Sherrilyn Ifill Delivers 2015 Bard College Commencement Address  Image Credit: Karl Rabe

Bard College Holds One Hundred Fifty-Fifth Commencement on Saturday, May 23, 2015

You have been surrounded by a dedication to excellence, the highest appreciation for art in all its forms and a full-on embrace of the humanities. But perhaps precisely because you have been nurtured in such an extraordinary environment; perhaps, because you are hard-wired to believe that art and music are essential for the human spirit; because you are committed to education and research, to intellectual debate, and civil discourse; because you believe that facts matter and that science is not arrogance; perhaps, because you are so wonderfully-shaped by the environment at Bard, you will need even more fortification as you face the challenges waiting out there for you beyond today’s celebration. Because the challenges we face in our country today, the fundamental questions on the table are ones that go to the very heart of our democracy. They call on us today to decide not only who we are, but who we will be as a nation and as a community for successive generations. And, you, Bard graduates, are desperately needed to help us sort through these challenges.

We live in a great country with tremendous opportunities, and the future is bright for you without question, but to be a responsible member of the community to which you belong, to exercise true citizenship, you will be obligated to help our nation grapple with its most vexing and starkest contradictions. You are called to help us determine whether we are truly committed to equality, dignity, fairness, second chances, reason, justice, and peace. Because it is not after all just that we incarcerate two million people, more people than any other nation in the world, it is that we have made a culture of imprisoning our fellow citizens, and, in creating this culture, we have demeaned ourselves, we have created television programs and forms of humor that focus on violence in prison, and we have condoned the practice of assigning prisoners to months, years, and, in some instances, even decades of solitary confinement with the full knowledge that this will strip them of their sanity.

And we have not even begun to research, to understand, and to prepare ourselves for the shifts in our society and culture that have resulted from these decisions we have made. We do not yet know the long-term effect on our democracy of the trauma of mass incarceration. It is not just that we have allowed states to enact repressive voting rights laws. It is not just that the state of Texas has decided that students in that state can no longer use their university ID to vote. It is that instead they have decided you may use a concealed gun-carry permit as identification to vote. It is not just that we have starved our children of access to arts and music education in our public schools, it’s that we have shifted the whole narrative about art and music to one in which the value is seen only through the lens of whether it may improve test scores. It is not only that the flaws in our justice system have been horrifyingly revealed as we watched the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island or saw Walter Scott running for his life in South Carolina before he was shot like prey by police officers. It is not just that we have seen, in glaring Technicolor, the racial injustices in our criminal justice system. It is that we now also know that law enforcement has in places like Ferguson, Missouri, been turned into a means of income-generation for municipal government, a practice so grotesque, so demeaning to the dignity of both law enforcement officers and the communities they serve, and so corrosive that the legitimacy of the rule of law in a democracy that we, you, must re-imagine the very structure of local governments and law enforcement in communities across this country. It is not only that we live in a time of staggering income inequality beyond which we have ever experienced in this country. It is that during this precise period of growing inequality, we have deliberately starved the infrastructure that supports our communities and the critical institutions of public life—the institutions that allowed my parents, two immigrants with little formal education, to raise 10 children in New York City in the 1960s and that allowed me and my siblings to become nurses and doctors and lawyers and teachers and to learn trades and to live that elusive thing called the American Dream.

These are big and complex problems. It will require more engagement, more creativity, more commitment, more investment than we have ever conceived to right the ship of our democracy at this moment. But we can do it, and the burden and the privilege of doing this important work will fall to you. You will need to bring all that you have learned during your time here at Bard to the work of engaging these issues, and whatever your chosen field—whether it is art or law or medicine or science or academia—you must take up the work of grappling with these tough, complex problems. How will you do this? You will do this with all the courage, curiosity, rigor, critical thinking, and passion you’ve brought to your education here at Bard. You can do it because you are not afraid of tough questions and hard answers. You can do it because you have been trained to value experimentation and to be unafraid of that necessary ingredient to all true experimentation: failure. You can do it because you believe in debate and dissent and civil discourse. And you will take those skills and values and apply them, I hope, beyond New York City or New York State, to places where my clients live, like Shelby County, Alabama, Paris County, Texas, and Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana.

