Chancellor Martin's remarks
August 29, 2008 — Watch video of the convocation ceremony
Good morning. Good afternoon. Hello, Badgers!
Cheers and applause
We're here to share your excitement — our excitement — about being Badgers, but before we get to that, I want to say something about why our enthusiasm this morning is a little bit dampened by our sadness.
As many of the know, three students from UW-Madison were killed this week in a car accident, early Wednesday morning. Today our thoughts and prayers go out to the families and friends of Lindsey Plank, Richard Putze and Daniel Myers. All three were exceptional people, and had already made their mark on UW-Madison, two in chemistry, and one in music. I'd like to ask you to join me in a moment of silence in memory of our three students.
Pause
Thank you.
Now I'd like to begin by introducing to you the people on the stage with me. First of all, let me explain that every year we have an essay contest. Students are asked to submit essays about your experiences at UW-Madison, and I as chancellor had the privilege of choosing the winner. You'll hear from the winner in a few minutes, but let me introduce to you Kim Roberts.
Applause
You're also going to hear in a few minutes from alder Eli Judge who is sitting on the stage with Kim Roberts.
Applause.
I'd like you to help me recognize and celebrate the runners-up in the essay contest in the front row. Richard Duffy and Emily Piehl.
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Finally on the stage this morning is the dean of students, Lori Berquam. Lori?
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The Offices of the Dean of Students and the staff in the Dean of Students are here to help you in any way possible and make your education successful. Whatever kinds of help you need, please think of the Dean of Students Office and Lori's staff as the first place to go. I hope you'll be seeing a lot of her and her staff.
Okay. Well, how excited are you to be a Badger?
Cheers and applause
I'm very excited to be a Badger too, and I'm just as new as you are. I moved in just a week ago, and I'm delighted to be here as the new chancellor.
We're starting together, and you, the Class of 2012, are always going to be very special to me because we start this journey together.
You're beginning a great adventure, and the first thing I want to do is congratulate you for being here. It's a highly selective institution, and you are to be congratulated. We're here this morning together to celebrate this beginning of your adventure and to celebrate you.
The University of Wisconsin, as you know, is known the world over for the quality of its faculty and students. Faculty and alumni have won 17 Nobel prizes and 34 Pulitzer Prizes.
From Harry Steenbock who discovered how to store Vitamin D, to Jamie Thomson who discovered stem cells in 1999, UW faculty and academic staff have been making discoveries that have improved the lives of countless human beings, or that had the potential to improve our lives in the future.
Their work drives economic development for the region and the state and continually reinvigorates and enriches our culture.
UW-Madison is home not only to path-breaking research but to legendary teachers and advisers, and in addition to them, student life staff who care about providing you with the best possible education in the classroom and outside of it.
We're extremely lucky to have you as students at UW-Madison, but you're also fortunate to be here. We live in a world in which higher education has never been more important. Nations all over the world are investing enormous sums of money in higher education, many of them using the American model, and indeed our system of higher education in the United States may turn out to be one of our most valuable exports, and promising forms of diplomacy.
The global knowledge community and the interconnectedness of the world make it highly desirable for people to get their education at research universities with connections all over the globe. The competition for places at research universities is incredibly fierce. And you are here, Class of 2012, because you have proven that you have the this talent, the backgrounds and the achievements to carve out a successful path at this university.
You have enormous opportunities in front of you. You also face enormous challenges as a generation and a class. Those challenges are too many to list, but they include, of course, threats to the environment, the need for new energy sources, struggling economies over the world, lack of affordable health care, an absence of reasoned and informed debate, and violent cultural and religious conflict.
The point I want to make you to this morning, in a world of this sort, is that simply having a diploma is not enough. It will not suffice. Yes, the data shows that having a college degree will significantly increase your income over those who don't have degrees, and the data shows that you'll have better health and incomes, but you need more than a diploma or a degree.
You need a range of skills and abilities and a passionate, passionate sense of curiosity. Not only will your employers demand these things of you going forward, but the world asks you to have these abilities and skills, and your lives will be greatly enhanced by acquiring them.
So what kinds of skills and abilities do I mean? The world is full of information and your generation knows better than any generation before you how to make that information available, how to access it. You're better equipped and more skillful, certainly than I am, and many members of my generation.
But all of us need to learn how to distinguish information from knowledge, knowledge from insight, and all of us need to learn better how to turn insight into our own discoveries and our own thoughts. Knowledge and insight, unlike information, require an understanding of history and context. They require integrative thinking.
What is integrative thinking? It's the ability to synthesize information from a range of sources and to sift through the glut of data in search of meaningful, logical and truthful connections. You're going to find help doing that sort of thinking in every discipline at the university. But the real trick is to take what you are learning in each different discipline and synthesize that and apply it to your own lives.
