Commencement Addresses

T.K. Says “Goodbye”

2005 WFU Commencement
May 16, 2005

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

The name “T.K.” was my Albertville, Alabama, childhood nickname. I answered to it for years. So when T.K. became attached to me again at Wake Forest, it brought to mind all that has happened to me since that name came, was lost, and then came again. The rebirth of T.K. was a joyful return to my life’s beginning as well as to this professional ending. I thank you, our students, for the return of this old label. It took me back to my life’s origin, as well as to this conclusion.

I

My two decades plus at Wake Forest have passed like a mere season or so. There was always something important to do-some issue crying for our time and attention. I have given myself across the years mostly to those objects of concern. Our basic need has been to establish ourselves as a national rather than a regional institution. I believe that ambition has been largely realized.

We have in most years had growing numbers of students from every state in the union and from nations near and far. The college guides have ranked us high, and we continue to become what we sought ideally to become.

We established our institutional independence and rebuilt our physical plants. On the Reynolda Campus and the Bowman Gray Campus we renewed our academic programs and undertook major educational renovation. We became leaders in technology programs. These are all projects we did together.

This growth of our national status will continue, and as alumni and friends you will be asked to participate in this thriving outreach. We will, of course, need your interest and help. Just as our alumnus and friend Arnold Palmer has helped and supported us, all of you, and all of us, must carry the Wake Forest name and reputation. Being a school that is small in the number of our constituents, there is a share of this load we can all consciously assume. We want you to be part of this community from now on. Bear your share, and Wake Forest will flourish accordingly.

For example, I am delighted by Chairman Greason’s announcement this morning that we have reached the $600 million dollar goal in the Honoring the Promise Campaign. This is a great milestone, one for which I am grateful. We still have another year to go, and that will help us focus all our energies on reaching and surpassing the Reynolda Campus goal. I want to thank you all for your roles in this achievement. When I came here, we were celebrating the $17.5 million dollar goal of the Sesquicentennial Campaign. So we have come a long way, but we still have a way to go. Just look at the endowment totals of the private schools ranked above us. We can all change that status in the years ahead. From $17.5 to $600 million is a long reach, but that kind of effort will be needed to sustain and advance this great school. A big “thank you” is part of this final goodbye.

II

Over these years I have learned also that to be your president, I must reveal to you not just what I think or believe — like a college lecturer — I must also let you know how I feel or what I am concerned about. I must share my heart as well as my head. I had to extend my notion of academic discourse from a didactic lecture to something more personal, even subjective.

As president, the Wake Forest community needed to know what kind of person I was and aspired to be. Oddly enough, that lesson was often most clearly expressed and felt at these ceremonies. If I was to tell you about the present meaning of Pro Humanitate, I had to tell you how its meaning was unfolding to me.

My charges at these ceremonies have gone from world events, like the attacks of 9/11, to the fall of the Soviet Union, to reflections on people whose influence on me was central to my personal development-my mother and a beloved uncle. We have also reflected together on things critical to the life of Wake Forest University. These vital lessons were in themselves part of my teaching, my lecturing at these occasions.

In coming to frame this last lesson of goodbye, I realized that as I stayed and served here, my life and experience were also changing, evolving in ways that caused me to mature and to know. In fact, as we grow and mature, our understanding of ourselves develops in ways that are part of our education. Thus, I trust that you too have the basis for the kind of development of your sympathy and understanding that will grow over your lifetime.

All this background was with me, of course, as I faced in the recent past, my brain tumor. I want to share with you today what I have learned from this experience and also what my lesson may also mean to you.

My presence before you this morning is in large part due to the skill of the Wake Forest University Brain Tumor Center of Excellence and the compassionate care I received there. The science that healed me was sustained by the loving art of family and friends, and the nurturing spiritual care that I sought and received. My network of support-spiritual, medical, my family, and Wake Forest University-was strong and secure. It fortified me.

As I said last year at commencement, my illness proved to be a kind of lesson in happiness. When you are physically tested, you are required to confront all the supporting elements that sustain your work and your life. In this important confrontation, you are given a vital revelation: we all live by grace and by grace alone.

My cancer and those who tended me, both medically and at home, were my instructors in this course. I am deeply grateful for its many new insights. So also am I grateful to all of you who are here today for your part — large and small — in this instruction. I have lived through a teachable moment and am grateful today for the lesson I have received — we all live each day by grace.

Living by grace means being able to live each and every moment of each and every day with the present realization that we and those whom we love are at constant threat for illness or grievous injury. That is, alas, the human state of being, no matter how far it may be from our daily thinking.

When we are physically robust; when our life’s circumstances seem to be harmonious; when our careers are thriving — in these times human nature can blithely ignore or even reject this message of grace. But this contingent nature of human existence is not some distant warning. It is rather a present and near danger.

While our natural tendency is to believe that happiness is achieved by ourselves managing our lives well, unmanageable circumstances, such as I confronted, challenge this assumption. Our first and obvious response is to attempt to manage this new threat in the same controlling manner.

Often we find that our assumption must be revised and we, in some way, abandon the view that we must or can manage life, sickness, death, in an ultimate sense. Grace allows us to concede this control and not only to be comforted, but to accept the truth and realize-with such surrender-a greater happiness and hope than we had even comprehended.

This was, as I said, a lesson in happiness. Cancer taught me that I was living, as humans always live, at constant risk for both flourishing and dying. Coming to inner terms with such teaching was a marvelous transformation. I commend it to you on this occasion of saying goodbye.

This lesson of grace was so well learned that I could sustain the rigors of radiation, brain surgery, and chemotherapy, while at the same uncertain time plan to resume my life and my work. That lesson of hope, too, was part of this miracle.

III

Thus I reached an understanding, both spiritual and emotional, that prepared me to receive the benefits of medical science. With my wife and family as my guides, and with the physicians who treated my cancer-these were all my personal teachers. I remain grateful for your care. But even more, I am grateful for your instruction in the larger truth of life.

So I learned that we live each day by grace. Coming to that understanding is also a guide that fosters happiness as well as hope. Thus even with the fact of cancer and my extensive treatment, the doors were opened for me to seize happiness. For cancer simply posed, in a direct and obvious way, the threat of extinction. But that threat was already present and real, though I did not acknowledge it on a daily basis. Coming to and accepting this lesson was the opening to happiness. I am a better man today, better in health, richer in spirit.

Happiness presents with it the subtext of hope. The ideal of happiness presents with it the prospect of hope. As we go about our regular lives-family, work, recreation-all those efforts are undertaken with the expected outcomes that contribute to our living and living well. In achieving the lesson of happiness, I was also given hope and opportunity. In my therapeutic activities, painful or not, I came to believe that the outcome of hope for the future would also be achieved.

The moral, the teaching of this illness, was and is that my life was still all it had been earlier. Life is and will be as it has always been. As we reach toward happiness, we are also given hope that our outcomes may be achieved.

IV

My experience with cancer and my treatment had, oddly perhaps, a benevolent outcome. I was given the chance to learn directly what human happiness is and, more deeply, the hope that such happiness engenders. Those life lessons were learned and internalized long before I knew what the outcome of my illness might be. I told my doctors that my intellect, my reason was the basis of my life. Please do not save my physical life, I urged them, if my intellectual life was to be sacrificed. That was not, as I thought and said, a sacrificial statement but a liberating one. I know in a personal sense what I need to serve my profession, my family and, of course, myself.

This happy conclusion was, as you may have guessed by now, reached as a consequence of our motto Pro Humanitate, in service to humanity. To serve that set of purposes in my life, I required my intellectual powers. That was the foundation of my life.

So today T.K. says goodbye, having walked through the deep, dark valley. But I was not alone. The doctors, my family, the love of one Wake Forest family and, of course, my nurturing faith were with me. Saying goodbye, and not farewell, means that our lives will cross paths again. I remind others that I am not leaving this school, just this office. And you, our graduates, will not leave Wake Forest, just our campuses. We hope that you will return often.

Another mark of this goodbye is my realization of the importance of community. Wake Forest is a large and complex place-on campus and off-and what we set out to do requires the joining of many hands. That process of the joining of our hands, and also our hearts, is the result of our sense of community in pursuit of our shared purposes. My illness brought to me the importance of this gift of communal union. When I was not here, Wake Forest friends took my place and did my work. I have never been able to thank them enough, but will try again today.

In these last weeks and months, I am sometimes given credit for major changes at Wake Forest. In fact, however, these changes have come from our common work. Our boards and their leadership are commonly engaged in our policy transformations. When we are visited or surveyed by college guides, it is the commitment and work of our faculty and students that is being examined. So also when our students are successful in achieving scholarship status, it is their work and the work of their faculty supervisors. I urge you, therefore, to practice this art of community if your groups are to succeed. That too is a part of this message of Pro Humanitate. We must grasp to the very ends of our collective reaches. We can-as we already have-accomplish what seems beyond our reach. Achieving more than we thought possible or probable has become a Wake Forest metaphor.

CONCLUSION

I must, therefore, end this final goodbye by giving thanks to all of you, in and out of Wake Forest. You helped me and often stood in my places. Your help has been a measure of grace. I hope that I, in turn, helped you.

This final goodbye to this great audience must be a warm hello to Dr. Hatch and his great family. He joins us as a tested and mature academic leader. We can expect from him and his office the continuation of the progress all of Wake Forest has made. So Wake Forest and T.K. welcome President Hatch with good luck and Godspeed.

Thank You.

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This charge is dedicated to the memory of our great friend Russell H. Brantley (d. February 13, 2005).

I want to thank my doctors and teachers: Dr. Vardaman Buckalew, Dr. Peter Donofrio, Dr. Edward Shaw, Dr. Stephen Tatter, and Dr. Glenn Lesser. I also must thank the Rev. Dr. Douglass Bailey for his spiritual guidance. Help with this essay came from Laura Hearn, Carolyn Dow, Sandra Boyette, Reid Morgan, and Michael Strysick.

Lessons in Happiness^*

2004 WFU Commencement
May 17, 2004

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

Across the years, with each graduating class, I have shared a reflection on life and living often drawn from my family or personal experience. I trust that you will indulge me again this year.

Commencement is a time of great transition, a singular moment never to be forgotten. As you look forward to the next phases in your lives, you are also concluding a phase in the life of Wake Forest. Your accomplishments and talents have invested you in your alma mater and enriched this university’s greatest asset, our network of devoted, talented people.

* * *

I join you fully in the satisfactions of this day. A few weeks back, I was not sure I would be with you today, so I am especially happy to celebrate this occasion. The past months for me have been sometimes shocking and generally instructive. I suspect that you have experienced similar emotions, perhaps in your first semester at Wake Forest. I trust that your education here will have prepared you to take the fullest instruction from the experiences that come your way.

Last fall, after a period of mild symptoms and medical tests and examinations, I learned that I had a brain tumor. My first challenge upon hearing what no one ever wants to hear was coming to terms with this news and sharing it with my family and closest friends.

It was a difficult process, especially in the beginning, but the expression of loving relationships, promises of support, and evidence of affection quickly gave me the comforting knowledge that I would not be walking this path alone. My wife became a medical care giver to me in a way that underscored our love and commitment to each other. She is a kind of miracle worker and gave me unwavering reassurance at each juncture we faced.

Both of us turned to our family and friends, and those relationships of love and trust grew ever more important. To have such a group — large or small — who stand with you in good times and bad is the greatest blessing, and I encourage you to build your own families and invest in the lives of your friends.

A second challenge was dealing with the illness itself. How fortunate we are to have the Wake Forest University Medical School, a place where medical care is grounded in world class research. The combination of compassion and extraordinary professional preparation that I encountered from every person involved in my treatment gave me courage, confidence, and a growing understanding of my condition.

My tumor was found early and could be treated aggressively, and I am well enough to have resumed my work and my life.

* * *

And here again I have found another great source of strength and comfort. When I had to take a leave of absence, the entire Wake Forest community — faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends — formed a bond that supported both the University and me. The trustees and the administration, especially Provost Gordon, took on extra duties to keep the University’s life and work on course.

All the while, my family and I received countless cards, notes and promises of prayers. My family and I were the direct beneficiaries of the spirit of Wake Forest. So, should any of us imagine that the essential spirit of Wake Forest has been diminished in the University’s growth, I assure you that this spirit is flourishing. It requires that we reach each other with grace. You have given me this grace, and I thank you and Wake Forest for this support, for each prayer and each good wish.

* * *

This whole experience has allowed me to focus on significant lessons.

On this day of transition, you and I share the anxiety of uncertainty. My uncertainty is to some extent ever present and has become a way of life. And it has taught me, more intensely than other experience, how fragile our assumptions about life truly are.

We must never reach the point of abandoning the better and more hopeful possibilities of life, even in great difficulty. The profound balance between our frail human condition and the dauntless human spirit to be and to achieve is ever-refined by our experience, bringing us closer to a true understanding of life and ourselves. To see each other, our families, our endeavors, and ourselves with this perspective allows us to live our lives fully and without regret.

Your uncertainty today arises from a very different set of circumstances, but I hope that the balance and perspective that I have just described will help guide you.

* * *

We must never fail, in these and other days, to send our prayers and good wishes to those in need. Pro Humanitate is, in fact, a gift that grows from personal relationships. I am here as a testament to this ministry.

May God send you to serve Pro Humanitate in whatever paths you walk.

And when you someday find yourself in a place of need, that same spirit will be there to serve and to heal you.

^*I want to thank Vardaman Buckalew and Peter Donofrio for their help in diagnosis. Ed Shaw, Glenn Lesser, and Stephen Tatter have managed my treatment. These and others are due my respect and gratitude.

Plus Ça Change¹

2003 WFU Commencement
May 19, 2003

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

Remember that once notorious Y2K problem?

Because older computing systems would not distinguish between 1900 and 2000, there were predictions of a kind of technological apocalypse — the failure of the power grid, the ruin of the financial system, and the collapse of the airline transportation network.

People stocked up on water, food, and money — perhaps some of you did. Millions of dollars were spent on new software. On the fateful New Year’s Eve, as midnight approached, every patient at our medical center who relied on monitors or mechanical support had a staff person at the bedside lest the systems fail.

Laura and I were on a coastal North Carolina island on the big night, wondering out loud how we would get home if the swing bridge to the mainland lost power. Many of us held our breath to see if the world as we knew it would be at work on January 1, 2000.

As it turned out, the world seemed quite as before — but was it in fact?

I

It seems, on reflection, as if things have been amiss in this new century, compared to the concluding years of the old one. Perhaps the Y2K predictors had a correct premonition that things would fail, but were mistaken about which particular failures to anticipate.

In the flush economic times of the 90’s, talk was heard of a “new economy ” — an economic system in which the business cycles of growth and recession would be transcended. The new economy — if there was such a thing — is already a casualty of the new millennium.

Wealth grew naturally in the capital markets of the 90’s. I once owned a technology mutual fund that rose 400% in one year. I had only a few hundred dollars in it, but the idea was that wealth came as naturally as listening to the right guru. Well, the markets have collapsed — not to mention my high-flying fund — and not a few of the gurus are out of a job or resting in jail.

At the end of the twentieth century, our nation seemed powerful and secure. The Cold War had ended peacefully — after decades of anxiety — without a shot being fired, leaving us as the world’s superpower and guardian. Yet, the attacks of 9/11 shattered the illusion of our security and safety. The world is not, after all, safe for democracy. America’s force does not a fortress make.

