OU’S 2009 Commencement Address Given By

    President Boren, members of the Board of Regents, distinguished faculty, fellow honorees, friends of the University of Oklahoma, proud parents, grandparents, and you who graduate today, Friday, May 15, 2009.

    I deeply appreciate the high tribute of this honorary degree and the singular privilege of addressing this spectacular gathering. What an important, joyous occasion it is with so many assembled of all ages, all walks of life, from all parts of Oklahoma, the nation, and of the world, all here to celebrate hard-earned, worthy accomplishment in so many fields of learning. I thank you and congratulate you one and all.

    For me personally also comes the very great pleasure of returning again to a university I greatly admire, as the guest of President and Mrs. Boren, whose vision and leadership have worked such wonders here and provided such inspiration to so very many. When asked if, in my travels, I’ve seen anything to give me cause for feeling good about our country and its future, I say, “Yes, I have. Go to the University of Oklahoma and see for yourself!”

    The lessons of history are numerous.

   What people believe to be true is often more important than what is true. That’s one lesson. Common sense isn’t common. That’s another.

    Another is that nothing ever happened in “the past,” only the present. Washington, Adams, Jefferson and the others of their day didn’t walk about saying, “Isn’t this fascinating living in the past? Aren’t we picturesque in our funny clothes?”

    The difference is it was their present, not ours, their time and it was different from our own. Nor did they have any more idea of how things were going to turn out in their time than we have in ours.

    But as clear as any of history’s lessons is that there is no such thing as a self-made man or woman. Never was, never will be. We are all, as were those in whose footsteps we follow, shaped by the influence and examples of countless others -- parents, grandparents, friends, rivals. And by those who wrote the music that moves us to our souls, those whose performance on stage or on the playing field took our breaths away, those who wrote the great charters which are the bedrock of our system of self-government, and so many who, to our benefit, struggled and suffered through times of trouble and grave uncertainty. And by teachers. And on this occasion particularly, when the part teachers have played in the lives of the Class of 2009 is so fresh in mind, I want to stress as emphatically as I can the immeasurable importance of teachers and how very great should be the appreciation we have for all they have meant in the lives of each and every one of us.

    There is nothing new about this. It has been a constant force through our whole American story.

    “It was my great good fortune, and what probably fixed the destiny of my life,” he wrote “that Dr. William Small of Scotland was then professor of mathematics.”

    That was Thomas Jefferson’s tribute to his favorite teacher at the College of William and Mary, William Small, who also taught the natural sciences and political philosophy. William Small was 26 years old at the time he was Jefferson’s teacher. It was he who introduced to the College of William and Mary the Socratic method of questioning students as a primary means of teaching. As Jefferson said, he had “a happy talent of communication” and an “enlarged and liberal mind” open to ideas.

    John Adams spoke with equal ardor for professor John Winthrop of Harvard, the most renowned scientist in colonial America next to Benjamin Franklin. One of Adams cherished college memories was of a crystal night when, from the roof of Old Harvard Hall, he gazed through Professor Winthrop’s telescope at the satellites of Jupiter.

    John Adams is as fine an example as we have of the transforming miracle of education. He was the son of a poor farmer. His mother was almost certainly illiterate. Because at age fifteen he was given a scholarship to Harvard, he discovered books and, as he said, “read forever.”

    But even before the scholarship, magic was worked by an earlier teacher, one Joseph Marsh of Braintree, who saw what gifts the boy had and, mainly through kindness, transformed Adams from a noteably reluctant student to one who wanted to learn all he could every day.

    As President Obama has written in his book, The Audacity of Hope, in a chapter titled “Opportunity,” “The single most important factor in determining a student’s achievement isn’t the color of his skin or where he comes from, but who the child’s teacher is.”

    Plainly, irrefutably our teachers are as important as anyone in our whole way of life. In my view, they are the most important and their work counts more in the long run.

    As a wise teacher has said what matters above all in the classroom or lecture hall or laboratory, is attitude - the attitude of the teacher. “Attitudes aren’t taught, they’re caught,” said Margaret McFarland of the University of Pittsburgh. Enthusiasm for their subjects is what all great teachers have and convey.

    We have all had such teachers. Many of us have worked with such teachers. We know how they can open the eyes, open the mind, and change lives. “Show them what you love,” Professor McFarland said.

    One of the most memorable examples I know of a teacher’s lasting effect was described by a former student of the extraordinary Louis Agassiz, who in the nineteenth century transformed the teaching of natural history throughout the United States. Agassiz’s intention, as he said, was to teach students to see.
   

    Every student of Agassiz’s during his years at Harvard began with what became known as the experience of the fish -- when the student was presented with a dead fish on a pewter plate and told to look at it, whereupon Agassiz would leave the room. Here is the vivid account of Samuel Scudder, who went on to do important work of his own in entomology.

