Commencement Address to the Kresge College Class of 2019

Kresge Class of 2019, I want to thank you. On behalf of your faculty, I want you to know how grateful we are for the small part you allowed us to play, as you lived this education into existence. As faculty we owe our standing in the world to your choice: and the choices you make every day to fulfill Kresge’s unique vision… an interweaving of research and critical thinking with the everyday challenges of deep community. In other words, a dialogue of life and learning. And we know that at Kresge, they are interdependent.

You know that this learning was not just 180 credits of requirements, electives, prerequisites … not just the proverbial “piece of paper.” And you know that this is not just about knowledge, but about how the tendrils of knowledge connect you across scales of space and time. What I mean by that is that your degree connects you to other communities — first of all to your classmates at UCSC’s smallest residential college — but also to students who came before you here, and students who came before you at campuses long before ours. Your degree connects you to Kresge Students who helped hire May Diaz, UC’s first woman Provost, in 1974; students who helped found our revolutionary Feminist Studies program in 1978. It also connects you to the University of Bologna, where as early as the 11th century, women and men taught and studied together. And likewise to higher learning in Constantinople, Athens, Takshashila in ancient Punjab, Louyong in ancient China. What you have in common with all of these is the humble ideal that information and conversation belong together, and that they are worth our time as a community.

Is this sounding … a little bit high minded? Romanticizing ancient history at a time like this?

I do know that some of you are thinking about this education right now in a very different way. I get passionate about communities, but most of us know at least one student for whom community worked in the opposite way — or someone who, in order to support their parents, or their children, needed to sacrifice their education. And there are other stories in the hearts of our graduates today, painful ones, stories of injustice … some of what you slogged through to complete this journey was mundane. Some of it was ugly.

So now on behalf of your college advising team, how about we just go over those 180 credits again. Your student handbook says that a 5-credit course demands you put in about 15 hours of work per week. In a 10-week quarter that’s 150 hours. By the way, the faculty manual says teachers put in about 100 hours in 10 weeks. So that’s 250 hours between you and a teacher. Maybe 5 credits each, for about 36 courses, is where this education really lives. How often, in the course of a normal human life, do you join forces with a dedicated teacher, to invest 250 hours into one conversation?

Think back a minute. What did you and your favorite teacher put those 250 hours into? 250 hours into developmental psychology, or the history of democracy. Maybe analyzing the orchestra music of Chou Wen Chung, or Tania León? Maybe intrinsic growth curves that cycle through an ecosystem, or maybe a recently discovered comet with a 1000-year orbit. Now you’re probably thinking: well, that’s nice, but I didn’t study that many comets or composers. You spent more time wrestling with TAs or canvas menus to get a study guide … fighting for priority enrollment… waiting in the college office for some signature. So let’s be fair, and let’s talk about the most uninspiring, unromantic 250-hour course you took. Think back to what you and a professor sunk yourselves into, that your future friends and coworkers will want to hear you summarize… zero times. 250 hours sampling gut flora from the scat of some unsuspecting field mouse. 250 hours on iron oxidization in the layers of rock exposed by a road-cut, or comparing four different 18th-century autobiographies. (And maybe they weren’t that different.)

I want you to consider that the privilege of your education has been the privilege to take up questions beloved by almost no one, but needed by all of us. They don’t inspire in the manner of a lightning bolt or a love song, but we need them, because just like this moment, at your graduation, the moments that spark those questions are the tendrils that connect us across scales of space and time.

How will your bored friends and co-workers know that field-mouse gut flora could help us understand childhood diabetes? Who besides you knows that a faded grey road-cut can help us predict the impact of climate change? And maybe one those 18th-century writers illuminated something about the atrocity of colonialism and imperialism in a way that is still relevant today… maybe despite the hundreds of years between their words and ours, they can shed some kind of a light on why we still have food and housing insecurity for students on our own campus. How much of your uninspiring, unromantic knowledge, will become, ten years or a hundred years from now, the heart of the better world we dreamed about, when we first came together, at Kresge College?

I don’t have to tell you that Kresge is a radical place. I don’t have to tell you that UCSC, and Kresge College, are radical by design. The California State Master Plan of 1960 established a vision for us, as a “generous and far-sightedly committed” university system — which, by the way, included a vision that your 180 credits would be tuition free. So we still have something to fight for. And you are still fighting, somehow, still rising. Across more than a thousand years of universities, you arrive today, comet-like, at this moment…and I hope you know that your degree has been a 9,000-hour conversation that is our greatest resource as a species. Congratulations class of 2019, you are now that resource, you are our dream come true; thank you for all you have given us. And thank you for being the heart of Kresge.