Marywood University Commencement

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“Your Education, Private Benefit, and Public Good”

Commencement Speech - Marywood University
Scranton, Pennsylvania
May 9, 2004

Richard Ekman
President
The Council of Independent Colleges

Sister Mary Reap, President, Distinguished Members of the Board of Trustees and Marywood University Corporation, Sister Mary Persico, President, Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Honored Members of the Faculty and Administration, Dear Parents, Family Members, Friends, and Most Especially Members of the Graduating Class of 2004:

Congratulations.

This is a day for both looking ahead and for remembering from where we have come—how far, and why—and the choices we have made, consciously or not. Today's joyous graduation does not happen in isolation, for your Marywood University education has given you the skills and perspectives to shape your future in light of both important traditions and your sense of purpose. You have been prepared well, guided by family and teachers, to make excellent choices: “Destiny is no matter of chance,” as William Jennings Bryan said, “it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”

In truth, your graduation has two kinds of significance—he private and the public. The private benefit of a college education is that you have now been prepared for employment that will be more interesting than the job you could have been hired to do without a college degree. And you will probably earn more money. The distinguished economist, Michael McPherson, who also serves as the president of the Chicago-based Spencer Foundation, estimates that a college graduate today will earn about $1 million more over his or her lifetime than someone who does not go to college. An excellent college or university, such as Marywood, prepares you not only for the first job after college, but for the second, third, and fourth. Some of you have earned your first degree today; others are being awarded graduate degrees. Perhaps you worked for a while after graduating from college; now you are obtaining further education. For Marywood, work and education go hand in hand.

Marywood succeeds by integrating the liberal arts with professional training, and by emphasizing that life carries with it important responsibilities. Whether you pursue a career in education or social work, public administration or the arts, the health professions or business, nursing, biotechnology, or any other field, you now know that there are responsibilities both in your professional life and in your life as a citizen of your community. Indeed, you also know that your community is not limited to one city, but encompasses a vast, interdependent world.

There is ready external validation that these themes of your Marywood education have very broad applicability. Several recent surveys should make you feel especially pleased that you chose to enroll in and graduate from Marywood University. The Hardwick Day consulting firm, based in Minneapolis, has surveyed the alumni of hundreds of colleges and universities up to ten years after graduation and has concluded that graduates of private colleges and universities, on the whole, feel more fulfilled and satisfied in life than the alumni of state universities. Also, students at private colleges are much more likely to graduate—when measured after four years and again after six years—than their counterparts at state colleges. Most significantly, these differences between private and state colleges are biggest for students who are above traditional college age, work full time in addition to going to school, come from low income backgrounds, and/or have families to raise while enrolled in school.

Do any of these characteristics sound familiar? They should, for there have been and will continue to be real benefits to you as an individual from your having chosen this excellent institution of higher education.

Your experience here is part of an important national story, a story that goes well beyond the private benefit that you have received from college. There is also the story of the public benefit—the ways in which you have been prepared to be a more responsible and valuable person in society, to do your part to make the world a better place. Look how many of you are receiving degrees today in the helping professions. Thomas Jefferson, in advocating for the creation of the University of Virginia two hundred years ago, argued that an educated citizenry was essential in order for a democracy to function effectively. And sure enough, the Hardwick Day surveys I mentioned earlier found that private college graduates tend to be more involved in their communities than state university graduates. And, if these surveys are any predictor, you will vote more frequently and contribute more to charities. Today, when young people are not voting in great numbers in comparison with a generation ago, private college graduates are likely to vote somewhat more frequently. I hope you will stay well informed about national, state, and local issues, get involved, and vote. And I know Sister Mary joins me in hoping that you will give generously to worthy charitable causes, including this fine university.

The goal of making the world a better place has had an especially long and important role in colleges with religious traditions. My organization, the Council of Independent Colleges, which includes 500 colleges and universities, has conducted a program since 1998 that helps colleges work more closely with community organizations. We have done this because to do so both enriches the educational experience of students and strengthens the communities in which the colleges are located. More than one hundred colleges and universities wanted to be part of this program, which is generously supported by the Atlantic Philanthropies, but only thirteen could be selected in a rigorous competition. It is significant, I think, that twelve of the thirteen have strong religious ties, and four of them are Catholic colleges. Like Marywood, these colleges and universities emphasize the helping professions, and educate men and women who want to try to make the world a better place.