        In ten minutes I had seen all that could be seen in that fish… Half an hour passed -- an hour -- another hour; the fish began to look loathsome. I turned it over and around; looked it in the face -- ghastly; from behind, beneath, above, sideways, at three-quarters view -- just as ghastly. I was in despair.

        I might not use a magnifying glass; instruments of all kinds were interdicted. My two hands, my two eyes, and the fish: it seemed a most limited field. I pushed my finger down its throat to feel how sharp the teeth were. I         began to count the scales in the different rows, until I was convinced that that was nonsense. At last a happy thought struck me -- I would draw the fish, and now with surprise I began to discover new features in the creature.

    When Agassiz returned later and listened to Scudder recount what he had observed, his only comment was that the young man must look again.

       I was piqued; I was mortified. Still more of that wretched fish! But now I set myself to my task with a will, and discovered one new thing after another…. The afternoon passed quickly; and when, toward its close, the professor inquired, “Do you see it yet?”

        “No,” I replied. “I am certain I do not, but I see how little I saw before.”

    The day following, having thought of little else but the fish through much of the night, Scudder had a brainstorm. The fish, he proudly announced to Agassiz, had symmetrical sides with paired organs.

    “Of course, of course!” Agassiz said, obviously pleased. Scudder asked what he might do next, and Agassiz replied, “Oh, look at your fish!”

    In Scudder’s case the lesson lasted a full three days. “Look, look, look!” was the repeated injunction and the best lesson he ever had, Scudder recalled, “a legacy the professor has left to me, as he has left it to many others, of inestimable value, which we could not buy, with which we cannot part.”

    Samuel Scudder, it should be noted, became celebrated for his ability to detect distinctions in species of insects as fine as one 100th of an inch, and over 70 American butterflies are known by the popular names he gave them.

    For my own part, in my work over more than forty years, I have been looking at my fish again and again. “How much of your time do you spend on research, and how much on writing?” I am frequently asked. I try to explain that there is also a good deal of time spent thinking.

    And yes, I think often of those teachers who helped me see. Miss Schmeltz in sixth grade who said, “Come over and look in this microscope, David. You’ll get a kick out of it.” And Carl Cochran who taught drawing and painting in high school. And those who inspired by example, like Thornton Wilder, a fellow at Davenport College at Yale who said, in explanation of how he chose his subjects, that he imagined a story he would like to see performed on stage or read in a novel, and if he found that no one had already done it, he wrote it so he could see it performed on stage or read it in a book.

    A while ago, at a dinner at the University of Southern California, I was seated beside the former president of the university, and the former U. S. Ambassador to India, Dr. John Hubbard, who is an historian in his 90’s and still teaching. When I told him how once in college, in the discussion group for a European history course, a graduate student who led the discussion -- I couldn’t remember his name -- said the first day that he would not hold us accountable for knowing a lot of dates and quotations. “That’s what books are for,” he had said. Much more important was to know what happened and why. “It was as if I had been set free to fly,” I said to Dr. Hubbard. “It changed my whole feeling about history.”

    He looked at me and said, “I was that graduate student.”

    Imagine! And I was able then, after so many years, to thank him as best I possibly could.

    And please, you who are about to graduate, do not wait until some later time to say thank you to those who’ve opened your eyes.

    We all need to express to those who teach far greater appreciation for how they shape lives. And because good teachers, even great teachers, have kept coming along generation after generation, we must not ever take it for granted that that will always be so. We must encourage more of the best and the brightest to make teaching their careers and make sure, everywhere, as is being done at this university, that those who choose a teaching career receive the best, most complete preparation possible in their education.

    The gifted eminent teachers of this university down the years have included such giants as Professor E. E. Dale, historian of the American West, and Vernon Parington, who was both a nationally honored scholar in English literature and the university’s legendary first football coach, and botanist Paul B. Sears, one of the earliest environmentalists and a powerful writer.

    And, of course, the present faculty includes many of distinction in a whole spectrum of fields of learning.

    You can tell a lot about a society by how it spends its money. And make no mistake we must spend more on education at all levels, and a generous part of that investment must be to compensate our teachers in proportion to the part they play and will play in our future.

    In all fields a good education is not good enough. It must be the best education possible. A high ideal? Yes, of course it is, and very American.

    In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free expects what never was and never can be.”

    To you who are about to embark on the next big venture of your lives, I say keep reading. Read books. Read history, biography, autobiography. Read books about ideas. Read and read again books that have stood the test of time. There are no bigger, better fish at which to look.

    Make yourself useful and work hard in work you choose for reasons other than money, if possible.

    See as much of the world as you can and with your eyes open. And, sometime, as time goes on, ask a teacher of your own child what you can do to help.

    On we go!