‘Much will be asked and expected of you in this world you now enter’

Ladies and Gentlemen, I warmly welcome each and all of you to the 108th Commencement Exercises of Stanford University. A special welcome to the seniors and to the graduate students from Stanford’s various schools. Today, we shall award 1,750 bachelor’s degrees, 2,110 master’s degrees and 844 doctoral degrees.

The college class of 1999 includes 368 seniors graduating with departmental honors and 268 graduating with university distinction. One hundred sixty-eight students have satisfied the requirements of more than one major, 59 are graduating with dual bachelor’s degrees and 293 with both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. Three hundred sixty-eight students have completed minors.

Seniors, when you arrived four years ago, I dubbed you the “class of the three nines,” suggesting that you were a triple, triple, triple threat. I was right and you were great and performed to the highest degree, or as we say, “to the nines.”

Let me turn to another simple number and break it down.

If we could shrink the population of the Earth to a village of precisely 100 people with all existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like this:

• There would be 60 Asians, 14 villagers would be from the Americas (North and South), 13 from Africa and 13 from Europe.
• Thirty-four would be Christians and 66 would have other or no religious affiliations.
• Approximately 54 would be unable to read and 3 would own a computer.
• Only one would have a college education.

As that one in 100 with a college education, much will be asked and expected of you in this world you now enter. All of you, seniors and graduate students, in the class of the “three nines” have done your best to prepare. And your families are justifiably proud of you.

So, let me now invoke a wonderful Stanford Commencement custom. Graduates, in the stands are many of those who have made your Stanford years possible: parents and grandparents, spouses and children; siblings, aunts and uncles; mentors and friends – whoever played a role in supporting you, encouraging you, sticking with you. I invite you to please turn to the stands and join me in saying: “Thank you!”

Now it is my pleasure to introduce Provost Condoleezza Rice, who will present awards recognizing outstanding teaching, research and service to the university. She herself this month will end six years of highly distinguished service as the Stanford provost, the recognition for which will be the visible impact she has had on our university. Thank you, Condi!

[Award presentations]

Thank you, Provost Rice, and congratulations to this year’s award winners.

It is now my pleasure to introduce this year’s Commencement speaker, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky. Mr. Pinsky succeeded Robert Hass, also a Stanford alumnus, in that distinguished position. It is a happy fact that Stanford may claim not only successive Nobel laureates but also successive poet laureates.

Since becoming president in 1992, I have made frequent reference to the university’s motto Die Luft der Freiheit weht (“The wind of freedom blows”) and to its author, the humanist Ulrich von Hutten. What I have not had occasion to refer to is the fact that Emperor Maximilian, in 1517, placed a laurel crown on Hutten’s head and named him poet laureate of the Holy Roman Empire. Hutten became one of the first humanists to write his poetry not in Latin but in the vernacular. Back in 1992, I ended my inaugural address quoting lines from a Hutten poem that were much beloved by Stanford’s first President, David Starr Jordan: “With open eyes I have dared it, and cherish no regret … ”

This past April, Robert Pinsky was given an unprecedented third term as Poet Laureate of the United States, though my hunch is that he did not receive either a laurel wreath or the privilege to teach poetry at all universities of the realm, as did Hutten. However, like Hutten, Robert Pinsky “with open eyes” has dared the life of a poet and, I trust, cherishes no regret.

Mr. Pinsky teaches creative writing at Boston University. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at Stanford in 1967 and was a Stegner Fellow in our creative writing program. His wife, Dr. Ellen Pinsky, a psychologist, is also a Stanford alumna, A.B. in English 1964.

Robert Pinsky’s five books of poetry include, most recently, The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996. The Figured Wheel received the 1997 Leonore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union and was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Pinsky’s An Explanation of America, his History of My Heart, and his verse translation of Dante’s Inferno also earned prizes and awards.

I mentioned that Hutten had abandoned Latin as the language of poetry so that the people would be able to understand poetry. Similarly, Mr. Pinsky’s main undertaking as Poet Laureate has been the “Favorite Poem Project,” in which 1,000 Americans are recorded reading their favorite poem.