I want to urge you, by the way, to look for integrative thinking in a place that is less and less popular in the culture, and that is in the reading of literature. How many of you like to read novels or poetry? Yes! What's wrong with the rest of you?
Listen, let me just emphasize that literature is a place where synthesis occurs naturally, even if by artifice, and reading literature will enhance your ability to make connections and understand things in their complexity. To succeed in the world, you're going to need strong and complex analytical skills. Understanding of science and the Socratic method. Read, communicate clearly, and those of you who can communicate clearly in more than one language are going to have a leg up in this global knowledge economy. You need to write well, think critically, appreciate beauty, take risks, to imagine what has never been imagined before.
You'll need to be able to work in teams with people who have very different backgrounds and points of view, and you're going to need not only to tolerate or understand people with very different backgrounds and points of view, you're going to need to be able to celebrate those differences as a source of dynamism and a key to it in the future. We're all going to need to improve our knowledge of ourselves, and that kind of knowledge is probably the hardest to come by. All of this may sound daunting, the skills, abilities, capacities that I urge you to develop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but you have the ability to achieve it, and a lot more.
Let me tell you a little bit about who you are, and why I'm so confident that you can achieve these things, and a great deal more. You were selected from 25,586 applicants. There are 5,700 of you, approximately, who are enrolled. Twelve hundred of you are first-generation college students. Let's have a show of hands of first-generation college students. Fantastic.
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I'm a first-generation college graduate, and I understand both the thrills and the challenges of being a first-generation college student. Fifty-nine percent of you were in the top 10 percent of your class. Let me repeat. Fifty-nine percent of you were in the top 10 percent of your class. Fifty-eight percent of you said you want to study abroad. I hope even more of you do, and 335 of you are from countries outside the United States. Let's see a show of hands of international students. Welcome.
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Now let me list the states from which most of our students have come. First of all, we have 3,375 students from the great state of Wisconsin! And then in order of numbers, Minnesota.
Cheers and applause
Illinois
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New York, whoo! All right, there are not that many of us yet. California. New Jersey. Loud, but small in numbers. Massachusetts. Yay! Maryland. Is there no one here from Virginia? Yes. There are a range of states that have sent only one single student, and if you're here from those states, please stand. Vermont. Yes, in the back. Utah. No? It's a long way from Utah.
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Rhode Island. North Dakota. One student from North Dakota. Are you here? New Mexico. Up there, way up. Delaware. Yes, over here. Louisiana. No? Yes! Idaho, Idaho right here in the middle. Arkansas. Scanning, no. Wyoming. Where is our one person from Wyoming? Over here. Welcome to all of you. You are incredibly fortunate to be among such a variety of people, among so many people with a variety of backgrounds.
On Wednesday I visited some of you in Ogg and Sellery Hall when you were moving in, and I felt right at home among the suitcases and efforts you were making to find your way around, because as I said, I, too, am new here. I just moved to Madison, and I'm not nearly as far along at moving in as you were. Beginnings are exciting. They fill us with promise and hope.
They can also be anxiety-producing. We lean heavily on a secure and intuitive sense of place, and when we're uprooted, it can cause confusion and disorientation. In addition to the excitement and promise and hope, how many have felt some disorientation, anxiety or confusion while you've been here? Yeah. Me too. So congratulations to those hearty ones who didn't raise your hands and to the honest ones who did, I know that we're going to experience a range of things as we go forward.
I'm not actually entirely new to UW-Madison. I got my Ph.D. here. I came here in the late '80s because of the German department. How many of you came here because of the German department at UW-Madison? Yes. I doubt that it's the reason most of you came here, but I want to extend a dinner invitation to anyone for whom the German department was one of your top five reasons for coming to UW-Madison, so see me after the convocation.
I went on to make my professorial career at Cornell, and I was happily performing my duties as chief operating officer of Cornell when I was nominated for the position of chancellor of UW-Madison, and it was an opportunity I couldn't resist. Why could I not resist coming back to UW-Madison? It's an extraordinary privilege to lead a university with Wisconsin's history, values, excellent value, public mission, legendary achievements in athletics and extracurricular activities.
I wonder how you made your decision to come here? I want to tell you that my decision was based on not only what a great university this is, and my experiences as a student. I'm going to tell you a little bit about those experiences. When I was thinking about the possibility of this job, I found myself dreaming about the years I spent here. I remembered the intellectual and political debates then about the big issues of the day. I remember the extraordinary professors I had, a number of whom subsequently became friends and colleagues. I thought about the spiritedness of the student body. Students covered Bascom Hill with pink flamingos. Have any of you seen pictures of that? That happened when I was here. Students created a sculpture of the Statue of Liberty on Lake Mendota, rising up out of it or sinking into it, depending on your point of view.