Technology equalizes the gap between the mighty and the weak. There is a frontier saying: “God made man, but Colonel Colt ” — he of revolver fame — “made men equal. ” In a world of weapons of mass destruction, there are no castles or walls or oceans as sanctuary. We felt more secure in our homes, offices, and airports before the calendars turned to zeros. Our sense of safety has been a casualty of the new era.

Now in your graduation year, the nation has been to war in Iraq — war being the clearest evidence that the national and international equilibrium is out of balance, a state of barely controlled chaos, imposing risks of every sort to the combatants and the diplomatic order.

That armed conflict has freed the world from the menace of one inhumane dictator, but we must hope that a larger reconciliation with the Arab world — in Israel and elsewhere — can be achieved. But we do not yet know whether that broader peace will be possible, and a war that does not yield peace is often the seed of still more war.

So the world might seem to us out of joint — in contrast to the halcyon days of the old century — as we celebrate today the achievements of your minds and hearts. This new century promises stern obstacles as you assume your stations and your duties.

The economy is shaky. Jobs are scarce. Graduate programs are flooded with applications. The national and global order is precarious. As if that were not enough, a new and deadly virus is on the loose.

Why have things gone haywire? What’s wrong?

II

Well, maybe nothing — nothing, that is, except our expectations.

The fact is that human history is a drama in which our lives — as individuals, as families, as citizens of nations — are fraught with uncertainties. We see through a glass, darkly. We do not yet know what we shall be. Success and security — let alone peace among nations — have never been guaranteed or achieved in the natural course of things. Ask your grandparents who survived the Depression and fought World War II.

The idea that individuals, let alone societies, make plans and achieve them in an orderly, progressive, and linear fashion is the way we often prefer to think, but it is never the way we live.

Nothing is so certain as change. Nothing is so predictable as the unpredictable. Surprises — big and small, wonderful and tragic — are around each bend in the road. You are graduating to the world that is, as it has been always, a domain of challenge and test.

III

This lesson of the contingent nature of things came to our home a few weeks ago in the person of our grandson, Will Joerling — a blonde, curly-headed, exuberant hunk of a twenty month old — an all-truck-and-tractor kind of boy who rules the kingdoms of our hearts utterly.

His pediatrician had seen something in his eye. A referral brought him to specialists at the Wake Forest Medical School with the frightful discovery that he was blind in one eye and, more frightening yet, that his condition might be symptomatic of something terribly grave.

You can imagine, or perhaps you cannot, the reaction of his parents and his extended family — bone-chilling fear and the certainty that our lives, not just his, were at stake in these awful hours of uncertainty. Our dreams for him and his future — we are already saving for his Wake Forest education — were in jeopardy. Life had offered up a menacing challenge.

After what seemed an eternity, we received the news we prayed for. His sight in the affected eye was lost, but other diagnoses we feared to hear were not spoken. He was otherwise fine. Quickly we moved from grief over his lost sight to relief at his pardon, and ours, from a worse sentence, and a future we dared not contemplate.

My daughter said the other day that she and her husband had been waiting to feel normal again after this ordeal — to recover their own equilibrium. But she had come to understand that there would be no return, no recovery of that normal. There would be a new normal instead — a new state of being or well being that now incorporates this experience into their lives and into the baby’s life.²

My daughter is profoundly wise. Upon reflection, there is no normal state of being — intellectual, emotional, or spiritual — that having been achieved gives us the perspective from which our experiences can be interpreted and our lives ordered and organized. We live each day as part of the evolving flux which is the world.

IV

The lives we would wish for you, and the lives your parents have sought for you, are those in which blessings and rewards are bestowed upon you as your labor and your merit would deserve.

But there is no life that does not cross those places Robert Frost describes as:

[L]ike a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig’s having lashed across it open. ³

You must encounter the mysteries of good and evil, achievement and despair, faith and doubt. The world’s story is told in comedy and tragedy, in laughter and in tears. Not all our endings are happy, but some are wonderful indeed.

As we live in awareness of the contingency which attends our days, our capacity to appreciate our blessings and benefits is deepened, as is our strength to face adversity through courage. We may come to know, indeed, that we live by grace.

My father loved to quote these familiar lines:

Do not pray for easy lives.

Pray to be stronger men!

Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers.

Pray for powers equal to your tasks. ⁴

I offer that benediction to you as you leave these halls to enter your varied fields of service.

The seal of Wake Forest, containing our motto Pro Humanitate, is at the center of the diploma you are to be given. We send you forth to lives where your endeavors must reflect your commitment — Pro Humanitate — to the equal regard for each human being God has made. With that faith — and with God’s favor — you can serve to build a world more hospitable to our dreams and safer for our children and our children’s children.

FOOTNOTES

1. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. “The more things change, the more they remain the same. ” A popular French adage. Several people read and commented on early drafts: Russell Brantley, Sandra Boyette, Reid Morgan, Michael Strysick, and Laura Walter Hearn. I appreciate their help and advice.

2. Will Joerling’s diagnosis is Coates’ Disease, a rare condition resulting from a breakdown of the blood vessels in the eye. It will require monitoring for several years, but it is not bilateral and should not affect his general health.

3. “Birches, ” The Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Modern Library, 1946), 127.

4. “Going Up to Jerusalem, ” in Phillips Brooks: Selected Sermons, ed. William Scarlett (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1950), 352.

Let’s Roll

2002 WFU Commencement
May 20, 2002

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

Because service in World War II was the central experience in the lives of both our fathers, now deceased, Laura and I shared a lifelong desire to visit Normandy, the site of the D-Day Invasion which led to the liberation of Europe. We took our first opportunity to go.

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The visit was an experience to which the much-abused word “awesome” rightly applies. That solemn pilgrimage is at once awful and awesome. The Normandy beaches, the invasion site itself, are witness to the overwhelming achievement of D-Day in human and military terms. The surf is rough, the beaches are narrow, the cliffs above are high, and on those heights the defenders had heavy weaponry protected by concrete bunkers. The gaps through which men and equipment might pass up and forward from the beaches were narrow and heavily fortified. At places like the Pointe du Hoc, Army Rangers scaled sheer cliffs in the face of withering fire from above.

How could this D-Day undertaking have been accomplished? The invasion required courage and human resolve beyond all imagining. Our fathers had that courage and resolve.

Another overwhelming moment came at the American cemetery—a quiet, immaculately green and hallowed space where row upon row of simple white crosses and Stars of David stand in silent tribute to the human cost of that supreme achievement on the beaches and hills. That place, too, was sublime and terrible—the gathered fathers, sons, uncles, brothers, whose lives were the price paid to free the world from fanaticism and tyranny. All the love lost, the dreams and ambitions never to be realized, presents a horrific scene.

At Normandy, the military achievement was astonishing, and in the cemetery was gathered the awful toll in lives, most of them younger than you graduates. This was holy ground.

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Americans who visit Normandy leave with an inescapable question in their minds and hearts: Could this nation today accomplish such a feat of the spirit? Do we yet possess that human will? That courage and resolve?

That generation of our fathers who stormed those beaches lived in an America unlike our own. They came to maturity during the cruel Depression. Jobs and savings were lost. Crops were worthless. Businesses failed. They had no sense of entitlement to the comforts and opportunities of life. They had been formed by suffering and deprivation. Suffering and deprivation gave them strength.

Their generation possessed a religious-like reverence for authority. My father could never understand, in the later upheavals over the Vietnam War, why anyone could fail to do what the country required. In his view, the social contract was binding and absolute. America gives you its blessings. You give America your obedience. It was that simple. So when his generation was ordered on to the beaches and up the cliffs, on and up they went regardless of peril.

Our fathers’ generation returned from the war and transformed America. They immeasurably enriched our common life—in the achievements of science and culture, in the expansion of education, in the miracles of medical science, and in justice with the opening of opportunities to minorities and the disadvantaged. They served America in peace with the same devotion they gave in conflict.

Having made the lives of us—their children and grandchildren—so prosperous and free, had our fathers unwittingly deprived us of the character and resolve they possessed? We had not passed through their fiery furnaces. Can we, could we, meet a comparable challenge in our time?

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Consider the world experience of these graduates whom we honor today. Your era has seen the end of the Cold War, the creation of a political union in Western Europe without war, the global spread of democratic ideas and ideals, the creation of a prosperity so great that the perennial problems of human want may actually be addressed. There is the emerging outline of a world in which the needs of the least among us become the common obligations of all. This university’s prophetic motto—Pro Humanitate—has been marching in great strides from the domain of the ideal to the real.

We had thought today to send you forth to a world of peace with the charge that you continue the extension of this ideal to men and women everywhere. But that hopeful and fortunate prospect for your common future collapsed with the World Trade Center in September. 9/11 is yet another “date that will live in infamy,” marking the beginning of another awful contest of belief and will.

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Thus the question of our national character that Laura and I pondered at the beaches and cemeteries of Normandy those years ago is no longer theoretical. Do we have the weapons of the spirit this new challenge will require? Can we in our time sustain the blessings and freedoms of democracy against a new tyranny?

It may be years before we know. This new struggle has just begun. But I came upon my own answer a few weeks back when I made another pilgrimage to another sacred battlefield—Ground Zero. That scene, too, is terrifying in its vast emptiness, in the void where once proud towers stood. There, too, was witnessed a supreme test of human commitment—firemen charging into doomed buildings, police officers and ordinary citizens acting with resolve in the face of disaster. Our citizens were tested and they were not found wanting.

There is not a cemetery as such at Ground Zero, but as you walk toward neighboring St. Paul’s Church there is a cluttered impromptu urban landscape of sorrow that is as compelling as the cemetery in France. For blocks around, there are numberless memorials of every kind—flags of many nations, posters, banners, flowers, caps, dolls posed in postures of grief, messages in all the languages of mankind, shirts and shoes, and prayer rugs—each containing inscriptions of memory, love and resolve. As I passed, there came over me that familiar sense of sacred space that brought to mind our visit to Normandy. It is a holy place. Someone told of seeing a Muslim unroll his prayer rug and pray toward Ground Zero as toward Mecca.

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This new Normandy—on American soil—made holy by the noble sacrifice of all who were lost, has evoked a remarkable sense of resolution in America and around the world. We graduate you, therefore, to a nation and a world now dangerous, where you must protect for your time the cherished ideals of freedom, equality, and human rights from the assault of a new tyranny.

You may suppose that in summoning the spirit of Normandy and Ground Zero, the virtues and values I am holding up for your lives are those of the warrior. Not at all. The only measure of our capacity to love people and ideals beyond our immediate circle of affection is the willingness, readiness and capacity to sacrifice—and to suffer if need be—that the objects of our devotion and the moral and spiritual aims of our lives be advanced. To love is to serve, if need be to sacrifice, for the purposes to which we devote our lives.

Some of you, indeed, may take up arms. Most will choose different weapons. But the war and the enemy are the same. We must do battle against all those foes, ancient and modern, which prevent men and women everywhere from achieving their rightful places in the commonwealth of love—the birthright of all God’s children of every race and tribe.

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You are the children and grandchildren of those who died at Normandy. You are the brothers and sisters of those who died in the terror of 9/11. From them you are given your challenge. I am confident in your character. We must strive for a world in which the motto of Wake Forest becomes the guide of men and women everywhere. Using all the weapons of your minds and hearts, go and bring that world to pass.

Todd Beamer, on ill-fated Flight 93, summoned his fellow passengers to heroic sacrifice. He also calls you to a life of service Pro Humanitate—“LET’S ROLL.”

In Memoriam
Louise Patton Hearn
(1912-1999)

2001 WFU Commencement
May 21, 2001

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

The people we loved.

The people who loved us.

The people who, for good or ill, taught us things.

Dead and gone though they may be,

as we come to understand them in new ways—and through them

we come to understand ourselves—in new ways too.

Frederick Buechner, Sacred Journey

Today we celebrate the achievements of character and intellect. The path to this moment started years hence, and you have required persistence and intelligence in equal measure to reach this moment of academic recognition. It is a day for proud celebration, and it honors me to be given this time to reflect on the way you have come, and more importantly, the way ahead.

On this day of endings and beginnings, is there a remaining lesson if you are to live complete lives—lives in which professional achievement is matched by personal well being?

I

There is certainly one topic, central to your life, about which your academic preparation has been limited, perhaps non-existent. That subject is love. How things stand between you and the objects of your affection will determine your happiness and well being as much as any other single matter.

Love is rarely a subject of academic study. I spoke with a philosopher friend about a contemporary guide for my thinking on this occasion, and he had no recommendation. Another writer reported that an anthropological database covering 300 world cultures, with entries on every topic of human concern, had no separate category for love.

But, I have a fortunate history from which to remedy this deficiency. I was blessed to have a mother gifted, remarkably gifted, in the art of loving. Since her death, I have been attempting to appropriate the lessons of my mother’s life, lessons in loving. She was, as much as anyone I have known, a kind of emotional genius. Thus, on this day of your adult beginnings, I offer these lessons in loving to you in tribute to her.

II

First, there is a sober and unwelcome truth. There is some fundamental connection between suffering and the capacity to love. It is a fact that we moderns resist. The parents here have spent themselves to see that every stone which might cause you to stumble has been removed. But you will learn in time, if you have not already, that to suffer is human. Moreover, despite pain and loss, suffering can be redemptive and strengthening.

The lesson of the great religions is that those whom God most loves—from Job to Jesus—he first allows to suffer. The first of the Buddha’s Noble Truths is suffering. There is no resurrection that is not preceded by a painful trek up some mountain of loss.
My mother belonged to what we call “the greatest generation.” They endured the Great Depression, fought and won World War II, and built this great modern nation.

Her generation knew suffering, not just of deprivation and war. My mother experienced an unbearable childhood loss. As the result of an appalling physical problem, then incurable, her mother committed suicide when mother was ten. They lived in a world not free of childhood diseases, and mother recalled vividly that her aunt lost three children in one week. She graduated from high school into the teeth of the Depression. She had no option to attend college.

In suffering are sown seeds both of bitterness and compassion. What is it that suffering, when it is redemptive, teaches? For mother it was a profound sense of gratitude. The blessings which came to her, particularly her children and grandchildren, were precious beyond measure because she knew that life offers blessings, gifts—not promised or guaranteed outcomes. Mother knew the lesson of love that renders our experience precious precisely because it is contingent and uncertain. As blessings—uncertain and undeserved—the rewards of our lives are rendered sacred. Suffering can teach us, if we are wise, that we live by grace. Most of us live in the confident expectation of life’s benefits. Mother lived in gratitude and thus in a state of grace.

My father liked to tell me, not in jest, “It’s the things you do not have that make you what you are.” He was wiser than I supposed. What mother did not have in her childhood and young life somehow prepared her to reach others with a constancy and resolve that arises from an intimate understanding of grace.

III

Second, the capacity for love is not part of our natural emotional equipment. Certain feelings and urges are, of course, natural to our biological system. From what we learn of love in popular culture, you would suppose that love is as natural as hunger or thirst. But if you consider the enormous social system which love must conspire to navigate—ranging over years and complex interpersonal networks—it is clear that no natural instinct is at work. Romantic attraction is perhaps natural, but love is not romantic attraction.

The most certain evidence that there is no natural endowment to love is that most of us manage the intimate attachments of our lives so imperfectly. We do not love as we would if love were a gift of our nature.

