolution, as the saying goes, Wall Street over Main Street.
Fifth, we all face, without question, the enormity of climate change and the consequences of environmental neglect. The fires in California, the floods in Iowa, the melting of the ice in the North, and the rising seas are just the most obvious facts that we all, rich and poor, of many different ethnicities and beliefs, must confront. Vast stretches of the globe will be inhospitable to human existence, and we must deal justly with the massive migration from South to North.
What does this all add up to for each and every one of you? The five circumstances in the world today just enumerated have eroded public confidence in democracy. They have fueled a sense of powerlessness and whetted a popular appetite for autocracy and tyranny. The danger is not only here in the United States. The 20 percent of the Class of 2020 who come from abroad understand this political trend all too well—in China, Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, Hungary, and Poland, for example.
So, to you, the Class of 2020, I say: do not despair. But do not hide behind blind hope. You, alongside all of us, face an unprecedented opportunity to make history. Elaborate dialectics are not required to see how we can make, with your help, quickly, a far better and more just world.
There are six reasons, members of the Class of 2020, to face the future after college with uncommon optimism, enthusiasm, and courage:
With respect, gratitude, and admiration, I congratulate each and every one of you in this unique graduating Bard Class of 2020.
Post Date: 08-23-2020
In all the years I have had the privilege and honor of serving Bard College as its president, I have never been prouder of a graduating class than I am of this class of 2020.
You are leaving the hallowed halls of a place of teaching and scholarship dedicated to the ideals of learning, debate, inquiry, curiosity, and skepticism at an unprecedented moment in history. There has never been a time quite so dark and so terrifying. The horror and carnage of both World War II and the Vietnam War remain far away and distant from most Americans. In the era of the Great Depression, this country was still a manufacturing nation and a densely agricultural one. No matter how long a recovery might take, there was a shared familiarity with what the future might look like. And in 1932, we elected, in a landslide, a new government, intent on breaking with the past and on realizing the power of government to help those most in need and to renew the spirit of the nation.
You are graduating Bard at a time when devastation is here at home, giving you and your family and friends every reason to be anxious and disconsolate. The reasons for fear are all too obvious.
First, the pandemic is still with us. Suffering and fear are all around us. Those poorest and least able to defend themselves have borne a disproportionate burden of the national pain. The threat of the disease has been exacerbated by the incompetence and cruelty of our leaders in our national government and our collective failure to design and implement a viable, consistent national strategy. The absence of a rational and fair health care system for all has become all too evident, as has the irresponsible neglect of our scientific community and its expertise and ingenuity that could have been marshalled in time to contain the damage.
Second, you face an economic crisis perhaps greater than that of the Great Depression. The rates of unemployment are skyrocketing. Jobs are disappearing, as are workplaces, companies, and traditional patterns of economic life. The much vaunted third industrial revolution, driven by technology, has gutted the need to employ our fellow citizens in large numbers, particularly those without a proper education or skills.
Third, amidst this perfect worldwide storm of economic collapse and dangers to our health, we are now confronted, and properly so as a consequence of violence against people of color and Black Lives Matter, with the necessity of coming to terms, finally, with the central question of race and discrimination that, as a consequence of slavery and unrelenting discrimination, has wounded this republic since its founding. We must, as a society, provide real and civic reparations to our fellow citizens of color in providing, now, genuine access to equality in housing, health, education, and a viable economic safety net.
Fourth, we must not ignore the poor, and the intolerable inequality of wealth in this country and throughout the rest of the world. No ethical defense of the right to property can be mounted on behalf of a society that permits 1 percent of the population to own 38.5 percent of the wealth, and where single individuals can amass a net worth larger than the GDP of sovereign nations. As you gaze beyond the confines of Bard, even close to us here in Dutchess County, much less far beyond in the heartland of the nation, you can discover how profoundly we have permitted governments, Democrat and Republican alike, to neglect, over decades, most of our fellow citizens, white and Black, and favor in the technological revolution, as the saying goes, Wall Street over Main Street.
Fifth, we all face, without question, the enormity of climate change and the consequences of environmental neglect. The fires in California, the floods in Iowa, the melting of the ice in the North, and the rising seas are just the most obvious facts that we all, rich and poor, of many different ethnicities and beliefs, must confront. Vast stretches of the globe will be inhospitable to human existence, and we must deal justly with the massive migration from South to North.
What does this all add up to for each and every one of you? The five circumstances in the world today just enumerated have eroded public confidence in democracy. They have fueled a sense of powerlessness and whetted a popular appetite for autocracy and tyranny. The danger is not only here in the United States. The 20 percent of the Class of 2020 who come from abroad understand this political trend all too well—in China, Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, Hungary, and Poland, for example.
So, to you, the Class of 2020, I say: do not despair. But do not hide behind blind hope. You, alongside all of us, face an unprecedented opportunity to make history. Elaborate dialectics are not required to see how we can make, with your help, quickly, a far better and more just world.
There are six reasons, members of the Class of 2020, to face the future after college with uncommon optimism, enthusiasm, and courage:
- First, never before has the need for government and good government been so clear. The nonsense put forth four decades ago that government was the problem has now been exposed as malicious. We need better government, for sure, but not less. Society cannot rely on the presumed superiority of private enterprise.
- Second, we have a chance to create good government. We can rescue the rule of law. We can put a stop to corruption. We can defeat the manipulation of public opinion by deceit and outright lies. We can restrain the abuse of force, as in Portland, and we can bring the compelling ideals of equality and justice, enshrined in the founding documents of this nation, to life. Each of you must vote, and devote the weeks ahead to ensuring that the election in November is not stolen, not disfigured by the suppression of voting or the abuse of the postal system, or stripped of legitimacy by false accusations of fraud.
- You have now, by virtue of having graduated from college, joined a minority, an elite. Whether you are first-generation college graduates or not, you will be able to compete. You have the skills of inquiry, curiosity, criticism, and improvisation—hallmarks of liberal learning—honed from the first days of L&T to the submission of your Senior Projects, that the economy and politics of this century demands.
- You therefore can lead in realizing justice and equity, empathy, and the recognition of the sanctity of every human being (strengthened, as it should be, by the love of the imagination and the arts) and join in restoring an embrace of immigrants and a tradition of decency and kindness to strangers that are the highlight of a pluralistic democracy.
- Fifth, you understand the power of education. You must join the fight to wipe out student debt and change the way we finance higher education. We must renew Abraham Lincoln’s most unsung gift to this nation, the Morrill Act that created our land-grant public universities, and must refinance all our public universities. And like Bard itself, you must be vigilant in seeing to it that, after the nightmare of our current government is over, we give our fellow citizens the public elementary and secondary education a true democracy deserves. Only with a system of education that is both equitable and excellent can the promise of freedom and the rights of democracy and an open society be realized for all. And if anything has been learned during this pandemic, and you’ve learned it, it is that there is no technological utopia or fix in education. True learning and intellectual and artistic progress have been made and will continue to be made in a community of scholars, scientists, students, and artists, in person and in groups, without masks, without isolation and social distance. Without a balance between the individual and the social and the ability to see the smiles of others, freedom and justice will not flourish.
- And, sixth and last but not least, as you go forth, remember how rare, valuable, fragile, and resilient Bard, your alma mater, is. Protect and defend it, and so too other indispensable intermediate and nongovernmental institutions—libraries, museums, theaters, concert halls, and civic groups. They too are crucial to the better world we now have the opportunity to create, swiftly and decisively, in defense of truth and justice.
With respect, gratitude, and admiration, I congratulate each and every one of you in this unique graduating Bard Class of 2020.
Post Date: 08-23-2020