New Student Convocation

Remarks by Chancellor Richard Herman
August 22, 2005

Welcome to you, the University of Illinois Class of 2009!

Welcome to Megan Plunk from Mansfield, Illinois, population 900. Where are you, Megan? Let’s give her a hand! Megan plans to study nursing and work to save lives in a hospital emergency room someday.

Welcome to Jessica Lukefahr from distant Kingsville, Texas. She’s going to be an English major and become a writer. Be careful everybody—some of you might become memorable characters in Jessica’s first novel.

Welcome to Vishnu Sivaji from Bangalore, India. Welcome to America and to our great university. Vishnu is studying electrical engineering. He plans to invent a new generation of nanotechnology that will make our electronic devices even smaller, stronger, and easier to master.

Welcome also to Jamaar Turner from Chicago’s South Side. Hello, Jamaar, glad to meet you. Jamaar might study political science, might become a lawyer, maybe even a doctor. He’s not sure yet. Don’t worry, Jamaar, you will find your way. Because Jamaar, like all of you, whether or not you know it—is searching.

You are young and at the age for searching. I am old. I don’t feel old. But, compared to all of you, I am old. Yet when I think back to when I was your age, it seems as if only an eye-blink of time has passed.

I was a math major in college. I had a head for theorems and polynomials and algorithms. It didn’t help much with the women. But it came in handy in Dr. Polowy’s mathematics class freshman year. Mathematics became my career for more than 30 years.

But mathematics was not all of my life. My wife, Susan; our children, Larry, Greg and Deidre; my five grandchildren; my parents and grandparents; my brother; my friends; the people in my synagogue, the men and women I work with at the United Way charity—these people and these commitments have been the largest piece of my life.

I worked hard at being a mathematician, a teacher and, now, a Chancellor. I have always loved my work, as I hope all of you will love your work someday, too. But searching—I hope that searching never leaves you.

Because all those eons ago, when I was in college, it was not Dr. Polowy or my other math professors who opened my eyes to the wonder of life around me, it was a gentle, erudite humanities professor—Dr. Frederick Bowes. How I came to his class, I do not recall. But Professor Bowes adopted me as a project. Somehow, he knew that I needed more sustenance than mathematics could provide. He and I would talk—the skinny kid and the dapper scholar.

What he asked again and again was: “Why?” Why did I want to be a mathematician? What did I want from my life? What did I believe in? What did I hold dear? Mostly, I mumbled vague answers to his giant questions.

Professor Bowes led me to read the great English novelist Charles Dickens. Every holiday season, you see his immortal Ebenezer Scrooge portrayed 24/7 on TV. Dickens was one of our great moral thinkers. His novels put a human face on poverty and suffering. Who could forget Tiny Tim saying, “God bless us everyone.”

Professor Bowes took me outside my comfort zone. He asked me to think for myself. He asked me to think about people other than myself. He did not give me answers. He did not lecture me about right and wrong. He asked me to make my own choices. At the time, I had no idea of his importance in my life. Yet, of all my college professors, it is Frederick Bowes whose memory I most cherish. I have never thought to thank him. Let me do that now: Thank you, Professor Bowes.

It is your first day of college. You are thrilled and nervous. You are trying to figure out how to find Gregory Hall, how to ride the bus from F-A-R (Florida Avenue Residence Hall) to the undergrad library.

The big questions of Dr. Bowes are not on the front of your minds. Not yet. But they will be. They must be. Because you are among America’s chosen few. Your high school grades and those much-feared ACT test scores were off the charts. You are leaders and doers and achievers. You will solve previously unsolved equations, write the Great American Novel, put humans on Mars, cure cancer, create a clean fuel that will save the planet. You will make a nation and a world that is better--more free of injustice, poverty, hatred, violence and suffering. You will be governors and presidents, corporate CEOs, church bishops, healers and poets. You will cover the news for The New York Times. You will be the next Steven Spielberg, Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, or Jesse Jackson. One of you may be the next Condoleezza Rice—or, god forbid, Howard Stern! You will make careers and contributions in endeavors that do not even exist yet, that you will invent.

And you will do all this in a world that is changing far faster than the 19th century world of Charles Dickens, as American jobs and opportunities are being swept abroad amid the greatest global communications and technological revolution in history. You cannot know where that revolution will take you as individuals or as a society. You cannot see the future. What you must do, however, is prepare to meet that future with knowledge, creativity and commitment—the core values of the University of Illinois.

Forty years ago, 80 percent of American college freshman said their top ambition was to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. The goal of being very well-off financially lagged far behind, with fewer than half calling it an important achievement. In the decades that followed, these values reversed, with three-quarters of freshmen coming to name being very well-off financially as their top goal in life.

It is my hope and my belief that your generation—the 70 million of you born after 1978, the largest group of young people ever in American history—will launch the beginning of a new commitment to doing not only well in life, making a lot of money, driving the best car, living in the grandest house, but a commitment also to doing good for those around you who do not have your abilities, your advantages and your opportunities.

The taxpayers of Illinois fund this great university not so that a handful of its children can someday find good work. This university exists to benefit all the people, by educating you—our future leaders—so your brothers, sisters, friends and neighbors will benefit from what you learn. That is an opportunity for each of you. It also is a responsibility.

Because as Marley’s ghost told Scrooge: “Humanity is your business!”

You are the 9/11 Generation. You remember exactly where you were when you realized the world was now linked in horror in a way unimaginable the day before. Mallory Martin of Chicago was in choir class when her principal came on the intercom in tears. When Maria Magginas of North Potomac, Maryland, heard that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon, in a panic, she called her father, who works at the State Department, to be sure he was safe.

Ashley Johnston of Hayworth, Illinois, was—appropriately enough—in her World Civilization class. Ashley had never heard of the World Trade Center. Is there anyone left on earth today who could say that?

You are, for better or worse, connected to one another and to all the strangers of the world—and your fates are entwined. Most of you by now have signed on to the facebook.com. The brainchild of a Harvard student only a few years ago, the website today links 3.4 million college students across the country. Here at the U of I alone, almost thirty-thousand students are members! You can find people who share your passion for Illinois basketball, your fashion style of turning up the collars on your polo shirts, or your love of Chinese music.

In the spirit of the web game, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” in which everybody is supposedly linked personally to the actor Kevin Bacon if you just go out as far as six individuals, the facebook.com reminds us how connected each of is with the people around us. Senior psychology major Christine Fleming reports that the facebook tells her she has 242 personal friends at the University of Illinois alone—and that she is friends through her friends with 10,124 people at universities around the nation.

I know, I know—it is only a game. But you get the point: You live in a small world that is getting smaller. So—Wednesday, you jump into your classes. You will get lost, that I promise. Yet I also promise you this: You will be found.

You will be found because you are a generation of searchers. You are our greatest hope and you are our only destiny. You are linked by six degrees of separation to all that is good and awful in the world. You are your future and you are everyone’s future, all at the same time.

The Amish people have a proverb: “Too soon old, too late smart.” It is my hope and my belief that you will go out from Illinois and prove that proverb wrong, that you will be smart when you are young, wise beyond your years—and that you, your families, your neighborhoods, your nation, and the world will be far better for your wisdom.

That is your destiny. Go out and make it so.

Thank you. And, once again, welcome to your new world.