My mother chanced to meet an impecunious Alabama schoolteacher in Nashville, her home, who was there for a summer job. Romance blossomed and they eloped at summer’s end. There was no money for a wedding, and, indeed, no money for a honeymoon of even a single night.

She had never met her new husband’s family, save for one brother. Her father and a maternal uncle had been mother’s caregivers after her own mother’s death. She had never heard either of these men raise their voices in anger. She left for Alabama to meet a life for which she could not have been less prepared.

The Hearn clan was large. My father was one of eight children, six of them boys. The Hearns were close-knit, competitive, and quarrelsome. The emotional volume was high. Anger was often the order of the day. Their sibling rivalries were acted out in every game of skill or chance. Her father-in-law, my grandfather, had a fierce temper, and some of his sons, including my father, had inherited or imitated it.

But mother was not diminished, let alone defeated, by the emotional maelstrom into which she had been thrust. Indeed, she mastered that maelstrom and became one of that large and volatile family’s islands of strength and sanctuary.

She made enduring friendships across that extended family. She became a mother-aunt to a wide network of cousins. She had the talent, a gift, to meet and match an extraordinary emotional challenge for which nothing in her life could have prepared her—save the capacity to love.

She lived to be the last survivor of that entire generation. Her graceful influences gave her generation and the next, my siblings and cousins, an emotional sanctuary which was our secure salvation. She transformed the emotional tenor of my generation.

Mother did not have some human instinct capable of leading her through the emotional maze that was her adult life. There is some talent of a rare sort—like having perfect musical pitch—that enables leaders in the art of loving to steer themselves and others in the perfect storms which are the human heart. Love is art. It is not a gift of nature. It requires talent and practice.

IV

Third, love is a paradoxical union of both weakness, vulnerability, and extraordinary strength. We know most, of course, about the vulnerabilities of love. In loving, we place our welfare in the hands of others. We are subservient to those we love, and most of us have known the pain and victimhood love brings. In that sense also, to love is to suffer.

At the other extreme of the emotional continuum, however, those gifted in love possess extraordinary strength and emotional security. Only those who love can themselves fully receive the strengthening gifts of love. Those gifts are powerful. When we describe God as love, we attach ultimate power to love as governing the world.

Mother lived, and lived fully, both these paradoxical characteristics of love. My father was an insecure, sometimes volatile man. Like his generation, my father volunteered when the war came, and the war rescued him from the Depression. Mother was his professional partner as he built a new and better post-war life, but his new career and his health were ultimately lost to his various demons. She bore the scars of loving him, but her love was rooted in loyalty and fidelity. She nursed him faithfully through his declining years and failing health.

But in an equal and opposite way, mother was a bastion. I would describe her as charismatic. She was secure in herself and in her place in the world, especially in the hearts of others. She had friends of all ages, and all her family derived from her wisdom in the management of our own often complicated lives. She formed around herself an extraordinary circle of affection, and that circle was powerful and unbroken.

She communicated strength and resolve and set high expectations for herself and for us. Her love came from something fundamental, and neither she nor that love could be broken. She told my daughter, who interviewed her shortly before she died, that she was often crushed, but never destroyed. Love is strong and gives strength to those who are gifted in its practice. Love is power to secure your well being and to nurture and give strength to others.

V

A fourth lesson regards the continuity between loving persons and loving things. There is a long philosophical tradition that sharply separates the human domain from the rest of creation. Immanuel Kant famously defined morality as placing persons and things into separate and separated spheres. The Jewish mystic, Martin Buber, taught that only personal things were capable of those experiences through which God is revealed in the world.

But reflecting on my mother’s life and outlook convinces me that her love of persons and her capacity to nurture were inseparably bound up in the devotion she had for flowers, trees, plants, animals, and the extraordinary interest she took in all things beautiful. She loved all creation—human and nonhuman—with a similar passion.

That love made lovely every domain of her habitation. Her trees and flowers were as children and, yes, she talked to them in personal terms. When I once teased her about this habit, she replied that if I had spoken with the magnificent elms that once crowned this quadrangle, they might not have died. If you loved those trees, she said, you should have told them so.

My brother, Joel, gave a majestic eulogy at mother’s funeral, and where he found and gave comfort was in the recognition that the work of mother’s love lives on—not just in us—but in all the environments she created and sustained.

Those who love best embrace all that God has made. Plato’s Symposium describes love’s path as a quest for beauty originating in the love of worldly things and culminating in the love of beauty itself as an absolute ideal. Love is a passion for all things lovely.

CONCLUSION

How may my mother’s lessons in loving be given you on this day of your adult commencings? Mother knew that love is not a feeling, not an emotion, but a way of living. Feelings, all feelings, come and go, but those who practice love know that its requirement is that we live in compassionate regard for every life we contact. To love is to live in active goodwill.

In so living, my mother drew others to her, and she thereby assisted them to live according to their best and highest instincts. As active goodwill, love transforms others in the image and expectations of that love. Therein is love’s power shown.

When asked the supreme requirement of life, Jesus said that we must love God and also our neighbors as ourselves. To the question “Who is my neighbor?” the answer was the remarkable parable of the Good Samaritan. You will recall that the righteous and the religious failed to help this victim of theft and violence. But the despised Samaritan gave rescue. Your neighbor is anyone who, on your life’s way, needs your compassion and care. Each person is your neighbor in the neighborhood that is the world.

The Good Samaritan is not a story about love as an emotion. It is a story about love as compassionate living. My mother lived this parable.

Wake Forest today charges you to live Pro Humanitate, in service of humanity. By this requirement, you are not being called to adopt some lesser affection, some feeling, toward the humanity at large. Rather, you are being given a summons to action, a call to arms, to do battle in your varied fields of conquest against those ancient enemies that prevent men and women, anywhere and everywhere, from achieving their rightful place in the commonwealth of love.

To love is to be, as Louise Patton Hearn was, a Good Samaritan along every path you walk—from this day forth and forevermore. In so living and in so loving, you will be blessed, and you will be a blessing.

Truth with a Capital “I”

2000 WFU Commencement
May 15, 2000

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

I know precisely when my education—as opposed to my schooling—began. I was a college sophomore taking my first courses in philosophy and anthropology. In philosophy we were studying the great Socratic dialogues, with special attention to those epochal disputes between Socrates and a group of teachers called Sophists (who gave “sophistry” its ill name).

Their quarrels centered on whether there could be knowledge and truth, as Socrates held, or, as the sophist Protagoras said, “Man is the measure of all things.” As things appear to each person, so they are. Sophists taught that since there are no truthful answers to questions, disputes were based on rhetorical skill, not the facts of the matter.

Meanwhile, in anthropology, I was reading Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and William Graham Sumner, being introduced to the idea of cultural relativism, the notion that our beliefs and values are products of culture and change over time and place. Truth is culturally and historically conditioned.

At some point, I realized that these two courses were about the same topic—philosophy, with thinkers from the 5th Century B.C., and anthropology, with writers of the mid-20th Century. What was at issue was the possibility of capital “T” Truth. Now, there was a subject to fire a sophomore’s imagination.

I found myself wanting to understand these topics, not for my courses or for a grade, but because I wanted to know for its own sake. I was hooked on learning, hooked on philosophy. It was exhilarating. I was on my way to the academy as my place of service.

I

I concluded that Socrates was right. The Sophists and the Cultural Relativists were wrong. Truth is possible—difficult and elusive—but possible. It certainly made no sense, I cleverly reasoned, to argue as a matter of truth—as Protagoras did—that truth is unattainable.

My sophomore’s faith in truth has faced severe challenge in the long years since. My observation of the disciplines within the academy, as well as the posture of the larger cultural climate, is the sophists have prevailed. Relativism is the order of these days. This triumph of the Sophists has always been surprising and paradoxical to me. For relativism contradicts what the last half-century has apparently established in our experience. Let me explain.

No developments of recent history have been of greater intellectual and cultural significance than the dramatic advances in science. Time magazine’s Person of the Century was Albert Einstein, not only for his singular contributions but also in recognition of scientific advancement across a broad array of intellectual frontiers. This session, Wake Forest celebrated The Year of Science and Technology as a tribute to these accomplishments.

These intellectual developments would seem to lead naturally and inevitably to the reinforcement of the rationalist’s faith in the mind’s progressive grasp of truth. The entire premise of the modern era is that knowledge gives us power to create technologies that improve and extend life.

However, outside of the sciences—and sometimes even within the sciences—there is widespread skepticism in academic disciplines about the possibility of even scientific knowledge. Post-modernism and post-enlightenment are terms used to characterize our age. The apostles of this new perspective concur that knowing is culturally and psychologically determined. We cannot know what is, only what appears to be. There is no truth, there is only received opinion.

The reasons for this skeptical climate are culturally complex. But skepticism is in no wise what one would expect in a world in which the genetic code is being blueprinted, the internet age is unfolding, and, indeed, the deepest mysteries of cosmology are yielding to our understanding.

II

In the history of our moral consciousness, there is a similar disconnection between our historical experience and the theoretical posture of our age. In recent moral history, no event stands out like the Holocaust. The lessons of this tragedy-too-great-for-speaking repudiate moral relativism. The relativist says that good and right are culturally determined. But, it did not matter morally that the Nazi Government was legitimate or whether this terror was the result of generally accepted anti-Semitic social norms. Observations of social mores are irrelevant to the moral assessment of what happened. The Holocaust taught us, vividly, and I would have thought forever, that human beings possess rights not bestowed by governments or dependent upon social mores.

Yet that morally certain lesson failed in its effect on the academy and in the larger society. We read in textbooks of discipline after discipline that morals and values are relative to time, place, and circumstance. It has become a virtual truism that democracy and tolerance require that equal consideration be given to every moral position.

Thus, the moral universalism that the world seemed to learn from the Holocaust stands in stark contrast with a presumed moral democracy in which every view is entitled to equal regard. And, yes, I participated once in a Wake Forest class in which the students were reluctant to denounce Hitler as a monster. He was, as one student said, a man of his own time. We cannot judge him by our different standards.

III

So I had thought this battle—begun for me as a sophomore—for truth and right had been lost. But my pessimism was ill-founded. A remarkable event at Wake Forest this spring has restored my faith in reason and in the lessons of my sophomore’s quest. The issue of Holocaust Revisionism arrived here like a maelstrom. The controversy consumed our collective awareness.

And this rationalist learned a reassuring fact about Wake Forest and, I suspect, a fact about human beings in general. I like being able to say this: in the face of lived experience, no one is a relativist. Our campus rose up to demand that truth be honored, and that the horrific crimes of the Holocaust be called by the infamous names that they deserve.

In one of my first meetings of the crisis, someone said, “Truth is the issue here. Wake Forest must stand for the truth.” From the emphatic way she said the word, I knew that she meant capital T “Truth.” I had an almost irresistible urge to hug her.

No campus voice rose to say, as skeptical historical theorists have it, “that since all history-writing is a subjective representation; all pasts constructed, it makes no sense to seek a consensus about what really happened in history. There is no objective truth. I have my goals and values, you have yours, and we choose our past accordingly.”

Were we to believe this skeptical view, we would, of course, have to allow the Revisionists their construct. Only truth can refute error. Absent an established truth of the matter, the claims of Revisionism cannot be judged false or even labeled as propaganda.

Truth, with a capital “T,” was the campus outcry. While I regretted the controversy, I was reassured by our common response. I trust we learned this lesson not for this day only, but also for other days. A university exists for the discovery of the truth. The quest for truth is the foundation of our academic mission.

And there is also moral truth. Our anger and anguish pointed to the unspeakable wrongs of the Holocaust—wrongs for which no words of condemnation are adequate. Our campus had an encounter with a central moral truth: that God-given human rights are not the province of governments and societies to bestow or withhold. May our commitment to this truth never be lost or forgotten.

You see, the basis for tolerance is not relativism. The reason we must tolerate and, more than that, act in positive goodwill toward our fellow human beings is that all of us are possessed of these inalienable rights.

IV

The diploma you are about to receive charges you, as a consequence of the education given, to live in service of the ideal of Pro Humanitate. It is the same ideal of truth and goodness that I am advocating. The quest for truth must be your guide in all things. Among the truths to live by is that humanity, here and now, everywhere and for all time, must be the recipient of our active goodwill. We must extend these God-given rights to our brothers and sisters of all tribes and nations.

The task of your generation is to construct a world culture. You must create a world made safe for human and creature habitation, a world where our differences are resolved through negotiation based on mutual respect, a world where the needs of those least among us are met by the effort of all. Such is the vision of the future embodied in the aspiration of Pro Humanitate. Go forth, and in your varied spheres of service, bring that world to pass.

This World and the Next

1999 WFU Commencement
May 17, 1999

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

Life is punctuated with singular moments yielding memories never to be lost. These moments and these memories define our individual lives and our common life as a people. Some such moments are tragic. None of us will ever forget the painful days following the tragedies that took Julie, Maia, and Graham from their rightful place in this assembly with you today.

The parents here will never forget where they were and what they were doing when news of the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. was delivered. Some of your grandparents will remember when Pearl Harbor was attacked, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died at Warm Springs, and when World War II came at last to an end.

Other memories, like those of today, will be joyful. You will recall Cardinal Arinze and this glorious day when you return years hence to show Wake Forest to your own offspring. By then, these trees will have created an overarching canopy, and you will look back on this day and these years through the golden lens of memory.

I

We all face another defining common moment in the next few months—the turn of the millennial and centennial calendars. Some of you doubtless have already made plans where you will be and with whom you will spend this significant calendrical passage. It will be a never forgotten moment.

The turn of the year, the century, and the millennium is given ominous cultural significance by the now notorious Y2K problem. Apocalyptic fears—belief in the imminent end of the world—have historically been associated with divine interventions. But the Apocalypse being predicted this time derives from the fear in some minds, and the certainty in others, that the computers upon which we have come to depend will fail with calamitous results. Computer failure, not the wrath of God, may usher in the end of the age.

But there is an important and deep lesson in the Y2K problem. It has to do with the complex interactions between the social order and technologies. We naively assume that humans devise technologies to enable us to achieve aims of our own choosing. The Industrial Revolution leveraged human muscle, and now the Information Age is leveraging our intellect.

But the truth is much more complex and alarming. Technologies do enable us to achieve social purposes, but technologies in turn form us and all society in ways we seem unable to predict or control. We create technologies, and technologies in turn conform the world to their requirements. As the technologies become more pervasive and powerful, the shaping forces are ever more influential.

Television provides especially powerful illustrations of the ways in which technology shapes both private and public life to its own requirements. One of the social purposes envisioned by planners for television was to enhance the political process and to strengthen democratic institutions. Citizens could witness candidates and the improved coverage of public events and legislative assemblies would surely make us a better informed and more effective democratic society.

What happened, of course, was quite otherwise. To our surprise and dismay, television remade American politics according to its own requirements—not as an educational or political process, but as a form of entertainment. The entertainment ethos now rules American politics, the political process having been transformed by television in ways quite other than we planned. Politics now is regulated in all-important respects by the mass media.

Television and the mass media brought an end to the possibility of closed societies. As much as the force of money and arms, television brought down the Soviet Empire and ended a half-century of the Cold War. What those living behind that famous Iron Curtain saw on television was more powerful than state-sponsored propaganda and the empty promises of a bankrupt ideology.

II

We stand now on the cusp of a new century and a new millennium. We are being transformed again by powerful new technologies that will doubtless make and remake us and the world, in ways we cannot now foresee.

