2008 Valedictory Celebration Speech

Faculty of the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, alumni, parents, family members and friends, and honored guests, as dean and representative of the faculty and staff of the Steinhardt School, I am proud to offer formal and official congratulations to you, our graduates and class of 2008!

Bravo!

I also congratulate and honor you, the parents, spouses, partners, family members and friends who have supported our graduates. Without your support and sacrifices, these graduates would not be here celebrating this glorious day. Your belief in them, your steadfast ability to imagine this day and their successes, sustained them throughout all the doubtful days -- and perhaps there were some, we salute you.

And you, dear graduates, as you leave the Steinhardt School, you carry with you our hopes for the future. It is, I want to tell you today, a future you must imagine. Events in Iraq, Guantanomo, Mynemar, and now China, the economy, the housing loan crisis, and education health care disasters, tell us stories that are unimaginable—and require that we, fortunate to have the gifts of our education, do something to shape a better future.

Every generation likes to believe what they struggled during their graduate education years, is a little more serious than the challenges of the present.

But graduates, I must say, I came of age during the civil rights era, the war in Vietnam, the birth of the women’s movement and, honestly, in terms of challenges, your times trump mine.

Perhaps because there will be a historical presidential election is less than 7 months away, I am thinking about how we will build a better future, And so I ask that you use your education from this great university to imagine a better world, imagine a better way for us as US government and US citizens to be in that world.

Let me tell you a story about how your imagination can lead us to that better world.

In his surprising and magical book, Imagining Argentina, Lawrence Thornton tells the story of a man caught in the horrors of the Dirty War in Argentina. You may recall that between 1976 and 1983 the generals, the junta, With US support -- ordered the disappearance, the torture and murder of thousands of people.

Carlos Rueda, the protagonist of Thornton’s story of those horrific times, has a gift through which he can imagine what happens to the people who have been disappeared. And as he uses his gift to help frantic parents learn the whereabouts of their children, and desperate wives locate their husbands, he is gradually able to imagine them out of prison and in imagining their escape, he makes it happen.

One day Carlos is walking down the street with his friend, and he sees a green Falcon. Now Green Falcons were in fact the car used by the secret police during the “dirty war.” They used green falcons to kidnap anyone suspected of anti-government sentiments. So, in the book Imagining Argentina, Carlos sees the car and says to his friend: “Can you see the men sitting in the car? Do you know what they see?”

His friend answers, “I suppose you’ll say ‘nothing.’” But Carlos responds, “Sheep and terrorists….They see sheep and terrorists because they imagine us that way: sheep and terrorists. As long as we accept what the men in the car imagine, we’re finished.”

“Last week,” Carlos says, “I went to the Riachuelo to find a leather bag for Teresa’s birthday. … I discovered a lacquered bamboo cage in which two Amazon parrots perched lifelessly. Just then the woman who kept the stall unlatched the door and the parrots flew out. I don’t know why she did it, but that’s what imagination can do, fly like the parrots as they arched into the sky where they caught the scent of the jungle and rode the free air back to where they belonged. We have to believe in the power of imagination because it is all we have, and ours is stronger than theirs.”

Now maybe you are sitting her today, wondering: Dean Brabeck, at graduation, a benediction on torture murder and horror?

I agree, this is, not the stuff of situation comedies, of reality t.v., or VH1.

My goal today, as I welcome you into your bright and graduated future, is not to discourage, but to inspire your imaginations.

The poet Ranier Maria Rilke had a correspondence 105 years ago, with a young writer. His letters are published in a slim volume called, Letters To A Young Poet.

We don’t know exactly what the young poet wrote to Rilke, but Rilke responds with sage-like wisdom at every turn. In one letter he writes to his young acolyte:

“Most people have…turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult.”

To use the Rilke scale of measurement: our current world situation is, I fear, the difficult side of difficult.

Rilke writes to the young man while he travels:

“Have patience,” he says. “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now,” Rilke writes. “Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Dear Graduates, today you leave us with the power to imagine a better world for us all.

Imagination gives birth to wishing. If we can imagine it, we can wish it, desire it, and when we want it, we can work to achieve it.

So I ask you as you leave us to take your strong and vivid imaginations into a world that needs you.

Imagine a way, out of urban poverty, out of a cycle of violence,
out of a history of school failure, out of the horrors of torture in our US military camps.

Imagine a global media that unites rather than divides nationalities.—and political parties.

I ask you to imagine the art work and the music that will inspire hope and social justice. Imagine a way to treat Alzheimers and adolescent depression. Imagine a better way to number the accomplishments of children and youth, beyond high stakes standardized tests.

Imagine a way for each of us here today, to sustain hope in times of doubt and despair.

You have seen the torch of this great university on publications and banners, but you carry an even more important torch within you now.

As you leave the Steinhardt School, make it a torch that ignites imagination wherever you take your teaching, your research, administration, your work in the health professions and psychology, in media, communications and the arts.

Congratulations and thank you for all you have given your alma mater and all you will give our needy world.

Trust the difficult. Live the questions. They are our route toward the answers.

Please return to Washington Square and let us know about your work – your scholarship and practice-- so that we can celebrate your successes with you. And we will be here for you always, in New York, New York, the city so great they named it twice!

Dean Mary Brabeck