Education: All in The American Family

Though 1988’s graduates are deservedly getting their young lions’ share of attention, commencement has always been a family affair — and never more so than this year. At Immaculata College, near Philadelphia, Nora Gammon, 54, a mother of twelve children, proudly accepted her B.A. along with Daughter Laureen, 21. At New York City’s Lehman College, Elyse Sanchez’s brood of four proudly stood by while the 35-year-old welfare mother got her B.A. Elizabeth McCulla, 21, became the eighth in her family to graduate from William and Mary (Mom’s and Dad’s alma mater). Jesse Jackson stumped up a storm as speaker at his alma mater, North Carolina A. & T., then beamed as Sons Jesse Jr. and Jonathan received their sheepskins. And at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kans., the day’s loudest cheer went up for Dan Butler, 70. Butler had quit Benedictine in 1940, raised eight kids, then dropped back in two years ago as a full-time student who insisted on moving right into a campus dorm. “I’m used to being around children,” explained the spry widower, “and I would have been lonely otherwise.”

Herewith a sampler of cogent words by featured commencement speakers around the nation:

Tycoon T. Boone Pickens, at George Washington University, Washington:

“Be willing to make decisions. That’s the most important quality in a good leader. Don’t fall victim to what I call the ‘ready-aim-aim-aim-aim syndrome.’ You must be willing to fire.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York City: “We don’t want to dominate the Arabs because the Arabs don’t want to be dominated . . . And believe me, it is so difficult to govern the Jewish people, why should we try and govern somebody else, anyway?”

National League President A. Bartlett Giamatti, at M.I.T., Cambridge, Mass.: “The enemy of the university is not dissent, not disagreement, not disagreeableness. Gentility is the mark of a great finishing school, not a university.”

President Ernest Boyer of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, at Trinity University, San Antonio: “An incompetent teacher is even worse than an incompetent surgeon because a surgeon can only cut up one person at a time.”

Barnard President Ellen Futter, at Barnard College, New York City: “Education is empowerment — individual and national . . . For the United States of America to be populated by a citizenry that is uneducated is a prescription for disaster and a sentence to everlasting mediocrity.”

Novelist Cynthia Ozick, at Bryn Mawr College, Pa.: “In the possession of a heritage, there are no princes and no paupers. Every reader is a potential citizen of influence with a claim on patrimony and on the widest and most inclusive recesses of the culture.”

Art Historian Kirk Varnedoe, at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Ga.: “I have a couple of disadvantages speaking to you today. I’m trained as an art historian, not an artist, and the painter Barnett Newman once said that art history is for artists what ornithology is for the birds.”

Journalist Bill Moyers, at the University of Texas, Austin: “A journalist is a professional beachcomber on the shores of other peoples’ wisdom.”

Chief Justice of the U.S. William Rehnquist, at Marquette University, Milwaukee: “When you are young and impecunious, society conditions you to exchange time for money, and this is quite as it should be. Very few people are hurt by having to work for a living. But as you become more affluent, it somehow is very, very difficult to reverse that process and begin trading money for time.”

Physicist Freeman Dyson, at the College of Wooster, Ohio: “The game of status seeking, organized around committees, is played in roughly the same fashion in Africa, in America and in the Soviet Union. Perhaps the aptitude for this committee game is part of our genetic inheritance, like the aptitude for speech and for music.”

Author Paul Theroux, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst: “These books about the affairs of the White House, telling secrets — they’re obnoxious. But haven’t we got a right to know those things? Aren’t we obliged to know those things? The same goes for people selling snake oil and salvation. It’s human weakness that they represent, but it’s an American strength when they are exposed.”

Vietnamese Boat Person Vu Thanh Thuy, at Marist College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: “In fact, surprising as it may seem, the daily struggle of making a living in America is more difficult to cope with than all of the events we went through in prison and at sea. The reason is that there is nothing ‘heroic’ about surviving the never ending problems of daily life.”