But the outlines of the moral requirements for the living in your world—the next world—are now clear. This world’s remarkable advances in transportation and communication have gathered the world’s tribes and peoples into inescapable relationships. There are no longer any regional conflicts. All wars are world wars.

Perhaps the gathering of the national communities of Europe is a metaphor for the future. The European Union with a single currency, the opening of borders, and the creation of new social and political institutions is a remarkable development considering the ancient history of quarrels among these neighbors. The European history my generation read was the story of one war followed by another, then another, seemingly without end. There is now real possibility that these nations will not take up arms against each other in your world. That is hopeful and promising, even revolutionary.

But there is, of course, another European story, a dark and ominous one. In the Balkans there dwell peoples with a horrific history of racial, ethnic and religious conflict. Again, the world has been drawn into war to intervene in these ancient disputes.

We spent this year thinking about globalization and diversity. In these two developments in Europe, we see starkly contrasted future possibilities—one of promise, one of peril. Indeed, the Balkan experience throws doubt upon that hopeful, perhaps utopian, American notion our year celebrated that if different people learn about each other, speak each others languages, then mutual understanding and tolerance will be an inevitable outcome. Much of the world’s experience contradicts this faith that familiarity breeds goodwill.

We must learn that tolerance is not a sufficient morality for a world made small. Mere respect for difference may be too modest a moral platform for the changed world you are about to inherit.

We may have had it wrong in this theme year. Instead of pondering globalization and diversity, perhaps we should have been reflecting on the opposite idea—globalization and unity. What are those fundamental human characteristics that make of us one people, brothers and sisters in the human family? The human genome project is another technology that will revolutionize your world. It has shown that, biologically considered, all humans are virtual clones of each other. Human unity and solidarity may provide the basis upon which we can build a global foundation more secure than mere toleration or acceptance.

As W. H. Auden anticipated the coming ruin of Europe in 1939, he wrote, “We must love one another or die.” I had always regarded this line as a typical piece of poetic hyperbole. Indifference would surely do towards those parts of the world we can safely ignore. Tolerance will surely suffice for those, different from ourselves, with whom we must somehow live. Love surely overstates the requirement for cohabitation on the planet.

But Auden saw this ancient religious lesson as a modern imperative for survival. For in a world community, there is no tribe or nation which is beyond the scope of universal interest and concern. The Internet knows no sense of place or space. A virtual world sits on our desks and in our laptops, and our cyber neighborhood is the universe. Most of us had never heard of Kosovo. But we are at war there.

III

The theme of each year’s message to the graduates is the University’s motto—Pro Humanitate. I marvel that the founders of a sectarian college in the then remote South, in an act of vision, gave Wake Forest an universal mission. Your education is not ultimately about your personal improvement. Having been given the opportunities which a Wake Forest education provides, you must accept the challenge to labor for the improvement of humanity—everywhere. Pro Humanitate must in fact unite with that ancient religious lesson—repeated by Auden—that we love each other as members of the human family under God.

In the next world, your century, service to humanity is no longer an ideal or a goal. Pro Humanitate is an ethical imperative.

The culture toward which we labor in common is a world culture. This next world is a world made safe for human and creature habitation, a world where differences are resolved through negotiation based on mutual respect—a world where the needs of the least among us are met by the efforts of all.

Such is the vision of the future embodied in our blessing upon you this day in this world. Go from this world and bring that next world to pass.

The Greatest of These

1998 WFU Commencement
May 18, 1998

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

This ceremony is an important beginning. Commencement marks an end to the preparatory phase of your life and the beginning of all that you are to be and do. What will you become, and how will you measure your achievements?

The central questions of your life are largely yours to answer. More than any other thing, your aspirations will determine what you become. Fickle fate can certainly mark us for good or ill, but people largely live the scripts of their own writing. The ambitions you form and the diligence with which you pursue them will define the substance of your life.

The measures of success, as culturally defined, are so pervasive that we may not even recognize the power they exert. There is a script ready-written for you, for all of us, regarding what you are to be and become.

I

But we all retain the choice to adopt other life plans. To make this point, I want to tell you the story of a man, William B. Cooper, who was my uncle and my other father. Because my mother worked, the children in our family lived in the summer with my Uncle B and Aunt Sis. By cultural measures, Uncle B’s life would not be considered a success. He quit school to go to work in the teeth of the depression, and never was able to find a decent job. For a while, he managed a family farm, just as mechanization was making family farming impossible, especially if you were a renter, and the profit, if any, had to be shared with the owner.

He ultimately became the owner of a rural general store and operated a peddling truck. A general store sold basic grocery, hardware, and some farm supplies. Before country folks had cars, Uncle B would drive his truck to his rural customers and deliver necessities. For many years, he and my aunt lived in three small rooms in the side of the store, and it was a long time before they enjoyed such conveniences as running water and a telephone. He never made more than a modest living. He never rode in an airplane. Only on one occasion, maybe two, he took a vacation and went to see the ocean. Otherwise, he hardly ever left the area where he lived and worked in middle Tennessee. His only child died at birth, and his latter years were marked by tragedy when my aunt took her own life.

II

This life story might seem to require a somber memorial. But when I gave the eulogy at Uncle B’s memorial service, I described a radiant and joyful man.

The country store was not a place merely to shop; it was a social center. In the days before television, the entertainment of rural people took place in the store. When the day’s chores were done, the local community gathered at the store for soft drinks and conversation. In the summer the children played outside. The adults discussed the problems of their farms and their lives, and there were games and an occasional square dance. They were practiced storytellers and the conversations on the porch in the summer and around the stove in the winter were lively and wonderful. Deep and abiding friendships were nurtured, and neighbors cared for each other with a devotion which modern communities would not believe possible. If someone was sick and could not milk or harvest, neighbors came and did the work when their own labor was done.

As the owner of the store, the community center, Uncle B was a community leader. He taught Sunday school for years, often serving as the superintendent of the Sunday school. The church was on a circuit. Preaching took place only once or twice each month and, thus, the Sunday school was the central religious exercise. Though uneducated formally, Uncle B knew people and life, and he had an understanding of the practical meanings of religion. He was a good talker and teacher, and the conversations from the store made it to church in his lessons.

Uncle B was dedicated to his work. No enterprise, large or small, ever received more committed effort. The store opened early, by seven o’clock at the latest, and it stayed open until the last customer left at night. The hours were long, and the work, especially on the peddling truck, was grueling. There was no air-conditioning, and the store and the truck were often unbearably hot in summer and cold in the winter. I can never recall a complaint about his work or life. He loved his job, and was proud of what he did as a merchant.

Uncle B was a man with a child’s sense of playfulness, a trait that endeared him to children. Children were drawn to him, and he kept candy in his pocket. He loved to play. The only food fights in which I ever participated broke out when Uncle B and I were cleaning out the produce counter. Aunt Sis did not approve of such foolishness, and scolded us like the children we both were.

My uncle’s reputation for honesty was legendary. In those backwoods where his peddling truck traveled, there were those who could not see and hear, and others who could not count. But each customer received a penny’s goods for a penny. Many customers traded chickens and eggs for grocery items, and when there were not goods and money enough to provide for necessities, Uncle B’s traveling store became a kind of early version of meals on wheels. His acts of charity, conducted as part of doing business, were incalculable. He fed the hungry, and cared for the needy.

III

Another youngster in that little community my uncle served was Jack Higgs. Jack went to the Naval Academy on a football scholarship, became an English professor who published on the cultural meanings of athletics. In his book God in the Stadium, the preface contained the following as he described the influence of his upbringing:

In addition to my father, I want to mention another wonderful individual, W.B. “B” Cooper, a dear friend of my father. As operator of the store, superintendent of the Sunday school, sponsor of our ball team and even manager for a while, he was the uncle of Tom Hearn, who used to spend part of his summers in our village. Hearn has been a voice … to reform college athletics. How much his attitude towards sports was shaped by his Uncle B, I don’t know. Starting with church and Sunday school, Sunday dinner, baseball in the afternoon, a replay at B’s store with cold drinks, and then a dip and bath in the blue hole …. [I]n the relationship between sports and religion, I have seldom seen such sanity, thanks to my father and “B.”

It will not surprise you that as I read those words, in an academic book a decade after my uncle’s death, I felt a tear running down my cheek. In print for the ages was the public acknowledgement of something important that I had known and should have written down myself. As my uncle walked his path doing his duty as neighbor and a friend, he left marks on the world. Jack Higgs had given Uncle B a tribute his life deserved. I offer mine today as a lesson to you.

Emerson defines success as follows:

To laugh often and love much, to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give one’s self; to leave the world better whether by healthy child, a garden path, or redeemed social conditions; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exaltation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived—that is to have succeeded.

That is not, of course, the kind of definition one would find these days at a career-planning seminar. It says nothing of power or wealth or status. But it does describe those qualities which, if practiced over a lifetime, promise to join success with life’s other ultimate aims—goodness and happiness. Success is not enough. A well-ordered life must be crowned by goodness and happiness.

IV

In thinking about these ultimate aims in life, they appear to be not just different but conflicting. Achievement or success is not the same as goodness or service to others, which is again not the same as happiness. To seek one would apparently compromise pursuit of the others. But in a certain sense, even accounting for his frustrations and disappointments, my uncle was a successful man in Emerson’s sense, who was also a good man and a happy man. As they say now, “He had it all.”

What made this union of success, goodness, and happiness possible for Uncle B—and makes his life worth your consideration—is the work of love. That is why Corinthians teaches us that the greatest of the spiritual gifts is love.

Though my uncle’s life was unmarked by education, wealth or position, his path through the world was crowned with all those rewards which love provides. He loved much, and was loved in return. Love crowned him with happiness, goodness, and, yes, even success. I wear his watch on my arm to this day, in remembrance, but also in hope that the counting of the days and hours of my life can bring rewards so cherished.

CONCLUSION

The theme of these remarks is Pro Humanitate—the motto on the seal of your diploma about to be handed you. This motto states Wake Forest’s ambition for your life—to live in service of humanity. In that respect, Uncle B is the greatest among men. His life, guided by love, was invested in the world—Pro Humanitate.

Our family was blessed with another grandson last year. My son and his wife named him Cooper. While I fervently hope that young Cooper Hearn will receive an education, freedom from want, and fuller opportunity than B Cooper had, I could not wish for him a better life measured against those ideals which matter most.

St. Paul wrote that the fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control. Uncle B had those gifts. He possessed them because he offered them to others. May such a life be yours, and you will be both blessed and a blessing. He was.

Between Memory and Hope

1997 WFU Commencement
May 19, 1997

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

This commencement day brings to a joyous conclusion a year in which—though there have been many successes—we have known little joy. Thus, even this occasion dedicated to our future hope cannot pass without a review of the lessons so brutally forced upon this community this year. The flag in the Perritt Plaza seemed at permanent half mast. This Chapel, so often the scene of our celebrations, was a place of bitter commemoration.

I

Even before the school year began, Matthew was on flight 800 and Graham was killed in a traffic accident at home. Then in early September, that call came, awakening me from sleep to a living nightmare. Julie and Maia were dead, victims of a drunk driver, and four other students were seriously injured. Like others of you, I slept no more that night. Still we were not done with grieving. Janice and Grace were lost to us, suddenly and unaccountably. Our trustee and friend Albert died just before this dedication. Mark, long time dean of men—a Wake Forest institution—was memorialized last Thursday. Bones McKinney, one of the most colorful personalities in our history, died this weekend. It has been a year of lamentation.

What did we learn that we must recall even on this day when the door of hope is open wide? These truths, often shielded from the young, are at all times for all people.

Life is infinitely precious, and our grasp on it is but frail. Death is ever present and powerful.

Love is strong, and the grief we saw and felt is testimony to the intensity of the love lost.

Life does not mete out justice according to merit. Life’s blessings are not given or gotten according to our just desserts.

II

There are other teachings I offer on this day of final lessons. One comes from our alumnus poet, A.R. Ammons, here this spring as part of the Year of the Arts.

His “Easter Morning” is among my favorite poems, and tells a story about the many lives we all live.

That poem records an Easter visit to the family cemetery, a place representing life’s “bitter incompletions” and “empty ends.” But this place of sadness is visited at a time of joy, in the morning of the day of hope, in the season of resurrection.

In particular, the graveyard holds a brother, killed in an accident, but the lost brother is present and alive. The poem begins with affirmation:

I have a life that did not become,

…

I hold it in me like a pregnancy or

as on my lap a child

not to grow or grow old but dwell on

The poet’s brother lives his lost brother’s life.

We here today are not unlike the poet on Easter. We revisit the sadness of this year at this moment when we commence to new, Easter-like beginnings. Like the poet, we too must leave here bearing lives, not just our own, whose promises, aspirations and ambitions must become ours, lives which live on in us and through us.

Our families, our friends, our faculty mentors, and, yes, those lost to this life, all become part of us. This is what it means to live, as your diploma says, “For humanity.” You are not one. You are many.

Graham loved Wake Forest basketball, and served as more than manager to our team, because his influence reached the court on the feet of other players. His zeal for success, his Christian faith, leaves a legacy we now assume.

Matt’s smile was perpetual and so infectious that no one dared stand in the color guard rank next to him lest the serious business of presenting the nation’s flag be overtaken by laughter. A scholarship fund will enable your future colleagues to complete Matt’s mission to France.

Maia said in her Wake Forest application that she hoped “to be remembered as someone who has been an influence on people’s hearts.” So will she be in our hearts and the many others she touched. Just last summer, in a tragic prophecy, she wrote of “two more souls [who] have been added to the eternal dance to swing in time with life and all its experiences.” Henceforth, we all dance her dance with destiny, to influence hearts for good.

Julie’s essay was about her extraordinary experiences as a volunteer. She participated in Students Against Drunk Driving every year in high school. She worked with Brian, injured in an accident, to help him walk. At a camp for underprivileged children, she played with Crystal, who, though she weighed more than a hundred fifteen pounds, was not too heavy a burden for Julie to carry upon her back. Today you and I must seize that load of loving service.

Julie’s essay quoted from the Gospel: You are the light of the world. Henceforth, these lights must be reflected in your lives.

The poet says at his brother’s grave on Easter:

I cannot leave this place, for

for me it is the dearest and the worst,

it is life nearest to life which is

life lost.

You leave Wake Forest, this place now to become your past, with a future self consisting of the many lives that make of you one. The life nearest to your life also is life lost. You take up today these lost lives.

III

We have learned this year the power of communal action. Our grief turned to anger, even rage, and that fueled a commitment to not allow this tragedy to be without redemptive consequence. Our community’s resolve was tested, and I am proud of what you tried and accomplished.

You joined with local law enforcement officials and the District Attorney’s office, and this trial sent a resounding message to the nation regarding the horror of habitual drunk driving. The case brought the first murder in the first degree conviction in North Carolina, perhaps in the nation, for driving while impaired, and it made front page news around the nation. Your rage for justice was answered by the court, and will reverberate throughout the nation for many years to come.

More ambitious yet, we had the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, the Secretary for Public Safety, and a host of interested parties to a campus forum to discuss the status of our State’s laws about habitual drunk drivers. Those laws were inadequate and we resolved, as a community, to change them. Governor Hunt asked Lieutenant Governor Wicker to lead a task force. You organized Safe Roads, a student led initiative across the campuses of our State. When the legislation was introduced, you were there to lobby and call the public’s attention to this menace.

