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Your years at Grinnell have involved a personal transition:
your passage from youth and uncertainty, to adult and uncertainty.
[laughter]
For the College, and for the larger world,
transitions both large and small have changed the face of that world,
even as you yourselves have changed.
One large transition let you witness,
perhaps with some discomfort,
was the change in the Presidency at Grinnell.
[laughter]
Whatever thoughts you may have had about all of that,
I hope you will join me today in thanking Pam Ferguson
for her tremendous...
[applause]
contribution to the College.
[laughter]
If you look behind me, you will see the most exciting, well-built
science center at any liberal arts college in the United States.
And this science center is not just a monument to science,
or to a donor or donors,
but a living building in which you have loved to learn and to study.
And if you look behind yourselves,
you will see our newly completed Bucksbaum Center for the Arts.
These spectacular facilities, or this spectacular facility,
brings together all of the arts on the campus,
adds an exciting new gallery,
and provides high-quality academic space for all of our arts programs.
We are grateful to President Ferguson;
to our former Dean and Interim President Charley Duke;
to Jim Swartz, our Dean; to our Trustees,
and to all of you, particularly for enduring the slings and arrows
of these construction processes.
Our focus today is obviously not just on what you have endured,
but on who you are.
Most of you were born in 1976 or 1977,
the year Elvis died, unless the tabloids are correct.
You were alive for the first installment of the Star Wars series
and, of course, most of you know that the latest installment
was released last week to coincide with this event.
[laughter]
Pope John Paul II was the Pope when you were born
and he is the Pope today.
Lady Diana Spencer was married on July 29, 1981 to Prince Charles,
and then we watched her marriage unravel,
and then we heard tragically of her death last year.
During your life you have witnessed the election
and subsequent re-election of the first Democratic President
since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
You have witnessed the second unconvicted impeachment
of a President in American history.
You have also listened for years to the song "1999".
[cheering]
Written and performed by The Artist Formerly Known as Prince,
which now perhaps will be dropped from the music repertory
after the end of this year.
You have grown up with PCs and workstations and the Internet,
and you love and hate all that but also you use it
and it has changed many facets of our lives.
Amidst all this, you have experienced love, loss,
triumph, peace, and dismay.
Today, our nation and the whole world
stand on the edge of a new millenium.
Only those of you who have read about the change to the 20th Century
at the beginning of 1900
will know that such transitions produce enormous hype
and conjoined fear.
But they do demark huge shifts
in life and institutions.
Shortly after the start of the 20th century,
the Russo-Japanese War began a series of modern military conflicts
that pointed to World War I
and then turned to World War II.
Our new millenium will no doubt bring with it
even more dizzying changes and disasters
than my grandparents witnessed at the start of the 20th century.
The foregoing shows that the world has changed significantly
in your lifetime,
and from time immemorial.
But the hopes, aspirations, charms, and foibles of mankind
remain the same.
Your Grinnell education is intended to cultivate in you
a capacity to apprehend, comprehend,
and learn from the world's transitions.
More importantly, your education here and our collective aim
is that the education will allow you
to contribute to the advancement of beauty,
the development of wisdom,
and the amelioration of social and individual distress,
even in a more technologically advanced society.
Today is your graduation, marking the end of one period of your life
and beginning another.
I hope you keep alive your sense of the wonder about our created world,
the richness of our human experience,
and awe at the beginning of each day,
and with each new person you meet.
And now, it will not surprise any of you
if I close by quoting from John Milton's "Tractate on Education":
"I shall detain you no longer
in the demonstration of what we should not do,
but straight conduct ye to a hill side
where I will point ye out the right path
of a virtuous and noble education;
laborious indeed at the first ascent,
but else so smooth, so green,
so full of goodly prospect,
and melodious sounds on every side,
that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming."
Congratulations.