2023 Baccalaureate Address
It’s an honor and a trip to be here. I first arrived on this campus 40 years ago as a nameless, aimless graduate of a big public high school in the suburbs of New York. Based only on the picture of me in the freshman facebook — feathered hair parted down the middle, mid-pubescent mustache, Police concert T-shirt — you would not have pegged me then as the person who’d be giving this speech today. I certainly wouldn’t have. But you know, Hamilton made me into who I am, just as it’s made you into who you’ll become. You may not know it yet, but trust me. It’s happened.
Let me say a few words about, in my case, the becoming. I was a political junkie growing up — the kind of kid who read Time magazine when everyone else was reading Sports Illustrated. When I couldn’t fall asleep, instead of counting sheep, I’d try to recite the names of the 100 U.S. senators. By the time I got to Jesse Helms, I was usually drifting off. So when I registered for classes my first semester as a first-year student here, I took everything in the Government Department I could get my grubby mitts on. I literally mainlined government classes. This continued in my second semester and for the entire next year — after all, there was no requirement that I take boring subjects like science, so why not? As I’ve learned to say in Texas: Dance with the girl that brung you.
My junior year, when all my friends were in Barcelona studying architecture or Florence studying art, I went on Hamilton’s Washington, D.C., program to work on the uppermost floor of a congressional office building signing letters with a signing machine and in the basement of the Federal Election Commission doing God knows what. The nation’s capital. My dream come true. Except I hated it. This was the most miserable place, and these were the most miserable people I ever could have imagined. I couldn’t wait to get back to Clinton. And when I did, I was heartsick. I’d always wanted a career in politics. It was too late to switch my major. I whined and moaned to everyone who would listen.
One of those who did was Lea Haber [’87, P’24], who is now a Hamilton trustee. She was on the Washington program with me, and she was the incoming editor of The Spectator. After I told her about my sinking spell, she took pity on me and offered me a column in the newspaper — if I didn’t want to work in politics anymore, at least I could write about it. I accepted, and I liked doing it, and I was launched. I’m happy to say that, as a result of that pivot, I’ve been a journalist for the last 36 years. She is responsible.
But I also have to give credit to a few other people on this campus at that time: the late Misty Gerner, the late Fred Wagner, the late Sid Wertimer, Gene Tobin, Frank Anechiarico [’71], and Ted Eismeier — professors who gave me confidence, taught me to write, taught me to think critically, and made me appreciate that there was a world beyond my front door. As hard as it is to fathom, it was in this tiny community that I expanded my world view and my horizons — which is what every excellent institution of higher education should do.
This weekend is when we celebrate your own version of life-changing progress. Let’s acknowledge what you 500 amazing people, you graduates, have done: You’ve moved from start to finish, from talking about it to actually doing it. You’ve accomplished something truly significant against a back-drop of truly unbelievable events.
The majority of you entered as first-year students in 2019, the fall before everything shut down. For more than two years you endured a public health emergency the likes of which we haven’t seen for a century — maybe ever. Your freshman and sophomore years an economic down-turn put millions of Americans out of work — perhaps members of your own family. At the end of your freshman year, George Floyd was murdered; the resulting reckoning over systemic racism continues to this day. In your sophomore year we had a hot mess of a presidential election followed by an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that put our democracy at risk — it remains at risk two years later. I could go on.
Seriously, the firehose of catastrophe and calamity has been turned up to the highest setting during the time you’ve been on this campus. And yet here you are. You had plenty of excuses to hit pause.
You had any number of reasons to be derailed. But you didn’t and you weren’t. You stuck with it. Way to persevere. Way to be resilient. I don’t think we can say that often enough to the Class of ’23.
Having graduated, all of you on Monday get to join the ranks of those of us trying our best to make sense of an often confusing, increasingly cruel, and dynamically changing world. What’s the word I’ve heard my own kids, who are not much older than you, use to describe this? Adulting. Adulting is your reward for making it to the other side.
Actually, we’re the ones being rewarded. The rest of us. Your presence in all our lives — as colleagues, neighbors, friends — translates into fresh eyes, boundless energy, and another set of hands deployed to solve the problems created by the generations that came before you.
God, we’ve screwed things up, haven’t we? Screwed up the environment. Screwed up equity. Screwed up the economy. Screwed up voting.
I’m galled by many things but particularly about the way we’ve made partisanship a virtue and compromise a vice, as if talking to someone who disagrees with you is a fate worse than death. The way we’ve let the misinformation virus out of the test tube — giving oxygen and airtime to ridiculous conspiracy theories — so that when we’re battling an actual virus, people don’t know who to trust or what to believe. The way we’ve created a generation of low-information and no-information Americans who either choose not to participate in public life or, God love ’em, do anyway. The way we’ve politicized the simplest things: Public Health. Renewable Energy. Sports.
We’ve lost our way, and we’ve lost our minds. We make everything about what’s good for us individually when it ought to be about what’s good for all of us — the common good. The answer to every question is not subject, verb, liberty, and nor is it subject, verb, grievance. We’ve become too hard and too soft all at once. We have to get over that and get over ourselves and re-center. We have to promote and elevate the value of something larger — the value of community. It’s on you and yours to succeed where me and mine have failed.
