Historian
Doris Kearns Goodwin urges Barnard College Class
of 2000 to seek balance among work, love and play
May
16, 2000, NEW
YORK, N.Y. - Achieving a balance between work, love
and play is the key to a satisfying life, Pulitzer
Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told
558 members of the Barnard College Class of 2000
in a graduation ceremony today.
Under
sunny skies with a light, cooling breeze, an estimated
3,000 parents, siblings, grandparents, friends,
faculty and administration, crowded onto Lehman
Lawn to watch the class of 2000 be presented for
the degree of bachelor of arts by Dorothy S. Denburg,
Dean of the College. (The students will receive
their degrees at the Columbia University commencement
Wednesday.)
Goodwin,
who received the Barnard Medal of Distinction along
with Hanna Holborn Gray, Annie Liebovitz and Kathie
Olsen, spoke to the graduates about the struggle
for balance in life by contrasting the closing chapters
in the lives of Lyndon B. Johnson and Eleanor Roosevelt,
both of whose lives she has chronicled.
She
was introduced by Richard Pious, Adolf S. and Effie
Ochs Professor of Political Science, who noted Goodwin
was not only "an elegant biographer and an ebullient
TV commentator" but "also the first woman journalist
to enter the Red Sox dugout."
On
the surface, Goodwin said, Johnson should have been
happy in retirement. "Yet the man I saw in retirement
had spent so many years in pursuit of work, power
and individual success that he had absolutely no
psychic or emotional resources left to commit himself
to anything once the Presidency was taken from him."
By
contrast, Roosevelt's last days "provided a sharp
contrast. All her life she had taken great pleasure
in her daily work, in using her power and celebrity
to help others less fortunate than she … As a consequence
at the end of her life she was neither haunted nor
saddened by what might have been; on the contrary,
she sustained an active engagement with the world
until her very last days."
The
lesson, she said, reflected one taught by her teacher
at Harvard, Erik Erikson, "that the richest and
fullest lives attain an inner balance comprised
of work, love and play in equal order, that to pursue
one to the disregard of the others is to open oneself
to ultimate sadness in older age whereas to pursue
all three with equal dedication is to make possible
an old age filled with serenity, peace and fulfillment."
Goodwin
chronicled her own balance, defined by the "intertwined
loves of history and baseball," nurtured by the
hours spent with her father discussing the Brooklyn
Dodgers, and passed on to her own children with
the help of season tickets to the Red Sox games.
And she warned graduates that "it will be the great
challenge of your generation to restore childhood
to our children, without losing the liberating impulses
swhich have brought women into the world of work,
perhaps the most important social trend of the past
century."
She
concluded: "I would like to leave each of you with
the hope that as you make your own choices over
time, you will choose in such a way that allows
your drive for achievement to be balanced by an
equal commitment to love and to play, to family,
friends and community. I hope that when you are
old and gray and full of sleep, as the poet William
Butler Yeats once wrote, that you can say that your
goal in life was not the perfection of work alone,
but the perfection of a life," Goodwin told the
graduates.
Goodwin
won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for history for her
book No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt:
The Home Front During World War II. The book also
won the Harold Washington Library Award, the New
England Bookseller Association Award, the Ambassador
Book Award and the Washington Monthly Book Award.
Judith
Shapiro, president of the College, told students
they had acquired the intellectual resources needed
to translate ideas into action.
"Real
change comes about only when individual actions
and initiatives are tied to a larger plan and purpose,"
said Shapiro. "Through your Barnard education, you
have developed a sense of the bigger picture, which
forms a context for your civic activism. You have
engaged in the sort of research and study that allows
you to search beneath the surface of an issue and
understand the social and historical forces that
have shaped it. You are prepared to question prevailing
assumptions - social, political, economic, and scientific
assumptions. You know what it means to take a principled
approach to answering the questions you have posed
"You
are ready to cross the bridge from serious moral
commitment to effective political participation.
You will be among those writing our laws, formulating
our public policies, transforming our institutions,
educating us and nurturing our spirits through your
creative achievements. You will be shaping your
world - and mine. And I have great faith in what
you have in store for me."
