Hillary searches for a more penetrating mode of living
Wellesley College 1969 Student Commencement Speech Hillary D. Rodham May 31, 1969
Ruth M. Adams, ninth president of Wellesley College, introduced
Hillary D. Rodham, ‘69, at the 91st commencement exercises, as follows:
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.
Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham, President of the Wellesley College
Government Association and member of the Class of 1969, on the
occasion of Wellesley’s 91st Commencement, May 31, 1969:
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.