Good morning,
I expect that June 18, 2006, your graduation date, will be one of the most memorable Father’s Days in your life. Typically, Mother’s Day is one where the telephone lines are busy, restaurants are full, and mothers are fully appreciated. Father’s Day, on the other hand, as one local radio announcer recently stated, “Rates right up there with Groundhog Day.”
I would like to provide some brief comments to you this morning related to your graduation, but also share some words of wisdom from my father.
I remember early in my childhood, asking my dad what he thought I should be when I grew up. He smiled and responded, “I believe that you will either be a judge or a shoemaker.” “A judge or a shoemaker?” I stated to him “Why one of those two professions?” Daddy commented with a smile on his face, “Because I’ve been watching you, and those are the only two people that I know of that can make a living sitting on their behind.”
In a more serious vein, in 1963, I was given the opportunity to leave Birmingham, Alabama, to go to Santa Barbara, California, to complete my senior year of high school. At first blush this may not seem like much of a choice, leaving the segregated South in order to live with a family in beautiful Santa Barbara, California, with the opportunity perhaps of staying in California to attend college. However, as a member of the football team, the choir, student government, vice president of the state association of student councils, and one who had never spent more than two weeks away from home, the choice for a 17-year-old was not as simple as it perhaps should have been.
I remember at some point in my decision-making process, approaching my father and asking for his advice. By way of background, my father, who only had an 8 th grade education, to the best of my knowledge had only left the state of Alabama twice, both times to attend the funerals of brothers, one in Texas and one in Michigan. He spoke to me with a sincerity that I had rarely experienced. He said, “Son, I left the country (referring to Fort Deposit, Alabama, where he was born) during the Depression to come to Birmingham to work in the steel mills. I was given a job as a laborer because it was work that white people refused to do. If you went out to Tennessee Coal & Iron today, you could not get the job that I have.” He summarized his comments by saying, “If you want to make something out of yourself, you’re going to have to get away from here.” So, armed with some homemade pound cake and pork chop sandwiches, I departed from Birmingham, Alabama, on a Greyhound bus.
My father, in his own way, attempted to prepare me for the world that I was moving into. I would like to attempt to do the same for you.
I would like to share a few comments with you from a book entitled The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin. He wrote,
“In 1949 only six percent of the cotton in the South was harvested mechanically. By 1964 it was seventy-eight percent. Eight years later, one hundred percent of the cotton was picked by machines.” Rifkin went on to state that certain forms of work, historically, had been made “... expendable, then irrelevant, and finally invisible...”
Rifkin’s book, which was written 10 years ago, provided yet another example.
“Over ninety-eight percent of the world’s vanilla crop is grown in the small island countries of Madagascar, Reunion, and Comoros. In Madagascar alone, which produces more than seventy percent of the world’s harvest, 70,000 peasant farmers rely on this single crop for their livelihood. Vanilla, however, is expensive to produce. The vanilla orchard has to be hand-pollinated and requires special attention in the harvesting and curing process. Now, the new gene-splicing technologies will allow researchers to produce commercial volumes of vanilla in laboratory vats - by isolating the gene that codes for the vanilla protein and cloning it in a bacterial bath - eliminating the bean, the plant, the soil, the cultivation, the harvest and the farmer.”
With one scientific discovery, an entire way of life simply became invisible.
More recently, Thomas Friedman, foreign affairs consultant for The New York Times drew from the findings of his new book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, in a recent address sponsored by the Lumina Foundation for Education. Mr. Friedman was quoted as stating,
“Because technology has flattened the world, the global economic playing field has become increasingly level, with significant implications for American education and competitiveness.”
He went on to state, “We got from the agricultural to the industrial revolution by making high school a requirement. We now move from the industrial revolution to the post-industrial, and there’s only one way for us to successfully make that leap and maintain social stability, and that is, that tertiary education, post-secondary education, is available to every American who wants it.”
In a flat world, Friedman stated, it is no longer good enough “to be a B student in Indianapolis.” In a flat world, he said, the United States requires “great teachers” to instill in young people the habits of mind necessary for lifelong learning.
“The only way to compete is by getting smarter and smarter, and not by working cheaper and harder. The single thing you need to learn is how to learn. Learning how to learn is the most important single thing...we can teach.”
Advice that I would like to leave with you is that the world that you are moving into will be a challenging one. The task of being successful will become increasingly formidable. The rate of change is exponential, and there is no lasting inoculation against ignorance. The good news is that as you graduate from the University of California, Riverside, you have the benefits of a good, basic, general education.
You have learned the mastery of basic skills: reading, writing, oral communication, computational skills, computer literacy, foreign language. You have learned critical thinking, self-realization, respect for the environment, appreciation for the culture and contribution of others, and you have developed patterns of discipline.
Although the challenges will be great, it will be nothing that you won’t be able to handle!
Returning to thoughts of my father. I recall on one of my visits to Alabama after I had graduated from college, my father called me and shared with me a letter from one of his sisters who still lived in Fort Deposit. In the letter she spoke of one of her grandsons who was doing very well in high school, and she had high hopes that he would be able to attend college as I had done. It was at that time I first realized that my college graduation, while a major accomplishment for me, was a source of pride for my family, and to some degree an inspiration for those who would come after me. You should feel the same way.
As you partake in these activities today, remember that graduation is a measurement, and commencement is a beginning. The acknowledgments you will receive this morning are a measurement of your success, but also the starting point for the balance of your life.
Congratulations on your success. Best wishes on your new beginnings. And always...continue to learn.
Jerome Hunter, Ed.D.
Chancellor
North Orange County Community College District