What will it take? It’s helpful to remember that the blessings of citizenship come with obligations and responsibilities. Civic participation and civic engagement. Kindness, compassion, charity. Honesty. Decency. Morality. Fairness. Cheerfulness and equanimity — an even keel — when things don’t go your way. Humility when things do. Perspective. If the last couple of years taught us anything, it’s to take pleasure in small victories, to be grateful for what’s working in your life, and to be forgiving of others and of yourself.
Perhaps the biggest obligation and responsibility is that you acknowledge reality — that you accept the world you’re living in. Another way we’ve screwed up is we’ve allowed people to live in an alternate universe that exists only in their heads, one in which truth is subjective. The late Pat Moynihan, the longtime U.S. senator from this state, admonished us that we’re entitled to our own opinions but not our own facts. He must be spinning in his grave. The 2020 election was not stolen. The pandemic was not a hoax. Climate change is real. There: I said it. Now you can tell your kids that your baccalaureate speaker was a woke lunatic from the fake news media.
In fact, what I am is someone who believes in telling it like it is. We need more of that. We need more facts, reality, and truth. We need more good information to push out the bad.
But who’ll provide it? This is my sweet spot, and here’s my spiel. Since 2008, a quarter of the nation’s newspapers have shut down. By 2025, it will be a third. Seventy million of us in this country — one-fifth of us — have no local news source or one about to topple over. Many of those 70 million are people of color. The majority live in counties where the median household income is below the national average. We live in two Americas: one informed, one not. No wonder voter turnout is low and polarization is off the charts. No wonder conspiracy theories are out of control.
Making matters worse, we live in the United States of Confirmation Bias. We put ear buds in our ears as we make our way through our day to keep the outside world out. We self-exile. We curate our cable channels and our social media feeds and our satellite radio dials so the only voices we hear are ones already in our heads. We can go a lifetime without encountering a point of view different from our own.
This is what’s killing us. It’s the poison coursing through all of our veins. Believe me when I tell you that robust, reliable, credible, nonpartisan, nonprofit news — journalism in the public interest — is the antidote. This is how I spend my every waking minute these days: Trying to strengthen the news ecosystem, that antidote, from coast to coast and border to border and, in the process, strengthen our democracy. Any of you who want to join me, put up a hand.
I’m conscious of the time. You and your families need to get down to the Rok. There’s a Utica Club with your name on it. But before I go, I want to do what everyone who’s ever been up here has done, and that’s offer some advice on the way out the door. The hack here is that these two bits are lifted from other people — with credit, of course.
The first I’m going to borrow from Glen Powell, the actor who played Hangman in Top Gun: Maverick. You probably were not expecting that. He was the commencement speaker two weekends ago when my son graduated from the University of Texas. Glen, who is not just a Texan but more importantly an Austinite, told the assembled students that when you go to a party at someone’s house, bring queso. Very on brand. But also very deep. You can take that to mean carry delicious melted cheese with you wherever you go, but I choose to believe it was metaphorical queso. It was about being courteous and showing gratitude — about not taking anyone or anything for granted. About not showing up to life empty-handed. Sidebar to this: Glen also said always write thank-you notes. I think in that case he actually meant write thank-you notes. But it’s basically the same point.
The other bit of advice is from someone you’ve never heard of. It was the summer of 2000. I was in the office of my boss, Greg Curtis, at Texas Monthly. Greg had been the magazine’s editor for 19 years and was retiring. I’d been his deputy for many years and in a few weeks would succeed him. What wisdom did he have for me as I took on this awesome job?
What I couldn’t help thinking about at the time was the peaceful transition of power in this country every four or eight years. Hilarious, right? The outgoing president writes a handwritten note and leaves in it the drawer of the resolute desk in the Oval Office. What I was essentially asking Greg was, what would you write in that note?
He was a man of few words, but even by that standard his answer was cryptically brief. “Show up,” he said.
At first I didn’t get it. Show up? You mean like, come to work? After a beat or two I understood where he was coming from. He meant, show up, be present, don’t waste a day or a minute or an hour. If you’re gonna take the job, do the job. Arrive at the office every day like a batter in the on-deck circle, in uniform, swinging a bat with a donut, waiting for your turn at the plate. Be eager to get in the game. And when you’re in the game, play your heart out. Show up.
I’ve always tried to do that. I’ve always tried be as present I can be in every meeting, at every event, in every interview. In this speech. It’s a sign of my seriousness and my commitment, and in my experience it’s almost always noticed.
From Greg to me, from me to you, that’s my message to the stout and stalwart members of the Class of ’23: Show up. We need your attention and curiosity and creativity. We need your enthusiasm and idealism and pragmatism. We need you to tell us which things are lit and which are mid. You’re the ones we’ve been waiting for. More importantly, you’re the ones you’ve been waiting for. The solution to all of our problems, the enabler of all of our aspirations, the answer to all of our prayers … is you. You got this.
