chancellor@ku.edu
Every year I invite students to give me advice for the commencement speech. Every year I get the best advice of all: Be brief.
The second best advice this year came from Cameron Popp, head of Student Union Activities (SUA). He said, "I'll listen to anything, just as long as you don't talk about the millennium." So, no millennium. I want to talk briefly about walking and storytelling.
Today, by the act of walking down Campanile Hill, you have added your story to the hundreds of thousands of stories that walked the hill before you to graduate from the University of Kansas. Brenda Chung, your story, a walk from Hong Kong to Lawrence, is now part of the KU anthology.
At the University of Kansas, graduation, commencement, and walking the hill are one and the same. The walk is the ceremony. We relive it every year. As Leslie Vink told me, "My story is, after four years of walking up the hill to class, I finally get to walk down."
The walk also becomes a metaphor for your personal pilgrim's progress. You have both walked down and crossed over into a new status. You came down the hill a student. In a moment you will morph into a graduate.
I don't think that anyone will notice a dramatic change. I suspect there is not a single three-piece suit or attaché case under those graduation gowns. Before you ask, we don't want to know what article of clothing you're actually wearing - or not wearing!
As Cameron suggested, graduation speeches are supposed to look to the future. I am supposed to tell you what you can look forward to. Well, I don't know. You are your future. We are your past.
Eleanor Roosevelt said it best: "Yesterday is history; tomorrow is mystery. Today is a gift."
So, I want to focus on the past, and the present, on how you got here, how your particular story got written, how the chapter marked "college" climaxed with you in a hot, sweaty, football stadium with 30,000 other people, pondering what it means to be identified as a bird - a Jayhawk.
Just because the walk down the hill is a classic doesn't mean that it can't become more modern, and that is what we have tried to do today with the technology of the message board.
The images on the message board connect families through a visual bond special to our age. We are electronic citizens, we love the camera. It is the storytelling medium of our era. "I saw you on TV" carries a special thrill. Why else would Allen Fieldhouse fill with squeals when the ESPN camera brings us back from commercial by focusing on a bunch of half-clothed men?
"Roy's Boys," you are part of KU's story. You are also the reason that bare-chested boys keep showing up at the admissions office.
The message board also makes it possible to share the walk.
We are glad that you are in Woodruff sharing the walk and seeing the video. Your presence in this way illustrates another eternal truth of KU graduation.
No one walks the hill alone. No one's story has only a single author. Parents, teachers, grandparents, wives, husbands, children, family, friends, people who simply love you very much, walk that hill with you. And they add their flashbacks to your story.
Every step that you took today evokes in someone a memory of a toddler who has pulled herself upright at the coffee table, turned awkwardly toward outstretched arms, toward a voice that said "come to me," and then taken her very first steps, into those open arms. You took that walk, Allegra DeSalvo and Toyin Adeyanju, just as surely as you took this one today.
This is my fifth year as chancellor at KU. I have my own set of flashbacks as I look out on this set of graduates. I remember having lunch with Jane Stoever, and being so impressed by her volunteering for an alternative spring break in South Carolina. I remember grinding my teeth at a Seth Hoffman editorial, and then thinking, "Maybe he has a point."
I welcomed today Herbert Cohen and Porter Mitchell. They both graduated in 1950 but a job out of state and the war in Korea kept them from commencement. They got here today.
Everyone here has a story, and some are better at telling their story than others. In this crowd of happy graduates is a master storyteller, Amy Blackmarr, who graduates with a Ph.D. in English.
Amy is a writer. She has already published two books and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She is part of a special KU graduate program called the Madison and Lila Self Graduate Fellowship program, named after Al and Lila Self, which is designed to bring the very best graduate students in America to Lawrence to study at KU.
Eight years ago, Amy promised herself she'd never again live a life she didn't love. She sold her Kansas City paralegal business and moved back to Georgia, to live in her granddaddy's fishing cabin and write. She knew she'd done exactly the right thing because she was doing what she wanted to do. That's pretty good advice. Amy suggests we all have one special story, our personal myth. She says, in a poem:
"And you are the only one who can write it,
What you've lived and what you've learned from living.
So it is the one thing you can make people believe,
Because it's the one thing
That YOU are the absolute authority on.
It's your own experience of being human,
And that's the place where your material comes from,
Your material for creating art,
For expressing your truth,
For getting on to the next stage."
"Getting on to the next stage." That's what stories help us do. Graduations do the same thing. KU is a collection of your personal stories, edited into four years of walking up the hill, and one special day, when we all walk down.
As you get on to the next stage, as you write that hard story which is your future, remember this day, this walk, and those storytellers who contributed to this day, to your college story, to your walk down the hill. Remember those who have helped you make your story human. Congratulations, Jayhawks!
