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MISS HILLARY D. RODHAM - CLASS OF
'69
Wellesley Student Commencement
Speech
It follows the full text transcript of
Hillary Rodham's Wellesley Student Commencement
Speech, delivered at Wellesley, MA — May 31, 1969.
Ruth M. Adams:
[Ninth president of Wellesley College]
In addition to
inviting Senator Brooke to speak to them this
morning, the Class of '69 has expressed a desire
to speak to them and for them at this morning's
commencement. There was no debate so far as I
could ascertain as to who their spokesman was to
be — Miss Hillary Rodham.
Member of this
graduating class, she is a major in political
science and a candidate for the degree with
honors. In four years she has combined academic
ability with active service to the College, her
junior year having served as a Vil Junior, and
then as a member of Senate and during the past
year as President of College Government and
presiding officer of College Senate. She is also
cheerful, good humored, good company, and a good
friend to all of us and it is a great pleasure
to present to this audience Miss Hillary Rodham.
Hillary Rodham:
I am very glad
that Miss Adams made it clear that what I am
speaking for today is all of us — the 400 of us
— and I find myself in a familiar position, that
of reacting, something that our generation has
been doing for quite a while now.
We're not in the
positions yet of leadership and power, but we do
have that indispensable task of criticizing and
constructive protest and I find myself reacting
just briefly to some of the things that Senator
Brooke said. This has to be brief because I do
have a little speech to give.
Part of the
problem with empathy with professed goals is
that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had
lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but
we feel that for too long our leaders have used
politics as the art of making what appears to be
impossible, possible.
What does it mean
to hear that 13.3% of the people in this country
are below the poverty line? That's a percentage.
We're not interested in social reconstruction;
it's human reconstruction. How can we talk about
percentages and trends? The complexities are not
lost in our analyses, but perhaps they're just
put into what we consider a more human and
eventually a more progressive perspective.
The question about
possible and impossible was one that we brought
with us to Wellesley four years ago. We arrived
not yet knowing what was not possible.
Consequently, we expected a lot. Our attitudes
are easily understood having grown up, having
come to consciousness in the first five years of
this decade — years dominated by men with
dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the
Peace Corps, the space program — so we arrived
at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have
found, that there was a gap between expectation
and realities.
But it wasn't a
discouraging gap and it didn't turn us into
cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It
just inspired us to do something about that gap.
What we did is often difficult for some people
to understand. They ask us quite often: "Why, if
you're dissatisfied, do you stay in a place?"
Well, if you didn't care a lot about it you
wouldn't stay. It's almost as though my mother
used to say, "I'll always love you but there are
times when I certainly won't like you."
Our love for this
place, this particular place, Wellesley College,
coupled with our freedom from the burden of an
inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic
assumptions underlying our education. Before the
days of the media orchestrated demonstrations,
we had our own gathering over in Founder's
parking lot. We protested against the rigid
academic distribution requirement. We worked for
a pass-fail system. We worked for a say in some
of the process of academic decision making. And
luckily we were in a place where, when we
questioned the meaning of a liberal arts
education there were people with enough
imagination to respond to that questioning.
So we have made
progress. We have achieved some of the things
that initially saw as lacking in that gap
between expectation and reality. Our concerns
were not, of course, solely academic as all of
us know. We worried about inside Wellesley
questions of admissions, the kind of people that
should be coming to Wellesley, the process for
getting them here. We questioned about what
responsibility we should have both for our lives
as individuals and for our lives as members of a
collective group.
Coupled with our concerns for the Wellesley
inside here in the community were our concerns
for what happened beyond Hathaway House. We
wanted to know what relationship Wellesley was
going to have to the outer world. We were lucky
in that one of the first things Miss Adams did
was to set up a cross-registration with MIT
because everyone knows that education just can't
have any parochial bounds any more. One of the
other things that we did was the Upward Bound
program. There are so many other things that we
could talk about; so many attempts, at least the
way we saw it, to pull ourselves into the world
outside. And I think we've succeeded. There will
be an Upward Bound program, just for one
example, on the campus this summer.