I met a friend at a McDonald’s in 1978 that used to be near Van Hise Hall. I tried and failed to learn sailing. I tried and succeeded to learn cross-country skiing in the Arboretum. I loved the natural beauty of the campus, walking on Lakeshore Path, quiet moments at Picnic Point. I loved walking to class on State Street with the most beautiful Capitol building in the country at my back, and a stunning university campus in front of me, and the proximity of the Capitol and the university has always made Madison a center of political debate, but also of culture and creativity. And of course I remembered the festivities on Capitol Square and State Street.
Once you've been on State Street on Halloween, you never forget it. I loved the time I spent in the state of Wisconsin. Camping trips to Door County. Shakespeare performances at Spring Green. The state fair in Milwaukee. Bakeries in New Glarus. Driving through the beautiful farmland and the woods. My experiences as a student were a powerful reason why I sought and accepted the job here as chancellor, and they are also the basis for a number of wishes I have for you.
I hope you also get to know professors and teaching assistants. I hope you seek them out. Make it a goal each semester to go to the office hours of at least one teaching assistant and one professor. You're going to have to take the initiative yourselves. It's not high school anymore.
I hope you find your own ways to invent fun and safe things to do. Don't just accept the prevailing definitions of what constitutes fun and what is a thriving social life. I hope that you enjoy one another, and that you too make lifelong friendships, and take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get to know people from backgrounds as varied as yours are.
We depend increasingly on social and professional networks that extend around the world, so your experiences with one another will not only be personally enriching, they will be important to your future well being.
I hope occasionally you'll unplug from all of the technologies and gadgets that we love. I certainly love them. But I hope you'll unplug from them and the hubbub of your social lives and cultivate the spirit, and the quiet and natural beauty of this place. I hope you enjoy the city of Madison and the state of Wisconsin, even those of you who grew up here. We're in one of the liveliest and most livable cities in the United States, and we're in a place where people still value hard work and substance over form and glamour.
Let me repeat what I said at the beginning: I urge you to get more than a degree. I urge you to claim an education. Learn to love ideas and learn to love what it feels like to produce them in your own mind. Think about intellectual achievements in the model of sports. We are amazed, even awed, by Olympic and Big Ten athletes and what they can do with their bodies. While you're here, you're going to have the opportunity to see extraordinary athletes, and indeed, some of you in this room are those extraordinary athletes.
While you’re here, I want you also to learn the thrill of mental or intellectual athleticism as you witness it in others and experience it in yourselves. Push yourselves to see what your minds can actually do and exercise those minds often. Use them or lose them, that's what the health experts tell us.
Be a Badger in your approach to ideas. Be fierce and persistent; do the digging or rooting that is required to get at the heart of things; and learn to sort and differentiate, separate the wheat from the chaff, the true ideas from the trivial. Take your learning outside of the classroom. Be part of the Wisconsin Idea and the Wisconsin Experience. Extend what you learned beyond the classroom, and seek knowledge in experiences beyond the campus. There are endless opportunities for that kind of learning here. We refer to those opportunities in our commitment to providing them as the Wisconsin Experience.
Take advantage of the programs that allow you to engage in public service, to study abroad, to do independent research with faculty researchers. Do field work, join one of thousands of organizations, start your own organization. Get engaged. Register to vote, claim your education.
Be a Badger in one other way. Badgers are famous for their protectiveness. They're apparently good parents and good caretakers. So be a Badger in this way too. Let's try to take care of one another. University life is exciting, it's fun, it's fantastic, especially at UW-Madison, but this is not a journey that you're expected to take alone.
There will be times that are difficult. Things happen. Almost all of us have times when we feel dispirited or discouraged. Many experience periods of depression and other emotional, psychological, as well as physical illnesses. When you do, if you do, seek help. Do not let the stigma associated with needing help get in your way. We do not accept that stigma here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Seek help from your friends, from your teachers, from your advisers, your house fellows. From the outstanding staff at the Dean of Students Office and from our counseling services.
In addition to seeking help for yourself when you need it, look out for others. Look out for others. Help us build a community in which people care for one another, in which we notice one another, and we notice when someone is in trouble, when somebody is hurting, whether that person is a good friend or not. Lend an ear, extend a hand. Help that person find what he or she may need in the way of support, and challenge your friends and your peers not to put yourselves in danger.
Be fierce about safety as well as about fun. Let's try together not to let anyone fall through the cracks at this large university. Let's try compassion, let's try love, and let's make those things compatible with fun, diversity, differences of opinion and a lively exchange of views. Above all, have a wonderful time, welcome, I look forward to seeing and interacting with you, and I look forward to congratulating you here at commencement in four years. Thank you very much.
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