Finally, I wish to share one other thing. You may know that I was a passenger on Amtrak train 188 that derailed and crashed last Tuesday night. I entered the train in Baltimore City, focused, as I always am, on work, planning to send an important e-mail to my office as soon as I settled in my seat, but nothing seemed to go right. When I checked my ticket as the train rolled into Baltimore Penn Station, I saw that I didn’t have my usual business class seat, and I was annoyed. Then I realized I didn’t have my portable Wi-Fi aircard, so I would be left to the uncertainty of Amtrak’s dubious Wi-Fi. These are the only reasons I was not sitting in the business class car that suffered the worst damage and the highest fatalities and why I was not working on my laptop when the crash happened. Instead, I was on the phone talking with my beloved sister. And, when I came to, walking on the tracks, I was still clutching that phone. Thus, unlike so many others, I was able to contact my closest family members and friends, those listed among the favorites on my phone, within minutes of the crash. And they, some of whom are here, this magical circle of family and friends, through this phone, surrounded me with care and comfort from hundreds of miles away.

I emerged from this awful accident with a broken collarbone, a concussion, and some emotional scars to be sure, but I’m grateful to be alive and relatively unhurt. And, while I’m still processing much of what happened and trying to understand what I should make of this extraordinary experience, I do know this much: committing your life to making meaningful art, or teaching the disadvantaged, or to, as I have, racial, gender, or LGBT justice issues; devoting yourself to ending religious intolerance, or to protecting the resources of our precious planet, to finding the cure for a terrible disease, to inventing some life-changing device or code, to composing transcendent pieces of music, does not exempt you from what I believe is the ultimate command of the universe, the ultimate command in my faith of God: to live and to love. Not just to go through the motions, not to work relentlessly until the very joy of life is stripped away, as I was in peril of doing before this accident, not to forget to breathe country air deeply, not to say you have no time for long walks or long hugs or long goodbyes. We are called first and foremost to live, and to nurture that magic circle of what I call favorites—that tight group of family and friends to who you will instinctively reach out when calamity happens and who will surround you with their love and get you back on your feet to face the challenges and work ahead. This to, the nurturing of this group is a kind of work and you must take it as seriously and apply yourself to it as diligently as you will to the work of responsible citizenship that your community and your country demands of you. So, class of 2015, I am excited to know that you will be leading our community, our country, and what we will become. I have confidence that you are prepared and committed, engaged and unafraid to do this great work.

Congratulations.

ABOUT THE COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER

Sherrilyn Ifill is the seventh president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF). Ifill is a longtime member of the LDF family. After graduating from law school, Ifill served as a fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, and then for five years as an assistant counsel in LDF’s New York office, where she litigated voting rights cases. Among her successful litigation was the landmark Voting Rights Act case Houston Lawyers’ Association vs. Attorney General of Texas, in which the Supreme Court held that judicial elections are covered by the provisions of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

In 1993, Ifill joined the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Law, where, in addition to teaching civil procedure, constitutional law, and a variety of seminars, she continued to litigate and consult on a broad and diverse range of civil rights cases while grooming the next generation of civil rights lawyers. In addition to teaching in the classroom, Ifill launched several innovative legal offerings while at Maryland Law School, including an environmental justice course in which students represented rural communities in Maryland. She also initiated one of the first legal clinics in the nation focused on removing legal barriers to formerly incarcerated persons seeking to responsibly reenter society. From her base in Baltimore, Ifill emerged as a highly regarded national civil rights strategist and public intellectual whose writings, speeches, and media appearances enrich public debate about a range of political and civil rights issues.

A critically acclaimed author, Ifill wrote On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century, which reflects her lifelong engagement in and analysis of issues of race and American public life. Her scholarly writing has focused on the importance of diversity on the bench, and she is currently writing a book about race and Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Ifill is the immediate past chair of the Board of U.S. Programs at the Open Society Institute, one of the largest philanthropic supporters of civil rights and social justice organizations in the country.

Ifill is a graduate of Vassar College, and received her J.D. from New York University School of Law. 

TO DOWNLOAD a high-resolution photo, go to: www.bard.edu/news/pressphotos/.
CAPTION INFO: Sherrilyn Ifill Delivers 2015 Bard College Commencement Address (Credit: Karl Rabe)

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(5/23/15)

This event was last updated on 05-23-2015

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