In recommending to me that I invite Mr. Pinsky to speak to us today, the senior class presidents said that they wished – and I quote – “to recognize the enduring value inherent in art and poetry that speaks to all graduates, both now and into their futures.” I ask you to join me in extending a warm welcome to one of Stanford’s own, United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.

[Mr. Pinsky’s speech]

Thank you, Mr. Pinsky.

[Conferral of degrees]

Graduates, on behalf of all members of the Stanford community, I congratulate and commend you.

Today, you join a worldwide body of remarkable alumni. Permit me to conclude, as I have done in past years, by singling out one of them and by relating him to the story of another member of the Stanford community. In the persons of these two Stanford people who overlapped but never met, my very short tale spans all of Stanford history from 1891 to the present. At one level, it is a simple tale about generosity and the wind of freedom, but on another level, it is a complex story about the challenges our world poses about human suffering and about the values of our country and our university.

At the beginning of World War I, when Belgium, under German occupation, faced famine, it was Herbert Hoover – a member of Stanford’s first entering class, a celebrated mining engineer and, later, a not so celebrated president of the United States – who organized, from London, a private relief agency to deliver food for the beleaguered Belgians. Stanford faculty, students and alumni took an active part. Hoover’s wife, Lou Henry Hoover, also a Stanford alumna and one of the very first women in the United States to major in geology, made urgent pleas for the cause. Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover were following the example of Jane and Leland Stanford, who having lost their son established this university to do something for “other people’s children.”

The cause of helping “other people’s children” and the fact that, after the Second World War, President Truman had placed Herbert Hoover once again in charge of famine relief bring us to the second person in my story. At the end of World War II, I was a seven-year-old living in the devastated port city of Hamburg. There and then, I heard the name Herbert Hoover for the first time as the label attached to American food supplies that reached our schools.

Certainly neither I nor anybody present here today could possibly have predicted in 1945, when I received what we knew as “Hoover foods,” that the American wind of freedom, the American Luft der Freiheit, that liberated Germany along with her victims, would one day lead me into the presidency of Hoover’s alma mater and make my wife and me residents of the Hoovers’ family home that Lou Henry Hoover had designed on campus. Yet, less than half a century after my first exposure to Hoover’s name during the Allied occupation of Germany, Stanford chose me as its president and here I stand, at Hoover’s alma mater, expressing the gratitude of countless children in remembrance of a Stanford alumnus, who on behalf of a merciful nation helped alleviate the scars of war and hunger.

More than 100 years ago, Herbert Hoover, like you today, sat listening to speeches and receiving a Stanford degree. In his memoirs, he recalled his feelings at that Commencement. I quote: “I listened to Dr. Jordan’s fine commencement address with my mind mostly on the sinking realization that a new era was opening for me with only $40 in cash and the need of finding an immediate job.”

I have no doubt that many in the audience today, from past or present experience, understand this “sinking realization.”

Hoover, however, soon made the most of his education, just as you shall. He also made Stanford itself one of his most important causes. He told his classmates: “If the university is to continue to grow, it must be by support that it shall receive from now on from its own graduates, and a university that does not expand with the growth of knowledge is a dead university.”

Stanford University is an institution with a continuous history, handed down from each generation to the next through, for instance, the life and story of Herbert Hoover. It is the faculty, students, trustees, staff, alumni, our local, national and foreign friends – it is you – who make the university grow through the traditions we build together.

Remember as you leave here today that Stanford stands for common purpose, for fortitude, faith and good cheer. It stands for perseverance in adversity. Stanford stands for the wind of freedom. It stands for diversity. It stands for generosity, for doing, as Jane and Leland Stanford did, something for “other people’s” sons and daughters. It stands for understanding the importance of higher education and its support. It stands for a continuous commitment to the power of reason and the unceasing process of inquiry.

To quote our first president, David Starr Jordan: “It is said that Rome was not built in one day, nor Stanford in a century; but it is being built, quietly, honestly, steadfastly, stone after stone.”

As you yourselves continue to build your lives “stone after stone” on the foundation in part laid at Stanford, on behalf of your university, I wish you the very best.