This legislation has passed the House 113-1, and will, we believe, win overwhelming approval in the Senate. Your influence has been felt. This legislation will become law. Safer roads will be the result of Safe Roads. This remarkable outcome is a tribute to your common resolve, in joint endeavor with many others.

Here, too, is a lesson for your life beyond Wake Forest. An aroused citizen movement can move a state from decades of misguided tolerance of a chronic menace to public safety. I stood with your fellow students in the State legislature offices. I have never been prouder of Wake Forest students.

You made a difference this year, and you can make a difference in the other causes in which your lives shall be engaged. Never accept the slavery of indifference or apathy or the claims of the slothful that we are the impotent pawns of social and political forces which we can only passively accept. A shared and passionate commitment can change an intransigent political system. That is the blessing of democracy. You have seized it this year. Make that blessing yours for life, and you will change this nation and the world.

IV

There were moments of epiphany in my undergraduate years, when I was about your age, moments when I acquired lessons never lost. I want to share one such moment with you that I have never before mentioned in public.

Our Shakespeare class was two semesters long. In the first, we studied the comedies, the tragedies in the second. The professor was a man I knew well, having taken several of his courses. In the first session of the second term, he remarked, in an off hand way, that Shakespeare’s tragedies were generally regarded as superior to the comedies.

“Why is that?” I asked at once. Mr. Ownby started to reply, but then paused. That pause lengthened into one of the most compelling silences, louder than shouts, which seem to last an eternity. The room was utterly still. You know the awkward anxiety that comes from an unexpected and extended silence.

Mr. Ownby paced the floor and looked out the window. Finally, he turned to me with an expression on his face which revealed that these were words from his heart and soul: “Because, Mr. Hearn, life is more tragic than comic.” There was another pause before the class continued. It was a moment I shall never forget.

It is important that you rightly hear what Mr. Ownby told me from his heart. For many years I mistook his message. He did not say that life is tragic rather than comic. He said life is more tragic than otherwise.

Now older and perhaps wiser, I know what he meant. We are the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride across history, and one of those horsemen visited Wake Forest this year in power.

Yet this Commencement day, like Easter, is a symbol of the possibility we have to do battle with our ancient enemies—to bring health, justice, security, and love to those in need. You celebrate today new weapons of the head and heart with which to wage this ancient and ultimate battle—for humanity.

You will encounter the realities of good and evil, achievement and failure, faith and despair. The world’s story is told in both comedy and tragedy, in laughter and tears. Not all our endings are happy, but some are wonderful indeed.

Above all, you must see yourselves as partners in the enterprise of humanity. It is a task embracing all that has been gained—and lost—from your families and from the family of Wake Forest. In your places of service, each of you must strive to create a legacy that offers a fuller destiny for all.

The commitment of Wake Forest to that purpose is upon your seal: Pro Humanitate. May that motto be the guide and guardian of your days, and you will be blessed and a blessing.

1996 WFU Commencement
May 20, 1996

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

As a gift for ten years of service at Wake Forest, the Board of Trustees provided me a summer sabbatical. I was to go in the summer of 1994, but various duties prevented my absence at that time. A kind fate arranged the delay. In February 1995, I underwent heart surgery and my sabbatical last summer was, as the saying goes, “just what the doctor ordered.”

Being married to a Francophile, we rented a house in Provence, outside the village of Cabris. Hedges of fragrant rosemary and lavender linked the walkways and there were commanding views south to the Côte D’Azur. It was an ideal setting for rest, reflection, and reading. It was a time for healing in every sense of the word.

I went to Europe with a special interest in the future of the European Union and the Maastricht Treaty. Much has been written on this subject in the United States. After a century marked by conflict, Europe was headed toward economic alliances and, ultimately, at political union, some loose confederation of the states of Europe.

These developments involved another interest I had in how Europe was dealing with the topics of diversity and difference which have become vital in this country. In America, we have established ideas about diversity and tolerance. It is an article of our public faith that as people know each other’s customs, speak each other’s languages, understand each other’s beliefs and practices, there emerges mutual understanding which results in tolerance and respect.

Europe is the place where this ideal should be actually realized. Europeans have occupied confined geographical space together for centuries. They know each other well and often speak several of each other’s languages. There is much cultural as well as actual commerce. Now there was to be a common passport, no barriers at national borders and, in time, a single currency. In Europe, I would see the kind of tolerance the American faith predicts.

What we found as we traveled and visited with people in various countries was startling and surprising. There was general hostility toward the Maastricht Treaty and the ideal of union among the states of Europe. Moreover, there were constant reiterations of traditional ethnic, political, and nationalistic stereotypes. There was scant evidence of expanded appreciation of diversity or movement toward an ideal of universal tolerance. It was as if World War II had just ended.

The American notion about how mutual understanding and tolerance are related was repudiated everywhere in our travels. After a century of conflict, the other countries of Europe still fear German domination even if that control is reflected through the banks and currencies.

I came to a sad and disturbing conclusion. If we are to surpass the tragic legacy of war in Europe, something more than mere tolerance and mutual understanding will be required. To know and understand each other is not to respect, let alone love, our neighbors.

I should have known better, I suppose. After all, this horrid war in the Balkans, complete with instances of mass murder and genocide, is a war among those who have lived side by side for centuries. The Balkans represent another horrible instance of ethnic and religious hatred among people who are in every real sense neighbors, often even relatives. To know others, even to know them well, is not a sufficient condition to guarantee tolerance, let alone peace. Europe does not yield promise that our American hope for tolerance through understanding will be achieved. Something else is required.

I may have seen that something else everywhere I traveled. There is an emerging universal culture of the young. The young in Europe, dressed in cutoffs and tee shirts, were carrying book bags. They wore basketball sneakers and baseball hats, often turned around backward, with the logos of American universities and athletic teams. They were eating fast food and drinking Pepsi. They were, of course, always listening to rock music, turned up much too loud for my hearing. This culture of the young is everywhere in every country. It has no borders.

On a particular occasion, I was crossing a bridge near Casa Artom in Venince where a multi-national gathering of the young was occurring. They were, as the phrase goes, “hanging out.” Someone had a “boom box” going full blast. The students were dressed in the uniform of blue jeans and tee shirts. It suddenly struck me that I could close my eyes and be home on the campus at Wake Forest. In dress, in manner, and in entertainment, those young people from many nations in Venice resembled you.

You are the first generation whose culture is being shaped by mass media, especially television, which is beaming universal messages to every corner of the globe. With the coming of the Internet, the young, who seem to be marching to the beat of some new and distant drum, will have powerful new ways to communicate.

Something new, something worldwide, is being born. On a trip to Japan, I walked out of a lecture hall at a Japanese university during a time of festival when students were engaging in revelry. I recall then that the sound of music, the smell of beer, and the dress and manner of the students made that place in Japan seem like Wake Forest.

Vaclav Havel reported a similar observation. He noted that seeing and watching young people, he thought himself in his native Prague when he was, in fact, in Singapore.

We academics are inclined to believe that these tokens of the youth culture—rock music, blue jeans, fast food, movies, television—are exports of the American consumer culture at its worst. I have often wished that these were not the symbols of the United States. Perhaps we should look and think again. These products may be the conveyances of hidden meanings.

Last summer I experienced in Europe the older prevailing culture of the dying century with its mistrust and fear of the other. The nations of Europe, treat or not, have not forsaken the bitter legacy of violence. There is no peace for there is no love.

What I saw on the bridge in Venice and at Tokai University in Japan is something still to be manifest. It will be revealed in the new century, your century, when the world will learn whether the powerful forces of technology will ultimately be used to bless or curse humanity. Perhaps these new strings are evidences of something more than devices of American consumerism. Something new, something democratic, something worldwide, something loving and peaceful, is stirring.

I do not know the music and the poetry of this new era. But Bob Dylan comes to mind as a prophet of this new era. Your parents will remember this refrain:

How many deaths does it take

Til we know

That too many people have died?

How many times must the cannon ball fly

Before it is forever banned?

The answer my friend, is blowing in the

wind.

The answer is blowing in the wind.

Some prophet’s message is blowing in the wind. Perhaps human community and the will to peace may emerge from the youth of the world. May that be the still small voice blowing in the winds of change.

May God grant that resolve and commitment for the members of the class of 1996 as you leave here to accept responsibility for this dangerous world. Pro Humanitate is the motto given you this day with your diploma. Ed Wilson said during our recent trek to old Wake Forest: “At our (Wake Forest’s) best, we reached not outward for what the world might give us but inward for what we might find within ourselves to give the world.” May you find Pro Humanitate in your heart and give that ideal from your hands as an offering and blessing to the world.

The twentieth century did not fulfill this school’s noble ideal. Isaiah promised that a child would lead us. In the twenty-first century, may you, the young, and your brothers and sisters around the world, lead us into a new promised land where our spears shall be beat into pruning hooks and neither shall we know war anymore. God bless you all.

Lessons of the Heart

1995 WFU Commencement

May 15, 1995

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

In the year 2015, by which time your experiences as parents will have given you profound appreciation for your own, you will receive an invitation to attend your twentieth class reunion. Many of you will come. I hope to be there among the ranks of the emeriti faculty. We will recall these years and this day nostalgically.

About that time, your doctor will tell you that you have reached the age when annual physical examinations are indicated. I hope you take that advice. I was given that word when I came to Wake Forest a dozen years ago in my mid-forties.

So the day came this February for my physical. Having had no significant health problems as an adult, I expected the usual once over lightly followed by some friendly advice about losing weight.

There was, however, a cloud in the eyes of my doctor and friend as he listened with the stethoscope to my heart. He said, “Tom, there is a murmur in your heart.” A few minutes later, an echocardiogram indicated leaking around my mitral valve. Another definitive test would be required, but he was fairly certain that there was a problem that needed surgery.

My first reaction was disbelief. After all I had just a few months earlier had a stress test in our Cardiac Rehab program and had performed better than ever. My tennis wars the previous Sunday afternoon had gone on for two and one-half hours, and four sets. I had none of the symptoms he asked about—no shortness of breath and no fatigue. My wife confirmed that disbelief when I reported what the doctor had said. “There must be a mistake,” she said.

Two days later, I went for the final test, an esophageal echocardiogram. Afterwards, I was a little woozy, having been given a sedative. When I was fully alert, I realized that the creatures in white all around me were doctors, not angels. The diagnosis was definitive. The good news: “It can be fixed.” Bad news: “You need heart surgery.”

My disbelief turned to anger. There is no history of heart problems in my family, and I have lived with a heart healthy lifestyle, good diet, and regular exercise. My son had sent me the full text of Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous “Serenity Prayer.” It had been on my desk for several weeks, and I had read it often. Two lines jumped into my mind: “the courage to accept the things which cannot be changed” and “accepting hardship as the path to peace.” I thought how little hardship, especially physical hardship, had been my portion.

A health problem reorders and verifies priorities. If someone had asked me if I could be out for six weeks, given my schedule, I would have deemed that impossible. But the truth was that Carolyn Dow cleared my calendar in a few hours, and only asked my advice about one or two matters.

Plans were made for my surgery immediately after Founders’ Day. I wanted to be here when our undergraduate business school was given the name of Wayne Calloway, who is a dear friend as well as a great Wake Forest leader.

I was reluctant to confess the anxiety and raw fear that I felt. My first duty was to explain to friends, family, and Wake Forest associates what was about to happen. I learned in that process a vital lesson of my illness. In telling others what was to happen and that the prognosis was for a complete recovery, I strangely persuaded myself.

By the time I had spread the news as required, I was finally able to tell the one person I dreaded telling most—my mother. I was able to calm her fears because I had largely conquered my own. It matters what you say to others about yourself. You may come to believe it.

The dread remained, of course, which precedes any ordeal. There were preparations to be made. I made a visit to my lawyer to discuss my will and to have in good order the necessary arrangements about my life and my job. There was a dreaded conversation with my wife about what would happen if.

A friend then delivered another piece of advice to which my soul attached itself. “Tom,” he said, “you cannot manage or control this surgery. You must find doctors in whom you have faith and then just entrust yourself to their care. Just become a patient.” I had complete faith in the medical staff at Bowman Gray and, trusting in them, I became a patient. Another lesson: faith brings peace of mind—in things human and divine.

I entered the hospital. On the night before my surgery, I was told that I could order anything I wanted for dinner. I looked over the hospital menu in dismay. Because I had friends in high places in the Medical School, I was able to have old-fashioned North Carolina barbecue delivered to my room. It was a memorable meal. I watched Wake Forest play Maryland, so tranquilized that I never doubted that we would be victorious.

As one who has been blessedly healthy—able to rely on my body to obey every command—no experience prepared me for the weakness that follows surgery. They had me up the day after, but I could not move unaided. My body did not work. There was also a lesson in this weakness. Given physical weakness, I look for strength elsewhere. The strength I first experienced was the care and compassion of friends and family. Then that circle grew to include the wishes and prayers of others—at first, they had to be read to me—but I received them and literally felt their force.

My mailbox was full of good wishes and assurance of prayers. I was especially touched by messages from students and student organizations. As Reynolds Price said in his remarkable book about his illness, the hopes and prayers of others are a “firm wind” at your back. We are not alone in the world. We live in family and in community. I have never known that truth so personally. The meaning of the community of Wake Forest was made real.

As winter gave way to spring, I felt a spring of my own. As I walked to recover my strength, I watched the redbud and dogwood swell and burst. A sense of the sublime overwhelmed me. The North Carolina spring had never seemed so wondrous. On my first visit back to campus, the daffodils along Wake Forest Road were in full glory. I was aware of how much we miss as we drive by in our cars. When I was able to walk around the campus, I went to see the Habitat House you built—by then, all but completed—and that, too, was a token of healing and health.

As my mind and body healed, I read, had visits from my family and friends, took long walks with my wife. Seldom had Laura and I visited so much and talked so long about matters trivial and profound. I surfed on the Internet, amazed at the new opportunities for learning now at our fingertips. I became a student of the spiritual disciplines of the East.

I suspect you see where this talk was heading—my recovery, the strength of the Wake Forest community, the care and goodness of our membership—all validation of our motto Pro Humanitate.

Then that bomb went off—the one in Oklahoma City—and with you and the rest of the nation, I was shaken by the explosion. A catastrophe, in the etymological sense, is a turning upside down, and so was I. My remarks for this occasion were cast suddenly against this tragic background. Feeling that tragedy and the grief poured upon the innocent, my reflections about my body and my healing seemed self-centered, even narcissistic. Why should the lessons of my heart matter on this day when families are grieving for their children?

So we dare not celebrate today a healing and this community’s goodwill without reflection on the darkness of the human spirit. We are the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. Oklahoma City is but a recent and graphic reminder. The world has just marked a half-century since the end of Nazi tyranny and the liberation of the death camps. In London, a clock numbering the dead from war in our century will conclude its grim count on December 31, 1999. The toll will be 100 million souls. The horsemen of the Apocalypse ride through history and across our world.

Yet the forces of darkness must not overwhelm the humane and joyful impulses of your spirit which brought you to this day of hope and beckon you forward. With faith in God Almighty, and with your commitment, you can bring healing and help.

Wake Forest’s motto, Pro Humanitate, given to you this day on your diploma, must be manifest in your lives if you are to be instruments of peace in a world of war.

