2009 Doctoral Convocation Speech

As Dean of the Steinhardt School of Culture Education and Human Development, I am delighted to greet you all on behalf of the faculty and staff, and welcome you to our 2009 commencement ceremony.

We are hooding our doctoral students this evening as a sign that we value their commitment to engaging in practice and research that will enhance the human condition at the crossroads of learning, development, culture, and well being.

Graduates of 2009, we hood you as a sign of welcome into the community of scholars.

Your dissertations -- the titles are in your programs --- address some of the most complex and challenging questions facing our society.  

I know you want to acknowledge the faculty members who have accompanied you on your journey.  I ask the faculty to stand and be recognized for their contributions as mentors and advisors, coaches and colleagues.

On Wednesday, May 13th at Yankee Stadium -- along with honorary degree recipients, Hillary Clinton and Steinhardt’s own John Patrick Shanley -- your teachers will become your colleagues in the world of the doctorally-educated.

Graduates, all the successes we honor today are possible because of the gifts you have been given and because of your own hard work, late night hours, and your perseverance.  But also you have accomplished much because of those who have supported you -- financially, emotionally, spiritually – as well as by doing the laundry.

You will enter your professions and the academy with a commitment to life-long learning and professional practice -- habits of mind, skills, knowledge and virtues instilled within you during your years at Washington Square.

The words, ‘Pestare et Praestare,’ are emblazoned on your diploma.  ‘Pestare et Praestare’ is Latin for persist and excel, the words on the University’s official seal. 

You have earned your doctorate for these traits – perseverance and excellence -- and you have done so in interesting, challenging times. 

These last two years have been ‘interesting’ for us as a nation.  We have seen banks fail, the price of gas sky-rocket and fall, and we have seen record levels of unemployment.  We have also learned more than we ever wanted to learn about torture, the great depression, abuses of executive power and wealth --

But we have been blessed with a new administration -- our first African American president.  Whatever your politics, here is a man who is literate, smart, witty, and deeply committed to that phrase that has now become a cliché: ‘ yes we can.’  He is  a can-do man, who is also committed to the life of the mind, a president committed to the ideals of a ‘deliberative democracy.’

Many have called our new president pragmatic, and perhaps pragmatism, if it is heavily dosed with dialogue, is what the world needs right now.  In a New Yorker article following the election of President Obama, George Packer reflected on the idea that ‘deliberative democracy,’ rather than ideology may be the defining governing philosophy of the Obama administration. 

Deliberative democracy appears in The Audacity of Hope.  It is the idea that through conversation, through dialectical exchange, through talking and listening to each other, we might claw our ways to a truth.  We might find a path that no one individually, without benefit of exchange of ideas, might attain.

Deliberative democracy theorists argue that legitimate lawmaking can arise only through public deliberation by the people.

Obama finds inspiration for the notion of deliberative democracy in Lincoln’s words.  At his first inauguration, on the eve of the outbreak of civil war, Lincoln urged his fellow countrymen, “Think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you, in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberatively, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it.”

I will bet you didn’t feel like you had many occasions over the past years of doctoral study to take time, to be deliberative and not hurry.

So what does it take to engage in deliberative democracy -- a concept as old as the Greeks who 2,500 years ago gathered in the agora, to debate the issues of their time?

In fact, forms of rhetoric -- as some of you in media and communication have studied – have us Thinking calmly and well upon whole subjects. 

Listening to others’ points of view and hearing our way into a new truth, is a more complicated and better understanding of a truth that we can only approximate.

Pascal says as the circle of knowledge grows, so does the circumference of ignorance.  So your learning and knowledge has paradoxically – sorry to inform you! -- made you more and more ignorant, or at least more aware that all knowledge is incomplete, and in need of deliberation, debate and discussion.   

It is that understanding that will compel you, propel you, require you to be diligent in the pursuit of the latest information available in your field.  This might be the latest intervention or strategy to heal another or the best knowledge that will help another learn and develop.

While your knowledge seeking will benefit from your deliberative thinking and communal problem solving, so will our democracy.

Our own Jon Zimmerman, Historian of Education, teacher of the history of education, received the NYU Teaching Excellence awards last year (2008).  He was one of only four professors chosen in a University-wide selection process.

In an interview with Debra Weinstein, Jon Zimmerman talked about his years of teaching history, and said  that only 1% of his students will  become historians, but he knew  they ALL will become citizens.

And so he “tries to teach the skills that democratic citizenship demands:  curiosity, critical thinking and open mindedness.”

Doctoral Students, as you look back over your years at NYU, can you say that today you are more curious and less certain than when you started?

Are you more likely to engage in deliberative discussion about your ideas?

More likely to critique and interrogate your opinions than simply defend them?

Are you more open to ideas that are different from your own beliefs?

At gatherings, do you seek to sit next to the person most different from you so that you might learn something new? 

Do you greet each patient, student, or client with eager anticipation that this encounter will lead to new knowledge, new ways of thinking?

Are you able to  think calmly and well upon the whole subject you have examined?

And are you willing to, as Maria Ranier Rilke enjoins us, to ‘live the question,’ especially those questions for which you have no answer? 

If so, you are now prepared to take your place among the doctorally-educated and find new solutions for our most intransigent problems.

And remember:  We will be here, on the Square, watching your star rise, and waiting for you to return and have another deliberative exchange with us.