- COMMENCEMENT 2009
- COMMENCEMENT PROGRAM
- SPEAKER REMARKS
- Hillary Rodham Clinton
- Debora L. Spar
- Anna Quindlen
- Sarah G. Besnoff
- CITATIONS FOR MEDALISTS
- CITATION FOR MEDALIST AND SPEAKER
- IMAGES FOR MEDIA
FOR COMMENCEMENT INQUIRIES
Lillian Appel, Commencement Coordinator
212.854.2024
lappel@barnard.edu
ABOUT COMMENCEMENT
» Past Recipients of the Barnard Medal of Distinction
commencement 2009
The President's Address
DEBORA L. SPAR
Now, you are all graduating, as I'm sure I really don't need to remind you, at a tough time. The bad news is we're in the midst of a really bad recession. The worse news, I'm afraid, is this recession is global, it's not getting any better, and no one knows how to fix it.
However, there is good news here. These are Barnard women. The good news—and I'm going to obviously try and tell you that there's good news here—is that this is actually a fascinating time in which to be graduating. No, let me make this argument. It is a particularly fascinating time to be venturing out into the world, as you all are, trying to figure out how the world works and what role you want to play in it, because what's happening right now is that all of the rules are changing in ways that are not yet clear but will almost certainly be profound.
We have, as you all know, a black man in the White House. We have a woman, very recently with us, running the Department of State. More subtly, job layoffs—and we know that they're big and very, very bad—are actually hitting men more than women in this recession. Don't cheer for that, all right? But what they are doing is that they're changing work patterns across the country and in millions of individual households. More importantly, we are witnessing the failure—and increasingly the acknowledged failure—of the dominant political and economic models of the past 20 years and, arguably, the past 60 years.
Now, this may sound way too grim for what are supposed to be celebratory remarks, but let me suggest that these changes, tough though they may be, actually create a time of great possibility for young women of your generation, and a rare moment of truly great expectations, because think of what's actually going on in the world that you are going to venture out into tomorrow.
The growth sectors in this economy are largely in those industries—healthcare, education, government—that have typically been either dominated by women or more receptive to women. By contrast, the industries that have typically and traditionally been dominated by men—think about automobiles, finance—are going to have to be radically restructured and probably reconceived. Somebody is going to have to figure out how to build a better Wall Street, and how to make a radically different kind of car—smaller, cleaner, more fuel efficient. These are fascinating, vital, and monumental tasks. Why shouldn't they be tackled by women? Why shouldn't they be tackled by Barnard women?
In the field of science, new teams, empowered by recent federal support, are going to continue to unlock the vast potential of stem-cell technologies. Within a decade, I suspect, somebody is going to cure a horrible disease like diabetes or Parkinson's based on cells derived solely from the patient's own, miraculously turned into cures. One Barnard graduate is already working on finding a stem-cell-based cure for ALS. Another grad, pioneering work on another disease, could well be with us in the audience today.
Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, all of the graduates assembled here today and, indeed, every one of us here today, are moving into an era in which deeply embedded notions of power and authority are going to be called into sharp relief. For the past several decades, the dominant ideology of American society stressed that power lay in the market, in the invisible hand that rewarded hard work and smart ideas. We can argue, if you'd like, over a drink later, whether this was a correct or incorrect ideology. We can debate whether it delivered positive or negative outcomes. What is incontrovertible, though, is that this world view is gone, and that a new one is going to have to be created.
In the process, we—you—are going to have to redefine how markets work and why they fail. You are going to have to rethink the basic connection between business and government, between the power of the state and private industry. You are going to have to reconceive the basic meanings of success and what it means to live in a prosperous society. These are big tasks with even bigger implications. Why shouldn't they be tackled and broached and ultimately solved by Barnard women?
I graduated college in 1984. It was a time of relative prosperity and political stability. It was safe, but it was boring. So I found myself, to my parents' shock, visiting Poland a lot in the mid-1980s, observing the rise of Solidarity and the embrace of democracy and market capitalism going on there. And then I found myself in South Africa, watching, every year now since the mid-1990s, how this extraordinary country has dealt with the end of apartheid and the embrace of a truly multicultural identity. In both of those countries, in both of those moments of time, I felt the sense of change, and I wanted to be part of it.
I hadn't felt that sense until November 4th in this country, when, like most of you, I joined the crowds on Broadway and confessed to my son that I had never experienced anything like that night in my life in this country, because what I felt and I saw on Broadway was what I had felt earlier in Poland and in South Africa: a sense of change; a palpable sense of possibility, of turning, as our speaker today so clearly embodies, the impossible into the real.
Very few generations have the luck to come of age during a massive inflection point in history, during a time when things move so quickly you can actually see them, and when individuals have the opportunity to change not only the course of their own lives but the course of the world around them. This time, your time, is one of those moments. Seize it.
On behalf of the trustees, faculty and administration of Barnard College, I congratulate you, the class of 2009.
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