Please stand with me for a moment of silence as we remember prayerfully the suffering of our brothers, sisters, and children in Oklahoma City, and as we commit the class of 1995 to lives in service to humanity.

In the Morning of the Day of Hope

1994 WFU Commencement
May 16, 1994

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

I will remember this year as the time when a new poet entered the circle of my acquaintance. As an undergraduate, I majored in both English and philosophy, and poetry was the literature I loved. The poems of Archie Ammons will be my companion from now on. Ammons is a two-time winner of the National Book Award for poetry and was the first McArthur Fellow. More important for this occasion is that he is a native of Columbus County, North Carolina, and an “old campus” graduate of Wake Forest College. I have intended to read his work for almost as long as I have been at Wake Forest, but you know how such plans get postponed. But for much of this year, his Selected Poems has been on my bedside table and in my brief case on the road.

The first time I read a poem called “Easter Morning,” I knew that I had been given the lesson for this message to the graduates. The poem records a visit to the family cemetery, a place of sadness representing life’s “bitter incompletions” and “empty ends.” But the place of sadness is visited at a time of joy, in the morning of the day of hope, in the season of resurrection.

Commencement in name and in fact, is about beginning, about new life, about an Easter morning of your lives. Yet this day also has that undercurrent of sadness as the poem describes. For every beginning is also an ending. In an essay entitled “Circles,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

The life of man is a self-evolving circle

which, from a ring imperceptibly small,

rushes on all sides outwards to new

and larger circles, and that without end.

Today your life circles are in a moment of change outward, bringing at once sadness and joy. The widening circle will contain, I hope, much of Wake Forest—what you learned here, the people you met, and most of all, the aspirations you formed.

Each present circle contains its origins, and thus the poet visits the cemetery on Easter morning. There is gathered the past: “it’s convenient to visit everybody.” Mother, father, uncles, aunts, teachers, friends—all “collected in one place … all in the graveyard assembled.” As this language of visitation and assembly makes clear, what is in the graveyard has not been lost. In the circle that is the poet’s life, this gathered assembly lives on in the vanishing present.

In particular, the graveyard holds a brother, killed in an accident, but the brother is present and alive. The poem begins with the affirmation:

I have a life that did not become,
…
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to grow or grow old but dwell on …

The poet brother lives his lost brother’s life. The life, though lost, is embraced within another circle.

We visit the past gathered in a place of sadness, but discover that the past is embraced in the circles of our own lives. As the lost brother lives, so does the rest of the gathered assembly. That truth is universal. No person’s circle is self-contained and individual. No one is self-made. We are not, any of us, merely single persons. We live many lives. Our circles are not one. They are many.

I know this truth. There is a graveyard in Albertville, Alabama, located on a last ridge of Appalachia called Sand Mountain. Each time I go home to visit my mother, we walk there to visit our past. These visits are never sad. Our walks there are reflective, grateful reminders of the truth of the poem: the circles of our lives contain what went before.

My grandfather was the son of a sharecropper, and his dreams of education were defeated by ill chance and poverty. His children and grandchildren received and lived his dream. My father is there. Though I do not resemble my father in body or soul, I sometimes see his look in my mirror and hear his voice in my tones and manners. He mandated public speaking and debate to his stage-terrified seventh grade son, and his requirement gave me a life-long love of language and respect for its power in human affairs and its beauty. He gave me the will to embrace Archie Ammons within my circle.

There is in our family a baby who died in infancy, but her name is born in life by my daughter Lindsay. There are uncles and aunts and others we love, reminders that we have many fathers and mothers. To visit them is certainly to know the melancholy sense of lost time and love. But to go there is also to affirm the continuity of time present with times past.

And so, too, do the present circles contain the future. On April 20, my first grandchild was born. He bears my mother’s name, Patton, and a new circle of promise is born with him and in him.

The poem and the poet leave the graveyard. On this “picture-book, letter-perfect Easter morning,” he goes for a walk. On this walk, he is blessed with vision from on high. Two great birds, perhaps eagles, whose essence is not of the earth, draw great circles in the heavens, and in those heavenly circles is the lesson of Easter morning.

… they went

directly over me, high up, and kept on

due North: but then one bird,

the one behind, veered a little to the

left and the other bird kept on seeming

not to notice for a minute: the first

began to circle as if looking for

something, coasting, resting its wings

on the down side of the circles:

the other bird came back and they both

circled, looking perhaps for a draft;

they turned a few more times, possibly

rising—at least, clearly resting—

they flew on falling into distance till

they broke across the local bush and

trees: it was a sight of bountiful

majesty and integrity: the having

patterns and routes, breaking

from them to explore other patterns or

better ways to routes, and then the

return.

Emerson wrote of circles:

Our life is an apprenticeship to the

truth that around every circle another

can be drawn; that there is no end

in nature, but every end is a

beginning; that there is always

another dawn risen on mid-

noon …

The circle of Easter is drawn in the heavens, not in the earth. There is no end, for in the circle, every end is a beginning.

As you leave this day of beginnings and endings, to enter upon new circles, whose lives will you live? Your past, of course, and your families and friends. Your Wake Forest mentors and associates. Each life from today must imitate the “bountiful majesty and integrity” of these great birds in flight.

The having

patterns and routes, breaking

from them to explore other patterns or

better ways to routes, and then the

return.

Whose lives are yours? For whom are you responsible? You live the life and the lives of all humanity. That is the abiding lesson of your alma mater’s motto, Pro Humanitate, given to you today with your diploma. You are involved in all humanity.

The special magic of today is that you begin new circles. My charge this day is to draw your circles in beauty and in truth, and to keep Wake Forest forever in your circle as you become her sons and daughters.

The circles of our lives yield stories told in both tragedy and comedy. Not all our endings are happy, but some are wonderful indeed. Thus you become a partner in the enterprise which is humanity. Live in that spirit, and the circle of your life will be blessed and a blessing.

1993 WFU Commencement
May 17, 1993

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

Our own Professor Angelou received this year countless awards and recognitions in addition to her presentation at the inauguration. One was as Citizen Diplomat of the Year from the National Council of International Visitors—an organization that fosters citizen visits around the world. My wife and I were in Washington to see her receive this honor along with a host of distinguished people, including another famous Arkansan, former Senator William J. Fulbright, who was honorary chairman of the event.

As you might expect from such a gathering, people were there from many tribes and nations. It was a collection of the varieties of the human species from ports-of-call around the globe. When the program concluded, Professor Angelou was presented with her award, and she came to the microphone to acknowledge it. She did something I have never witnessed in all my years of attending banquets.

She spoke not a word. Instead, she broke into song—the pure unaccompanied human voice. She sang one song, then another, then another, and so on it went. Even more remarkable, each song was in a different language. Each was of a different mode and mood. Without understanding the words, we could tell from the singing of songs celebrated facets of the experiences of differing people, of alien cultures, some represented in her cosmopolitan audience.

When she ended her singing, her first spoken words expressed the message of her singing in what I later learned to be a line from one of her poems. She said, “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”

That was the theme of the singing. The words from unknown tongues. The tunes were unfamiliar. But the music—Dear Graduates—the music, was human and universal. As I sat there in what was a moment of enlightenment, I knew that I had been given my charge to you from the mouth of our singer and poet: “We are more alike than we are unalike,” and perhaps an even more important message, we can all call each other “friend.”

We can sing each other’s songs and tell each other’s stories. Despite differences in culture, language, race, sex and politics, there is a universal humanity, and there is in our commonality the hope for human community here and around the world. On this day of commencing, there is no message from Wake Forest to its alumni-to-be more urgent than to summon your faith and our commitment to overcoming the barriers of differences and division toward the building of the human community.

This you will recognize as the motto of the University on the seal of your diploma: Pro Humanitate. This motto knows no boundaries of race, class, culture, sex or nation. You are called to be sons and daughters in the human family.

This faith in your institution’s motto will not be easy to sustain. Voices everywhere are urging a different message—we are more unalike than we are alike. They tell us that the differences among us—differences of race, sex, religion or nation—are fundamental and ultimate. In our separate groups, we are strangers, rivals or enemies, not friends. Thus, we cannot sing each other’s songs; we cannot tell the stories of another group with sympathy and understanding. There is no music of humanity. There are only our separate songs, and discord is the theme.

Because we are the children of Adam and Eve—cast from every earthly paradise—these disciplines of division can always point to evidence of their cynical creed. Tragic events in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states remind us that hate is strong. The end of totalitarianism has brought not freedom but anarchy. Ancient hatreds are unleashing acts of unspeakable cruelty.

Here at home, the gospel of division and difference is dividing this body politic into adversarial groups lacking faith in the democratic process or shared values as the basis of public institutions. The apostles of difference, of unlikeness, believe that our humanity is exhaustively defined by those special features that separate us into human groups. Being of one race or another, one sex or religion or another, marks a border that humans can never cross. We are strangers to human experience other than our own. The historian, Arthur Schlesinger, said that we remembered the pluribus on our coins but have forgotten the unum.

As graduates of Wake Forest University, you inherit the influence of three vital intellectual and spiritual traditions: the Judeo-Christian heritage, the belief in liberal education, and political democracy. These are unifying ideals. They express belief in our common creation and moral equality under God and our capacity to be so educated in common that we could govern ourselves in freedom. Liberal education from its beginnings meant education for freedom and education for enlightened citizenship.

There are not unique ideas and ideals locked in libraries and museums to be studied and admired. They are living realities, carried into the world through your lives and the lives of those you will teach, as you all will teach each day you live. These ideals are yours to build or to destroy, and to pass on to your children as your legacy to them and to their children. These ideals are under attack from those who have no belief in the ideal of a community embracing all humanity. They may believe that society as such is oppression or that human groups are such that they must inevitably war with each other for scarce resources.

You will be tempted to lose faith in the possibility of such a universal community. You will hear passionate appeals to the divisions of tribe, clan and family that mark us. When you are tempted by loss of faith in the ideals of Pro Humanitate, I hope that you may recall the poet’s message:

We love and lose in China,

we weep on England’s moors,

and laugh and moan in Guinea,

and thrive on Spanish shores.

We seek success in Finland,

are born and die in Maine.

In minor ways we differ,

in major we’re the same.

I note the obvious differences

between each sort and type,

but we are more alike, my friends,

than we are unalike.

We are more alike, my friends,

than we are unalike.

The name of this poem is “Human Family.” On your diploma it reads Pro Humanitate. May this creed guide you to lives of service and accomplishment as Wake Forest this day bestows its name and its ideals upon you for your care and keeping.

1992 WFU Commencement
May 18, 1992

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

Each year I give this charge to the graduates, and each year the subject of these remarks comes to me as a gift. Sometime in the year, something happens or I have an experience that forms itself into these remarks. This year was different. As Commencement approached, I had been given no subject, and so I had the unfamiliar job of searching for a theme.

My first thought was to talk about the year of reorientation in which I have been involved. I will soon have been here as President nine years, and I have spent this year doing again the things I did when I came in 1983. I have been in every building on this campus and met with many of you on both campuses. I need to thank all of you who have made this year possible and pleasurable—students, faculty and staff. Since this is our largest academic gathering and since this year is at a close, it seemed appropriate that I would report to you on it. However, I am just now beginning to gather my impressions, and sadly, you students are about to leave Wake Forest.

I can say that my study has reaffirmed my belief that Wake Forest is a good place and is gaining new strength. Education thrives here. Our students are fair-minded and intelligent. Our faculty are well-prepared and devoted. Our administrative staff is hardworking and loyal. In short, we have good students, good faculty, and you graduates have seen dramatic improvements in our facilities and our environment. This year will help us prepare for the future, but that report will reach you as alumni sometime next year. So I cast that topic out.

My next notion was to talk about the presidential election. Wake Forest hosted the debate of ’88. You undergraduates were freshmen, and you saw how the media have come to rule American politics. Yet what should I say about the election? (All I want is for it to be over.) I find it an odd time in American life. Never perhaps has our nation been stronger in our role as the world’s representative of democratic values. The cold war is over. Communism is dead. Our nation is the envy of the world. Yet not since the Vietnam era have our people felt so angry about the nation and its leaders. Even this recession is mild by historical standards, and the absence of inflation helps the least advantaged most of all. This should be a time for an American celebration. Our nation’s promise is bright. Why isn’t that promise, rather than our national anger, the theme of this election? I do not know, so I cannot speak to you of it.

I have spoken to recent classes about the extraordinary developments in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The world has been remade while you have been students at Wake Forest, but what began as a process of enormous opportunity and hope for the world now seems fraught with danger and discord. With the disappearance of Soviet authority, ancient tribal and ethnic hatreds are being resurrected. Freedom has brought less opportunity than chaos. Is freedom that results in anarchy worse than Soviet tyranny? Is that the awful experiment underway in Eastern Europe? The question frightens me. If people who look alike, speak each other’s language, and have lived together for decades, if not centuries, cannot overcome tribalism and hate, what hope is there for the world? I cannot say.

One of the most vivid images I have of the birth of freedom in the former Soviet Union is the toppling of the statues of Karl Marx, the philosopher architect of Communism. His motto, “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” set off a worldwide revolution. No movement of thought of such consequence fails to contain lessons of permanence and importance. The latest joke about the American university is that the difference between the universities in the Soviet Union and those here is that American professors still take Karl Marx seriously. Perhaps we are wise to do so. I think, for example, of Karl Marx’s doctrine that society is fundamentally divided according to economic class. We might do well to examine ourselves in Marxist terms, but Marx is not a fit subject for this glad occasion.

Then just weeks ago, I thought I had been given my topic. NASA’s COBE satellite discovered what is believed to be conclusive evidence that the universe began in an explosion popularly known as the “Big Bang.” Someone exultantly called it the most important scientific discovery of all time. The satellite detected the oldest and most distant objects ever witnessed, cosmic clouds some 15 billion light years from earth. Those structures were formed only a scant 300,000 years after the moment that the universe came into being. Now we know how the structure of the cosmos was formed. If it is the most important scientific discovery of your lifetime, then surely I should say something about it.

But what could I say? I am a philosopher and not a scientist. As I reflect on the Big Bang theory and the structure of the expanding universe that it describes, my imagination falters and fractures. I have one of two radically different reactions, the same reactions I have almost every time that I look up into the heavens on a bright and starry night. On the other hand, the universe seems so infinite and vast that it is impossible that my life and my destiny should matter in so great a scheme. Yet, I have an equal and opposite reaction, that the mind which can contemplate this awesome universe is as wondrous a thing as the universe itself. I hear the words of the politically incorrect Psalmist in my ear, “What is man that Thou are mindful of him?” So I could not talk about the Big Bang theory. I do not understand it, and my emotional and intellectual reactions to the contemplation of the universe are contradictory. I should not leave you graduates with my own personal quandary.

Yet another promising subject appeared. It grew up on the border of our campus as a group of students and staff joined hands and hearts to build a home for Habitat for Humanity. It was a wonderful evidence of the goodness and goodwill of our students and staff. It brought us together as only a large and important project can. Some of us gave our money, and some of us gave our labor.

Even as that home was being finished and moved to its neighborhood, the Rodney King acquittal sent parts of Los Angeles and other cities up in flames. We were reminded vividly that there is a third world society right in the heart of every urban center in this country—where every measure of public well-being is comparable to the least developed places in the world. In the midst of this national agony, I found it reassuring that even as homes burned and as lives and hopes were lost, some here at Wake Forest were building one house. Oh, I know that one family’s shelter is a small thing, but as the motto of the Christopher Society says, “It is better to light one candle than curse the darkness.” I wondered why human anger is destructive. Why when we are made, do we strike out to destroy? Why can’t anger make us committed to removal of the sources of our anger? Why do we destroy? I wanted to speak about that, but I could not. I do not know the answer.

