2007 Graduation - Valedictory Celebration

Professor Robert Landy, Faculty Speaker

My dear graduates and honored guests-

I speak to you today as a representative of a most distinguished faculty of rookies and veterans. I'd like to acknowledge them and their essential role in guiding you to this moment of valediction. Valediction, by the way, means: the action of bidding or saying farewell. Commencement, the ritual you will experience on Thursday, is about beginning, about saying hello. So we, your faculty, say goodbye before you, our graduates, say hello to all that lies before you.

When Dean Carey briefed me on preparing these remarks, a colleague who was present asked me if I ever addressed such a large audience. "Much larger," I replied. "I was at Woodstock in 1969." "You mean," she said, "you performed on the same stage as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin?" "No," I replied, "the real performance took place in the audience." And so, I look out at you and I honor you for your mastery not only of the electric guitar and the belt voice and the expressive dance, but also for your mastery of media ecology and speech pathology, of counseling psychology and educational technology, of speech communications and performing arts administration, of (physical and occupational and art, drama and music therapy, of business and bilingual and multilingual and interdepartmental and international, interpersonal and multicultural studies) learning and teaching and research and reaching for sustained excellence in scores of Steinhardt programs I have omitted for lack of time and rhyme -we, your faculty, honor you.

A long time ago, in the warmer days of the cold war, as I was about to graduate from high school, my history teacher turned to the class and proclaimed, "You should know, people, that all the great creative ideas have already been thought. Most of you will go through life without a single original idea." I looked around the room and could see that many of my friends, at least the ones who were listening, felt as crushed as I did. We were 17-years-old, baby-boomers. The world war and its holocaust were behind us and despite the incipient fear of nuclear annihilation, we were bold enough to imagine a world of tolerance and peace. Hardly a new idea-in fact the Greek playwright Aristophanes, had a novel solution to world peace in the year 411 BC-in his play Lysistrata, the women deny their men sex until they agree to stop the bloodshed and violence of the Peloponnesian War. It worked, at least in Aristophanes' play. At the time of my graduation, we were one year away from the Cuban Missile Crisis and two years away from the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 30 years away from the ethnic cleansings in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and four decades away from 9/11, Darfur, the Iraq War, and the awareness of global warming. These realities were unthinkable. Or maybe we were just too young and too unimaginative to think them. In hindsight my history teacher was right. After all, history repeats itself again and again in ways documented in very ancient texts.

I realize now, however, that my teacher was right in a much deeper, much more radical sense. Her valedictory was not only a warning, but a challenge to all of us. She seemed to say: "As a single human being and as a community of human beings, it is inevitable that you will repeat the past and make the same mistakes as your parents and their parents and all the great and ignominious cultures that came before. But if you dare to imagine new ways of going about the business of building families and communities, caring deeply about enhancing the culture through its systems of education and human development, then you become a creative human being who will indeed make a difference.

One the most satisfying roles I have played in my life is teacher. After teaching for more than 30 years, most of them at NYU, I still enter each class and each relationship with my students hearing the nagging charge of my high school history teacher in my head. Despite the part of me that has embraced a more Eastern perspective of letting go of self-criticism and second guessing, of being mindful without being critical, I still attempt to approach the old ideas and relationships in new and thoughtful ways, the new ones in adequate or novel ways. As I look out into this magnificent audience and see some of my students in drama therapy and counseling psychology and educational theatre and many hundreds whom I do not know personally, I want you to know that you are the center of the performance. We, as your teachers and sometimes entertainers, are here to ritualize your achievement, and to bid you farewell, as is our task at this moment of valediction.

Before the final faculty farewell, however, from people in medieval gowns and brightly colored hoods, I have one more reflection--several years ago, I was in Vienna for a conference and had the urge to visit Freud's apartment on Bergasse 19, now a museum, where he lived and wrote and treated patients. I sat at his desk and for an instant, imagined myself in his role. I glanced to my left and noticed that a small mirror hung from the handle of the casement window, placed there by Freud himself many years before. And then I realized that when Freud turned toward the window, the first thing he saw was a reflection of himself, or more in keeping with his ideas, a refraction. And then, redirecting his gaze, he looked out at the changing seasons in his garden and then at the world beyond. The image of the mirror and the window stayed with me ever since. As I look out at you and at your families and friends, I see myself as a graduate and neophyte, about to embark on a new part of my journey, and I see myself as a parent and guide and friend, supporting that journey. And I see beyond, to the world outside, beyond Radio City, beyond the Viennese garden, beyond Woodstock, to the world you will encounter tomorrow, where there are many mirrors and windows. The ways you look into and through them will be critical. As Steinhardt graduates, you stand among the pillars of culture, education and human development. We, your teachers, have been scaffolds, and it is time for us to let you go and bid you farewell. As we do, I give you my best reading of the challenge that my high school history teacher gave me many years before-Be mindful and thoughtful, be willing to look within yourself and beyond yourself and engage with the images and relationships that appear before you, in all their terror and in all their magnificence.

My dear graduates--fare well.