Marywood University, as you well know, was founded in 1915, just after the First World War began in Europe, but before the United States was drawn into the war. Marywood has served to educate individuals and to serve society for many years. We sometimes forget that in the 19th century the Catholic Church in Europe was closely aligned with the ruling elites, usually hereditary monarchies. As the revolutionary movements from 1848 onward broke out all over Europe, the Church was hardly supportive, and it was most critical of the leveling influences of Socialism.

Yet, America was different. About the time when Marywood was getting started, in 1919, a group of the leading Catholic Bishops in America announced what they called the "Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction." Coming right at the end of the First World War, among its recommendations were startling calls to: (1) provide affordable housing for the poor; (2) reduce the cost of living; (3) set a legal minimum wage; (4) provide social insurance; (5) permit labor to participate in industrial management; (6) provide people with vocational training; and (7) pass legislation that protects children who are in the work force.

All of these issues still have a strangely contemporary ring to them. America has come a long way on most of these issues since 1919—we now have a legal minimum wage and it has been increased several times, we have social security, child labor laws, some job training programs, and some subsidized housing. But these social problems have not been solved over the past 85 years, either here in America or throughout the world.

When the First World War ended, as you know, the country went through enormous changes—the prosperity of the 1920s, the Depression of the 1930s, and the Second World War—but the same social problems have remained with us. Even after another generation of unprecedented post-World War Two growth, the challenges of achieving a just social order were still so persistent that President John F. Kennedy warned in l961: "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."

Since its founding, Marywood has stayed true to these concerns. The American Catholic tradition in higher education that has emphasized service to the less fortunate members of our society owes much to the late 19th and early 20th century American religious leaders who understood the needs of the vast numbers of immigrants to the US, largely from Catholic parts of Europe--Ireland, early in the period of immigration, then masses from Germany, Eastern Europe, and Italy. These leaders understood that American churches were distinctive in their need to address the populations in the rising industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. While Protestant leaders such as Walter Rauschenbush and Washington Gladden also understood that a "Social Gospel" was required to help the poor, for Catholics this was a mainstream conviction. It is no accident that, during this period, many American colleges and universities were established out of the explicitly religious convictions of their founders both to help the individual improve him or herself and to help improve society. Perhaps the best known of these is Temple University in Philadelphia, the result of Russell Conwell’s enormously popular “Acres of Diamonds.”

Today, there are 4 million 18 year olds in the United States and more than two-thirds of them are going on to college. The percentage of high-school graduates going to college has increased every year for more than a decade. This is very good news for the emergence of an educated citizenry, as Thomas Jefferson had wanted two centuries ago. And in this election year, you who are the newest American generation with the opportunity to fulfill Jefferson’s ideal of an educated citizenry should vote.

Marywood's roots in this tradition go deep. The Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a small religious order with Belgian and French origins, you will recall, departed from Europe in the 1840s. Their initial goal was not to help the European urban immigrants heading for such destinations as New York, Boston, Chicago, and St Louis, but rather to help the poor on the frozen frontiers of Michigan, Canada, and Pennsylvania. Yet within two generations, the Sisters were also working in such urban centers as Baltimore—and Scranton—and as concerned with the needs of the less fortunate new Americans in industrial centers as with others. As the founding of Marywood illustrates, higher education is one of the key ways to advance the cause of social justice. The distinctly American concerns of the Sisters and their institutions have become pervasive.

You, the members of today's graduating class, are at the junction of the several intersecting traditions that emphasize the public benefit of education. As we pause today with hopeful thoughts about the future, optimistic about all that you have learned at Marywood, and mindful of all the hopes your families, teachers, and friends have invested in you, we need also to regard with appreciation the distinctive history and traditions you share as a Marywood graduate—American and European; urban and frontier; service to others and improving your own circumstances. These have been constants over a very long period of time.

There are many appropriate words of wisdom about the role of history and tradition in our lives, and in conclusion I want to refer to two of them:
1) The first, from philosopher George Santayana, is that “those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.”
2) The second, from major league baseball player and homestyle American sage, Yogi Berra, is that “the future ain't what it used to be.”

Your challenge, as you graduate today, is twofold:
1) First, you should learn the lessons from the study of history, as Santayana suggests;
2) And second, you need to reverse Yogi Berra’s future that “ain’t what it used to be” and turn it into a future that is what it should be, both for yourself and for all the others with whom you share this planet.

Thank you, and congratulations.