Many of the issues that I've mentioned — those
of sharing power and responsibility, those of
assuming power and responsibility have been
general concerns on campuses throughout the
world. But underlying those concerns there is a
theme, a theme which is so trite and so old
because the words are so familiar. It talks
about integrity and trust and respect.
Words have a funny
way of trapping our minds on the way to our
tongues but there are necessary means even in
this multi-media age for attempting to come to
grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even
inarticulable things that we're feeling. We are,
all of us, exploring a world that none of us
even understands and attempting to create within
that uncertainty. But there are some things we
feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive,
and competitive corporate life, including
tragically the universities, is not the way of
life for us. We're searching for more immediate,
ecstatic and penetrating mode of living. And so
our questions, our questions about our
institutions, about our colleges, about our
churches, about our government continue. The
questions about those institutions are familiar
to all of us. We have seen heralded across the
newspapers. Senator Brooke has suggested some of
them this morning. But along with using these
words — integrity, trust, and respect — in
regard to institutions and leaders we're perhaps
harshest with them in regard to ourselves.
Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an
individual academic paper, Founder's parking lot
demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to
forge an identity in this particular age. That
attempt at forging for many of us over the past
four years has meant coming to terms with our
humanness. Within the context of a society that
we perceive — now we can talk about reality, and
I would like to talk about reality sometime,
authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what
we have to accept of what we see — but our
perception of it is that it hovers often between
the possibility of disaster and the potentiality
for imaginatively responding to men's needs.
There's a very strange conservative strain that
goes through a lot of New Left, collegiate
protests that I find very intriguing because it
harkens back to a lot of the old virtues, to the
fulfillment of original ideas. And it's also a
very unique American experience. It's such a
great adventure. If the experiment in human
living doesn't work in this country, in this
age, it's not going to work anywhere.
But we also know that to be educated, the goal
of it must be human liberation. A liberation
enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so
as to be free to create within and around
ourselves. To be educated to freedom must be
evidenced in action, and here again is where we
ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and
our teachers, questions about integrity, trust,
and respect.
Those three words
mean different things to all of us. Some of the
things they can mean, for instance: Integrity,
the courage to be whole, to try to mold an
entire person in this particular context, living
in relation to one another in the full poetry of
existence. If the only tool we have ultimately
to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we
can by choosing a way to live that will
demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know.
Integrity — a man like Paul Santmire. Trust.
This is one word that when I asked the class at
our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say
for them, everyone came up to me and said "Talk
about trust, talk about the lack of trust both
for us and the way we feel about others. Talk
about the trust bust." What can you say about
it? What can you say about a feeling that
permeates a generation and that perhaps is not
even understood by those who are distrusted? All
they can do is keep trying again and again and
again. There's that wonderful line in East Coker
by Eliot about there's only the trying, again
and again and again; to win again what we've
lost before.
And then respect. There's that mutuality of
respect between people where you don't see
people as percentage points. Where you don't
manipulate people. Where you're not interested
in social engineering for people. The struggle
for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere
of communal trust and respect is one with
desperately important political and social
consequences. And the word "consequences" of
course catapults us into the future. One of the
most tragic things that happened yesterday, a
beautiful day, was that I was talking to woman
who said that she wouldn't want to be me for
anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live
today and look ahead to what it is she sees
because she's afraid. Fear is always with us but
we just don't have time for it. Not now.
There are two people that I would like to thank
before concluding. That's Ellie Acheson, who is
the spearhead for this, and also Nancy Scheibner
who wrote this poem which is the last thing that
I would like to read:
My entrance
into the world of so-called "social
problems"
Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.
The hollow men of anger and bitterness
The bountiful ladies of righteous
degradation
All must be left to a bygone age.
And the purpose of history is to provide a
receptacle
For all those myths and oddments
Which oddly we have acquired
And from which we would become unburdened
To create a newer world
To transform the future into the present.
We have no need of false revolutions
In a world where categories tend to
tyrannize our minds
And hang our wills up on narrow pegs.
It is well at every given moment to seek the
limits in our lives.
And once those limits are understood
To understand that limitations no longer
exist.
Earth could be fair. And you and I must be
free
Not to save the world in a glorious crusade
Not to kill ourselves with a nameless
gnawing pain
But to practice with all the skill of our
being
The art of making possible.
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