Toward the end of this semester, I gave a reading of poetry of Robert Frost. The reading was respite for me because it required—in a hectic season—that I sit down for a night with this poet whose works have been a companion of my years. There in a poem I found the gift of my topic for this occasion. There was a poem about how life’s lessons come when we least expect or seek them, a lesson learned from the wandering flight of a butterfly. In the midst of menial and manual labor in the work of everyday, the poet says, “I thought of questions that have no reply, / and would have turned and tossed the grass to dry.” There was given my questions and wonderings, some, as the poem says, without reply. Hard and disturbing questions that cause our minds to worry and wonder at the mysteries and complexities which surround us are at the center of life.

Not all questions have answers, and no important question has an easy answer. In the knowing of our ignorance, there is the wisdom of Socrates. If we have taught you well, your days will contain moments of contemplation about nature and nature’s god, human nature and its destiny, and even the structure of the cosmos itself. The nature of education is not so much to know as to be a seeker after truth.

In your life, you will learn to respect, I hope, the majesty of human achievement. To think the thought of the collective mind of our heritage is to know how splendid human achievement at its best can be. We create objects, of mind and of hand, of exquisite beauty. Sometimes that beauty is truth. Sometimes it is not. To know the difference makes all the difference.

You will encounter the mysteries of good and evil, achievement and despair, faith and doubt. The world’s story is told in both tragedy and comedy. Not all our endings are happy, but some are wonderful indeed. Nature and nature’s god have minds of their own which we approach with reverence and awe.

Above all, you must see yourself a partner in this enterprise of being human. It is a task transcending the generations. In the work of humanity, each must strive for a legacy that leads toward a fuller destiny for all. That destiny begins for you today.

The commitment of Wake Forest to our purpose for you and your purpose in the world is upon the seal of your diploma you will receive: Pro Humanitate. May it not merely adorn your wall. May that motto be sealed upon your mind and heart, and guide you in the exciting pilgrimage that lies ahead.

1991 WFU Commencement
May 21, 1991

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

Today with your families, friends and classmates, each of you celebrates a personal milestone. Wake Forest will remain one of the decisive stopovers on your life’s journey. The degree you receive today is one of the permanent and important facts of your biography. You leave for new and challenging destinations. Our aim has been to prepare you for that further journey. We bless and honor you. We are grateful for that part of you which joins our common legacy. We hope that you will return to us often, for Wake Forest also has a further destination. As we journey on, let us journey together.

There is greater reason than usual to celebrate on this occasion. A few weeks ago we believed you would be graduating with our nation at war. Some of you would have gone to battle directly. All of you would have felt the intervention of the war in your lives and in the lives of those you love. Your graduation would have had a somber rather than a joyous tone.

You will remember we held a service in Wait Chapel at the beginning of the Persian Gulf War. The most touching moment was when we heard from the rostrum the names of those Wake Foresters already in peril. Then individuals in the audience rose to speak the names of additional friends and family that each might be remembered by name.

I was struck by the frightening number of names that were spoken and by the realization anew that when the nation goes to war, it sends its young—its future, its promise, its hope. I was reminded of the cynics’ maxim that the old declare war and send the young to die. How grateful we are that the names posted in Benson Center are coming down. How grateful we are that you are not headed to war, that you can celebrate today.

There is yet another reason for celebration at this graduation. Just over a year, we thought you would graduate to a world locked in intractable conflict. Europe and much of the world were divided between the forces of Communism and Democracy, led by the Soviet Union and the United States. We feared the Soviet Union and Communism for half a century, to the point at times of national hysteria. We regarded Communism as a threat to freedom everywhere, half believing ourselves in its own dire predictions of ultimate world domination. But as you graduate, the Soviet Union is in a state of disarray and potential disunion. Its very survival is in doubt. Eastern Europe is politically free. The Warsaw Pact is disbanded. Germany is reunited. Communism has been shown to be nothing but empty ideology supported by tyranny. These remarkable events have altered the course of history. You graduates will live in a new era. This, too, is a reason to celebrate. The cold war, waged for half a century, has also ended.

The war in the Persian Gulf has ended. Our troops are coming home in victory. America has new heroes. Perhaps for the first time since my boyhood—when our national heroes were World War II generals—the nation is honoring its warrior leaders and heroes. Even more important, the larger and frightening contest between this nation and the Soviet Union, a conflict fraught with danger of a nuclear holocaust, is ending. This brief armed conflict and the long cold war are both ended—ostensibly in victory.

But as recent events make painfully clear, peace does not come when war ends. The agony of Iraq is as doubtless greater now than when the Allied War machine was trained upon it in full fury. Rebellion, the flight of refugees, and the continued wrath of a tyrant have made peace as horrendous as war.

In Europe, the changes of the past year brought hope, even euphoria. The Berlin Wall came down as the young danced and drank champagne, but East Germany is now in economic chaos. “Perestroika” and “Glastnost” were words of hope, but the Republics of the Soviet Union are demanding political and economic independence, and ancient ethnic and political feuds are erupting. Upheaval, not progress, is everywhere. There are new and dangerous threats of instability. The expectation that political change would bring economic prosperity has been dashed. Russia is being given food aid. There is no bread and milk in Moscow’s stores. The erstwhile superpower is a beggar at the world’s table. An economic transformation must be effected in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for which there is no precedent in history. What does victory mean?

The cold war may be over, but peace has not begun. Mistake me not, we have much today to celebrate. The ending of war is a monumental achievement. Generations of doomsayers, who predicted a cataclysmic nuclear conflict between the superpowers, have been silenced. The end of armed conflict and the cold war means at least that the world of peace can begin. That work now falls to you. As you lead the nation into the new century, your task is to work the work of peace—to make real the ancient dreams of humanity for peace and plenty.

That task begins by creating an evolving sense of humanity as a single family inhabiting a single fragile home we call the Earth. The service of this great family is inscribed on the seal of your diploma as the very purpose of Wake Forest—Pro Humanitate. What has been our motto and our ideal since 1834 is now required to become fact rather than principle, if the complete war you must now wage for peace is to be won. Never have this institution’s seal and promise been so apt for a generation of its graduates.

The ultimate test of your education at Wake Forest will be its adequacy to this remarkable challenge. May Pro Humanitate not be a token on the seal of your diploma on your home or office wall—but a guide to your life as the nation and world turn to your generation for new initiative and leadership.

The Older Order Has Passed Aways – Behold! All Things Have Become New

(St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians)

1990 WFU Commencement
May 21, 1990

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

Two events will forever mark your senior year in my memory. These events have become powerfully connected in my mind. They have marked a symbolic turning point in my life—and in a larger sense yours as well. These events were the death of my father and the destruction of the Berlin Wall.

The change of the generations is a time of assessment, and I have pondered my father’s life and mine. World War II was the formative event of his life and his generation. My father volunteered, earned a naval commission, and served in the South Pacific. Almost everything about his life was changed by the war. His political attitudes were formed in the context of a war in which the moral issues were clear. He served a just, holy cause against the forces of evil. It was easy for his generation to regard all of America’s enemies as evil.

The legacy of World War II, created by my father’s sacrifices and those of his comrades in arms, many of whom are here today, was a new world order. Europe—and much of the world—was divided between communism and capitalism, socialism and democracy, the USSR and the USA. An Iron Curtain—in Churchill’s memorable phrase—was set between East and West. That curtain was vividly embodied in the Berlin Wall.

This bipolar conflict with its “hot” and “cold” wars dictated our politics and our consciousness for almost a half century. But in the year my father died, the Berlin Wall fell. The most powerful symbol of this divided world, the end of the wall marked the end of my father’s legacy. The old order passed away. My father and my father’s world were no more.

The changes of the past year have astonished the world. Communism seemed so omnipotent—fear of it mesmerized us for half a century. We half believed in its ultimate victory ourselves. Communism will not be part of the order of your century. Is this the end of history or its beginning? There are few categories yet to describe what awaits your new century. The context of life is changing. A new epoch is unfolding. This is one of those rare and remarkable moments in human history. The world’s new order awaits your creation. Your careers begin today.

The failure of communism does not mean the triumph of democracy. Communism failed because it was flawed—flawed first in philosophical and ideological sense. The Hegelian idea that we can draw charts for human history is vanity and always was. Communism went bankrupt because it could not keep its promises to its people, bankrupt because its people had no bread or soap.

There are no closed societies. Freedom rides on the technologies of information over whatever barriers are erected. The people of all nations have seen your blue jeans and heard your rock music. These are the rhythms of freedom, and the garments of a new era.

But communism also failed as a result of changes in the world that have weakened our society as well. My father’s generation rebuilt the conquered nations of his war—generously relieving Germany and Japan from the consequences of defeat. To remove their military threat, we prohibited their arms and, through what T. H. White called the “law of unintended consequences,” this prohibition helped create the world’s strongest new economies. Was my father’s war so clearly won? White remarked before he died, that Japan, and by implication, Germany, won in the marketplace the war they lost on the battlefields of Europe and in the Pacific. Did the former enemy’s military weakness contribute to their economic strength? Did our strong army contribute to our present economic weakness?

Military and economic powers historically have belonged to the same nations. Yet America in Vietnam and Russia in Afghanistan learned the limits of even the greatest armies. Someone said that the best minds in Japan and Germany build cars and electronics. Our best mind built weapons. At a recent conference on third-world debt, the U.S. contributed $7 billion in benefits, a generous gesture. Japan brought over $40 billion. Guess whose products will win those markets?

Communism has failed. We have yet to succeed. They have lost. We have not prevailed. To think of the future in these terms is to affirm the old categories. That order has passed away. Russia has been the nation we loved to hate. As the divisions and antagonisms of Eastern Europe become our problems—and not Russia’s alone—we may yet see the influence of Russia in Europe in this past half century in terms very different than those my father understood.

What will the new order be? I do not know, but if the promise of peace is to be realized in the new age, it will be because the Wake Forest motto—Pro Humanitate—becomes fact as well as principle in your generation. As Vaclav Havel, a man who went from a Czech prison to his nation’s presidency in a few short weeks, said in his moving address to Congress, “Without a global revolution in sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better.” That revolution awaits your making.

For thousands of years, civilizations and people have lived side by side, but proximity has not brought cultural integration let alone human fellowship. Chernobyl and global warming have taught us that environmental problems are not national but human issues. World hunger and peace are the problems of humanity. A new perspective is required in which we see the world and its people as a human community with a common destiny. That perspective is your alma mater’s motto. With that watchword we send you to meet this exacting and exciting challenge.

If these extraordinary political and economic changes can occur without bloodshed, if the Berlin Wall can be reopened, might we not see renewed hope for the solution of other human ills? May we not see among you a revolution of hope-belief in your future and the human future—confidence that your generation will build upon the achievements my father’s generation left to you and me. This revolution of hope—and with it the rebirth of idealism among the young—can give substance in your lifetime to the ancient dreams of peace and plenty.

My father was a forceful and dominating man. As the years passed and his vigor declined, his anger would still sometimes rise, but I had become a man. He could no longer dominate me. Now he is dead. So is his world.

I will miss the ordered world of my father’s making. As St. Paul said, “The old order has passed away. Behold! All things have become new.” Commencement is a time of beginning. Yours is now the world to make anew—in gratitude for what has been, and in hope for what, with your labor, may become.

Henny Penny and the Apocalypse

1989 WFU Commencement
May 15, 1989

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

I choose for my text today a story read to you by your first teachers, your families. It is probably not a story you have studied at Wake Forest, but its lesson is fit for this day of commencing. I thus conclude your collegiate instruction with the tragic tale of Henny Penny.

The story, for those scholars ill studied in these classics, is this. Once upon a time, while Henny Penny is grazing beneath the oaks, an acorn falls and hits her on the head. Henny Penny concludes at once, “The sky is falling. I must go and tell the king.” Along the way, Henny Penny encounters other feathered friends, Cocky Locky, Goosey Lucy, Lucky Ducky, and others, and having heard her story, they, too, join her pilgrimage to tell the king that the end of the world is coming. Finally, this feathered flock meets the cunning Foxy Loxy. He offers to take them to the king, but there is first to be a stop at the fox’s den. There the story of Henny Penny reaches its tragic end. Those who believe the sky is falling because a single acorn fell end up as the fox family’s lunch. Beware, the story says, of the prophets of doom. Do not join their apocalyptic army. There was doom indeed, but not the doom foretold. The sky is still in place to this good day.

The world is, and has been always, populated with Henny Penny and her disciples and descendants. The world is facing an imminent catastrophe. The apocalyptic end is imminent. All we can do is share the tragic tale with our dominions and princes. Our fate is sealed. Our doom is certain.

I have heard many Henny Pennyists in my life. Two world wars blighted our planet in this century, leaving nothing but devastation in Europe and Asia. This was surely the falling of the sky. Yet we head into the new century, your century, with the world’s most vital economies flourishing in Europe and Asia. The nuclear age was ushered in, and we were told by Henny Penny that the bomb would bring the sky down upon us. But, ironically, some now believe that the nuclear age, with its balance of terror, has stabilized world relationships in an unanticipated way. Can it be that nuclear arms became an instrument of order in a vivid example of what Theodore H. White called “the law of unintended consequences”? Now we have our first superpower arms reduction treaty, and new international recognition that the spiraling arms race is a luxury which we cannot afford.

There was then, in the fifties and sixties, the threat of world communism. The system seemed so monolithic, so powerful and sinister, that the sky of freedom and democracy seemed sure to fall. Now there is Perestroika and Glasnost and cries of freedom across the communist world from the Soviet republics to China. Even so cold a cold warrior as Brezinski is proclaiming the end of communism as we knew and feared it.

The energy crises of the 1970s were another new apocalypse. Without petroleum we could not survive, and Henny Penny told us that our suppliers were uncertain and diminishing. The energy threat promised utter ruin to the world economy. Can it be already that we are awash in oil, some of it literally awash in Alaskan waters, and remarkably, a Wake Forest graduate, Stanley Pons, is claiming that the world’s energy future can be resolved in a bottle of water at room temperature?

I could continue this recital, but your president’s message is clear. The Henny Pennys of this world are certain at each crisis that our sky is falling. Our problems are unsolvable. The apocalypse is at hand. Yet the human record unfolds. We live to fight our woes on other fields on other days. The impossible becomes possible. The imagined becomes real. The hoped for becomes actual. In this history is your commencement charge.

I do not say that we should ignore Henny Penny and teachers of her stripe. Prophets of doom should be heard. But the apocalyptic message of despair and hopelessness should be measured against the other record which instructs us, as The Man of La Mancha said so compellingly from the stage of the Wake Forest university theater this spring, “to dream the impossible dream.”

There is a fine line to walk between a proper recognition of the problems that surround us, serious and profound though they may be, and our opportunities and responsibilities to make the world new and better. I do not counsel you to adopt the motto of the sundial which advised students on the campus of old Wake Forest “Count only the sunny hours.” Between naïve optimism and the apocalypticism of Henny Penny, there is due regard for the serious problems we confront and the responsibility we have for the furtherance and renewal of the human spirit.