Elizabeth
S. Boylan, conveying greeting from the faculty,
urged graduates to seek their own version of consilience
- a word reintroduced into the lexicon by biologist
E.O. Wilson, and referring to the drive to unify
all knowledge. Gayle Robinson, chair of the Board
of Trustees, told the graduates she would see them
in 25 years - at her own 50th reunion.
Fiza
Quraishi, president of the Student Government Association,
urged her fellow students to remain open to change.
"We hear about Barnard women going out and changing
the world and we are told that we, too, can change
the world with our education and the leadership
experiences we have gained here. We need to remember,
however, that the most effective change comes when
we look into ourselves." Her own answer, she said,
"is to try and resist the ease of falling into a
myopic routine of life, working with my nose to
the grindstone instead of stepping away from my
work, at least metaphorically, and indulging in
the variables that the future has to offer."
Melissa
Marrus, senior class president, likened the students'
experience at Barnard to Dorothy in the land of
Oz, but with a twist - the students left Oz a better
place. "Among the many improvements that we have
helped to institute are the recycling program, one
of the best sexual misconduct policies in the nation,
a move toward socially responsible investing, the
elimination of the 18 credit limit, and so much
more. None of this could have happened without us-we
saw a problem and went out to fix it, with the support
of the administration and faculty. While Dorothy
was out looking for home, we were looking to make
our home a better place for everyone." Marrus was
also awarded by vote of her classmates the Frank
Gilbert Bryson Prize awarded to the senior who has
demonstrated "conspicuous evidence of unselfishness
and who has made the greatest contribution to Barnard
during her college career."
Jennifer
M. Hensley, selected by a committee of students
and staff to offer academic reflections, said that
just as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington,
D.C., now has a virtual counterpart - so, too, the
experiences of the Class of 2000 at Barnard "will
no longer be confined to the space within the Barnard
gates." Instead, she said, they will be reconstructed
in memory, and thus endure. She told the class,
"The memories are not leaving us, they are merely
changing shape."
Also
receiving the Barnard Medal of Distinction were:
Hanna
Holborn Gray, the former president of the University
of Chicago and the first woman president of a major
research university, has provided strong and inspired
leadership to some of our nation's finest colleges
and universities. Awarded the Presidential Medal
of Freedom in 1991, she is esteemed for her exceptional
contributions to higher education and to civic life.
She was presented for the medal by John Furth, a
trustee, and vice chairman of Klingenstein, Fields
& Co. LLC.
Annie
Leibovitz is an American photographer best known
for her portraits of celebrities. Born in Westport,
Connecticut, in 1949, she received a bachelor of
fine arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute
in 1971. From 1970 to 1983 she was a freelance photographer
and the chief photographer for Rolling Stone. She
was also the concert-tour photographer for the Rolling
Stones in 1975. She has close connections to Vanity
Fair, and in the early 1990s, she founded the Annie
Leibovitz Studio in New York City. She was presented
for the medal by Angel A. Chang, a senior who majored
in art history.
Kathie
Olsen graduated with honors from Chatham College
and received her Ph.D. in Biology from the University
of California. She was also a postdoctoral fellow
at Harvard Medical School from 1979-80. Olsen is
a chief scientist at NASA and has developed a distinguished
career as both a neuroscientist (working in behavioral
neuroendocrinology) and as science administrator
at the National Science Foundation (NSF). She founded
the NSF's program for behavioral neuroendocrinology
and doubled funding during a six-year period. Olsen
also serves as the administrator's senior scientific
advisor and principal interface with the national
and international scientific community. She was
presented for the medal by Peter Balsam, the Samuel
R. Milbank Professor of Psychology.
Full
Text of President Judith Shapiro's Speech
Full Text of Fiza Quraishi's
Speech
Full Text of Melissa Marrus'
Speech
Jen Hensley Commencement
Address May 16, 2000
Barnard students celebrate
Columbia University commencement
Special Congratulations
For
immediate release Contact: Lucas Held, Barnard College,
212-854-7583
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