Today we send you to the world—your intelligence, your energy, your values, your commitment pro humanitate. We send you in the certainty that you can by your wit and will keep our common sky from falling. You and your classmates will enter science, education, government, research, commerce, and the great professions. You will thus touch every segment and sector of life. If you accept the charge and challenge of your teachers and your school, you can move human destiny towards its fulfillment and away from despair. You are a great gift to the world which your families and your school today celebrate.

You, too, will face the threat of the apocalypse and Henny Penny will counsel you to despair. Whether it be AIDS, the greenhouse effect, terrorism, drugs, or the federal deficit, you will be told that the human race has been lost.

But today you enter that ultimately serious race, the human race. It is yours now not to study, but to run. It has hills to climb and dark valleys to cross. But there will also be glorious views and moments of triumph. You run this race not for yourself alone, but for humanity past and future. Upon your striving rests our hope that a world where the ancient enemies of mankind are outdistanced and vanquished. May you run with faith the course that is set before you.

As you run, do not stop for lunch in a fox’s den or heed those doomsayers whose message is that the race is over and lost. Prophets of such feather might turn out to be no more than a bunch of chickens!

1988 WFU Commencement
May 16, 1988

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

Wake Forest has trees for a name. When we left the forest of Wake, the elms that stood here until your final year became a central symbol of our measured development in what will, for a very long time I expect, be called not just the campus, but the new campus. The elms were our environmental and emotional center. Their years have marked our seasons, shielded commencement audiences from the sun, sheltered our games and walks, and celebrated our victories. Only these two in front of the chapel remain. We have scant hope that they will be spared the blight which threatens the species. They were left in hope, and to commemorate a legacy. In our common memory, these elms are, as the poem said, “safe and beautiful forever … majestically swaying, brushing the shadowed doorways of remembrance.”

Only a handful of you came to the solemn ceremony that preceded the Thanksgiving removal, and there was pointed humor about the occasion. It was whispered in Reynolda Hall that the president was promoting Druidism as the new school religion. The Deacon Club wondered whether the Demon Druids might be supported by a vast army of hitherto unutilized supernatural forces. But the loss of these trees marked a passage for Wake Forest, and reaction from the alumni and public made it clear that trees are more than wood, bark and leaf. The removal of the elms underscored the urgency of our commitment to campus and environmental beautification.

An alumnus from Raleigh made a special trip to Winston-Salem to see the new trees. His reaction, voiced by others was, “That’s the way the plaza (as the quad was once called) looked when I was a student. It seemed familiar and right.” What seems familiar and right at one season, is unnatural and wrong at another.

There is a commencement lesson here: we humans are forever in search of a permanent and unchanging reality, some state of “being” to arrest the moving flow of “becoming” in time. But our efforts to seize and hold a permanent order are vain. Change is not merely nature’s first law, it is perhaps nature’s only law. Heraclitus, the first quasi-scientific thinker in the west, stated this truth epigrammatically, “you can never put your foot in the same river twice.”

These elms, like all gifts of beauty and love, were for a season. Our task, the human task, is to accept with gratitude the legacy of beauty, truth and goodness that others have created for us, while we turn to the task of creating new monuments of mind, heart and hand. We plant for those who in future years will sit beneath the shelter of these young trees, as our forbearers gave the elms in promise for us whom they did not know. Thus did they and do we now fulfill our motto: Pro Humanitate.

Commencement season is when Wake Forest gives you to the world for the fulfillment of your tasks on behalf of humanity. That humanity comprises the world that is, but even more importantly, the world that is to be. These new trees are a symbol of that commencing, and it is well therefore that you graduates are placed among these sapling ashes—all of you and the trees portending opportunity.

As alumni, you will return in future years to a campus much changed. Campus beautification will continue. The new University Parkway entrance will be completed this summer. At their last meeting, the trustees approved the most significant expansion of the campus since we called this “new” campus home. Central to that expansion will be the long sought University Center, new facilities for the Babcock Graduate School of Management and the School of Law, expansion of the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, and new space for the sciences including the Olin Physics Building. This will relieve crowding in Tribble Hall, as the Magnolia Quad buildings are renovated for College uses. The extension of the Silas Creek Parkway to carry non-Wake Forest traffic is scheduled to begin next year.

The new coliseum, a partnership between the city and Wake Forest, will open for the season of 1989. Thanks to generous friends, we have new facilities for baseball, tennis and golf. Not of least importance, these trees will grow with the assistance of nature and human nature. One day when you return the quad will have regained its arboreal splendor. It will be again the place now recalled, fondly I hope, in “the shadowed doorways of remembrance.”

But these changes in our institution’s “body,” our campus, facilities and environment will count for naught unless we also grow in our communal “spirit” and “mind.” The concern of education is not the buildings, but what occurs in them. Wake Forest is its people, its faculty and students, and the ultimately serious work we do together in pursuit of a more enlightened world for ourselves and for all mankind. The vital changes for Wake Forest will not be in brick and sand, but in mind and heart and character. Our common university soul is captured in the flux.

This lesson from the elms of the permanence of change has been expressed clearly by students. Lane Wurster issued the challenge to the graduates last year in his senior oration. He urged each of his classmates to “inspect one of these new trees, and allow it to inspect you,” to see if your growth can be measured by each other. You might do that today with a camera. I hope you will. Your classmate Claire Bell enriched that challenge to you that evening when we bid a solemn farewell to the elms. This is what Claire said:

In May we will stand with dozens of new trees that will be growing daily to fulfill their identity. In the morning sun, the delicate beauty of the young saplings will hint at future majesty. Drawing strength from the roots we have put down at Wake Forest, let us strive to fulfill our human potential with the same steadfastness of spirit that can be seen in the growth of a young tree. The disappointment that follows a loss is overcome by the joy of new life and thrill of creation. It is our duty to those who came before us and who created the beauty we see today, to maintain the traditions of our university, including the quadrangle. Wake Forest is the garden of our sapling years: each of us is then transplanted to a life where our potential is actualized, where we can reflect the glory of our creation as purely, strongly and beautifully as a mature tree.

The chestnut is another magnificent species fallen to a blight. I read recently of the efforts of arborists to develop a blight resistant strain. In tree research, it takes a long time to measure success. One of the researchers said something which we should all capture and hold from this day of many memories: “In just a few hundred years,” he said, “we hope to restore the chestnut to the forests.”

“Distant Music”

Elm branches,
Swaying,
Balancing a cloud of silver,
What magic in your dreamy dip-and-toss?
What meaning in your mystic to-and-fro?

A fragrance from the hills of youth
Sweeps through these swinging boughs…
Some distant music
That has lived long upon the edge of silence.

Some door is opened out of long ago,
Faces look forth from long-forgotten windows.
Faint calls I hear,
Echoes,
And fainter answers,
Across the fields of childhood.

Ah! They were very fair, those fields, those faces,
All changeless now,
All safe and beautiful forever,
Shining like clouds above the hills of sunrise
With early light upon them.

Ye bring me back the golden afternoons
Of some slow-smouldering October,
Elm branches,
Majestically swaying,
Brushing the shadowed doorways of remembrance.

1987 WFU Commencement
May 18, 1987

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

This quadrangle was green with new spring, and I was here for an early and almost solitary Sunday walk. As I entered, I was aware of the pitched chirping of birds. Looking up, I saw that the quad had been invaded by a flock of goldfinches. By the scores—or the hundreds—, they flew like golden bullets through the trees or hung like nugget ornaments on every branch. The quad was magical. I was captivated and captured. The goldfinches stayed and I stayed.

There was a morning engagement. I was giving a talk on Robert Frost. One poem to be read had these famous lines that now ran through my head and heart:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The watch on my arm warned me. I knew this poetic conflict between duty and desire. I stayed until duty could no longer be deferred, and rushed off. I went some miles to keep my promise.

When my remarks came to this winter tale of a ride in the woods, I shared my spring moment with goldfinches—still under its spell. I wanted my smallish audience to know that poets—and philosophers—know what they are talking about occasionally.

That was not, as I had thought, the end of the matter. Nancy Easley Uhl—wife of our faculty member and daughter of Wake Forest institution Allen Easley—told me of another visit of the goldfinches to Wake Forest—at another place and another time. Another Wake Forest president, Dr. William Louis Poteat, had seen a tree of goldfinches and called Mrs. Easley to bring the children. She related this to me in a letter:

When the Easley family moved to “Little Wake Forest” in 1928 Dr. W. L. Poteat (known affectionately as Dr. Billy) had retired as president and taught one biology class. He also taught in an easy informal way I now realize. He shared his stuffed bird collections and his finds like yours last Sunday morning. He showed a Venus Flytrap in the Garden Club show! As a child, I enjoyed all of this.

Young Nancy Easley told her goldfinch story in a childhood poem.

Invitation

Hurry to the Campus
Bring the children
There is a tree filled
With migrating goldfinches

Mother hung the phone up
Calling out to us
Dr. Billy found a tree
That’s full of goldfinches

We circled around
From every angle
Sun on flitting birds
Made the tree glitter

Finding shining moments
I think of the goldfinch tree

She wrote, “It pleases me that the goldfinches still migrate through North Carolina finding the Wake Forest campus wherever it is and its President.”

Because I lack the poet’s muse, my art is but to tell the story. Like the poem, my message to the graduates is in the telling. Each must appropriate a meaning.

May this tale speak to you of your life here and hereafter. May it provoke in you the deepest symbols of the phrase alma mater that Wake Forest now becomes to you and for you.

1986 WFU Commencement
May 19, 1986

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

Socrates told us long ago that education has everything to do with language. Our commerce with the world is mediated by symbols and systems of symbols. The situation is complicated nowadays because new knowledge—or even the accumulation of new facts—imposes on us new sorts of language and/or jargon. Language and concept must expand to meet the extension of human understanding. The discourse of education similarly enlarges and expands.

Whether in philosophy or psychology or law or medicine—students are apprentices to complex and specialized vocabularies. In some cases, courses of study present us with what are literally new languages. In other domains, we learn to understand and interpret new realms of discourse—the symbol systems of numbers or music or poetry or chemistry or physics.

This is where it is particularly important that we understand the centrality of the liberal arts and sciences at Wake Forest. If education consists in the speaking of many languages, we must have the rudiments of a common grammar and vocabulary if the university is to be a university, rather than a modern tower of Babel. As knowledge accumulates and requires ever more specialization and selection in all of our courses of study, the fundamental mastery of the basic skills in the basic discipline becomes ever more urgent.

The faculty—gathered appropriately at the forefront of this assembly—are the protectors of the integrity of discourse in their respective fields. At the same time they desire to see their vocabularies extend. That is part of their motivation to inspire and induct new generations of scholars.

Properly enough, this day belongs to the graduates and their families. In another sense, however, the day belongs also to the faculty. After all, the faculty have taught you to speak their respective languages. Word is but prologue to deed. Therefore, we pray that the faculty has given you a better understanding of the significance of this University’s motto: Pro Humanitate.

Will the faculty please stand and face the graduates so that they and the rest of us may give you the applause you deserve.

To all of you, I say thank you.

1985 WFU Commencement
May 20, 1985

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

My freshman year at Wake Forest coincided with the celebration of our Sesquicentennial. We gave that milestone the honor and ceremony our rich heritage deserved, but we were restless also to prepare for that future yet to be made. Frost said that “the fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” The fact that is the sweet dream of our labor is a Wake Forest which builds its future upon those particular strengths that come from our goodly heritage.

This was then my sophomore year—the time when the newness is over and one settles down to the facts of the labor of electric moments this year—Elie Wiesel’s parables of redemption at Founder’s Day—Jimmy Carter’s forthright interchange in a Wait Chapel packed to the rafters. However, I shall mostly recall from this year a greater sense of familiarity with Wake Forest and its people, and a larger sense of sharing rather than studying and observing. Many of you here assembled have been my sophomore advisors—I am grateful to each and all of you. In the swimming pool, the tennis courts, the quad, group meetings—everywhere in fact except in the pages of the Old Gold & Black—you have made me feel at home among you.

Schools of all sorts have been subjected to public criticism recently. It is said that we have lost our sense of the fundamentals, that we do not teach our students to write or read well, or to think in numbers or concepts with sufficient clarity.

Wake Forest can blunt that sort of criticism. We have not done much tinkering with the fundamentals of our curriculum. Our faculty members realize that the skills of communication are basic to all else.

“Commencement” means not an end but a beginning of a new period in your education. That process should continue throughout your lives. When it does, you brighten the name of Wake Forest as well as your own, and verify the quality of your experience here. The diploma is not a certificate to adorn a wall. It is a passport.

The Sesquicentennial Celebration concluded with a stunning sound and light show in this spot. I hope most of you saw it. This year may have had a less dramatic conclusion, but we have continued to go about our business, which is celebrating the life of the mind. That celebration—of the life of the mind—is what Wake Forest calls upon you to translate into productive, useful lives—lives which exhibit our guiding purpose: Pro Humanitate.

In my message to the graduates last year, I thanked them for helping me understand the Wake Forest spirit. This spirit is a mixture of friendliness and curiosity and fierce independence, coupled with a determination to make real our great visions for this school. I repeat that word of thanks to this class.

I will go on learning about the Wake Forest spirit, and I think each of you will, too. The places of our lives change in remembrance. May your memories of Wake Forest cause you to serve and honor the values of education all your days.

1984 WFU Commencement
May 21, 1984

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

You are, of course, a special class. You have a unique place in the history of our school because this has been our Sesquicentennial Year. You have played a key role in the almost uncountable events—both solemn and carefree—which began last September. I had not taken office as president then, but already from a distance I had begun to follow your journey carefully. Many of you have worked hard and freely given your insight and imagination and candor. I think you will not easily forget this final, taxing year of study and celebration.

I know that I shall not. I cannot believe that any freshman received such friendly and understanding treatment as I did, before and after I took office on October 1. What can I say except to thank you for the many tokens of affection given Mrs. Hearn, our children, and me on the day of my inauguration and on other days thereafter. I do not, however, thank those of you who sang Christmas carols in the front yard—at 3 a.m. The voices I heard were not angelic.

This is my proper opportunity to thank the seniors and graduates, and I gladly take it. But I would like to say again that I am most grateful to President Emeritus Scales. He became my friend quickly. He has given me good advice, and is in all respects the ideal predecessor. He and Mrs. Scales have been gracious beyond the call of duty or even beyond the higher call of friendship.

I thank the University community for helping me understand the Wake Forest spirit. It is a mixture of friendliness and curiosity, and it is fiercely independent. And always there is the determination to make our great visions for this school into reality. I have yet to comprehend our special Wake Forest mystique, but this year has been a grand induction. Just as a new journey begins for you today, one began for me last fall.

I hope we all do well.

I have one observation. In 1934 when Wake Forest was 100 years old, the country was in the midst of the Great Depression, and the College was hard put to keep body and soul and student body together. During the intervening 50 years, there have been enormous changes. There have been three explosions—the nuclear explosion, the population explosion, and the knowledge explosion. The world has lost some of its stability. That is all the more reason we should retain ours.

In the year 2034, Wake Forest will celebrate its 200th birthday. In the name of some future Wake Forest president, I invite you back to Wake Forest to help the University celebrate its bicentennial. In the meanwhile, join me in the works which we must do together to make that future occasion a celebration of our stewardship of dear old Wake Forest.

Again, I thank you for being my friends.