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June 12, 2005 by David K. Jordan, Ph.D. Professor of Anthropology Emeritus and former Provost, Warren College Professor Jordan received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1969, the same year he joined the faculty at UCSD. From 1994 until his retirement in 2004 he served as Provost of Warren College. His academic interests center in cultural and psychological anthropology, sociolinguistics, and the cross-cultural study of religion. He has published on language, social structure, folk religion, and sectarianism in Taiwan and China. He enjoys writing in and about Esperanto and the associated area of interlinguistics. He has taught the first quarter of The Making of the Modern World (MMW-1) almost every year since Eleanor Roosevelt College was founded in 1988. Dr. Jordan's website for MMW-1 has introduced thousands of ERC students to an eclectic collection of valuable information and resources related to the course.
Let me start with some background for the parents and friends in attendance: There is no higher-profile feature of Eleanor Roosevelt College than the MMW sequence, which stands for “Making of the Modern World” and aims to review the Human Career and how we have come to the situation we are in. Students who entered as freshman graduate only if they complete the whole sequence. Transfer students who graduate from ERC have had at least half the sequence. Now I shall address the graduates. For about a third of you, the professor who walked into your life on your first day of MMW-1 was a shadowy figure, known by his reputation as The Dreaded Jordan. That’s me. I was the author of much of what you read that quarter, the object of many of your jokes and your curses, and for some of you I was the source of that creepy sense of violation that comes when a professor turns out to know your name. I was famed among you for a web site that extended clear to the horizon, for exams composed in league with the devil, and for lectures that seemed longer than Lent. And I irreverently referred to the MMW sequence as Moo (which is how it’s pronounced in Welsh). Mine was the first lecture you heard, and now it is the last as well. If it was weird going in, it is weird going out. But this time the devil’s off for the summer, so there won’t be an exam. In Moo we tried to teach you all sorts of things that you have long forgotten in detail, but have often assimilated in broad outline. Today my message is quite different, far more personal, and rather un-Moo-like. As you finish your time in college there is naturally a great sense of accomplishment and congratulations from friends and relations. You have obviously done well. But this is also a time for some regrets, a time to reflect, “if I had known then, what I know now …” followed by some bit of advice you sort of wish you could give your past self. If I had known when I entered college what I know now when I am graduating, you reflect: If I had known then, what I know now … If I had known then, what I know now … If I had known then, what I know now … That wonderful formula, “If I had known then what I know now" is the flip side of advice, the advice you should have been given but weren’t, or the advice you were probably given when you weren’t paying attention, or the advice you got but didn’t believe. “If I had known then what I know now" represents opportunities lost and paths not taken. To be blunt, you already blew it on the office hours thing. And the credit card thing. And the reading on time thing. And probably the soccer team thing. And the Brazil thing. And all those other things. Oh, if only you’d known then what you know now …! Fortunately, you still did fine. First lesson for today: Good advice is an excellent thing., but you obviously don’t need to follow all of it. But that’s all water over the dam, as they say. Let’s look ahead and imagine what advice you would be giving yourself now from the perspective of many years from now. What would you be telling yourself on your college graduation day if you were looking back at the age of 90 and muttering “If I had known then what I know now"? After all, old people are famous for their wisdom, and surely when you are old you too will be wise. What will you wish then you could have told your graduation-day self today? To start to figure this out, let me review some advice, direct and indirect, that I have received over the years from old people, advice that I never thought about when I graduated from college. But advice I have decided since that I should have noticed back then. I have organized this as a series of six family stories. Each one except the last is shorter than the one before it. ANECDOTE 1. An old uncle told me when I was a boy, “Boy, he said —he called me Boy because he was very old and very old people can get away with that sort of thing — Boy, if ever you are feeling down in the dumps, let me tell you one thing that ought to cheer you up: At your age, you’ve still got your own teeth.” I must confess I hadn’t thought of that quite that way before. It’s become kind of a life Take Home Lesson with me. When the going gets tough, it is sometimes very stabilizing to think to yourself, “Well, at least I’ve still got my own teeth.” Teeth for him were, of course, a metaphor for health in general, and for youth as well, and for the possibilities that health and youth make available. My parents spent their last years in an old people’s home. Each meal brought weak and tottery people from the “healthy wing” of the facility into the dining room, leaning on their walkers, some bearing oxygen tanks, while the staff carried meals to others in the “shut-in” wing of the facility. On the day my father turned 90, I asked him point blank, “What does it feel like to be so all-fired OLD?” He paused for only the slightest moment, and then answered, “Well, if I were thirty year’s younger, I’d say I had the flu.” When I returned to San Diego, I immediately called a travel agent and booked an excursion to the Peruvian Amazon. And ever since I have preferred taking the stairs rather than riding in elevators, just to rejoice in the fact that I still have the capacity, and parking at the far end of the parking lot to enjoy the fact that I don’t need to be close. And using the campus shuttle only when it is raining. Your strength and your health are great but temporary treasures. Use them and appreciate them, and do not hasten their passing. Take Home Lesson. Rejoice in having your own teeth. ANECDOTE 2. Not all the good ideas that come from old people come as words. Our family has various little rituals, as families do. And some of these too represent the wisdom of older people. Let me tell you about one that relates to graduation. It began during the dark days of the Great Depression, when my Uncle Hubert graduated from college. After the family returned home from the graduation ceremony, Uncle Hubert’s father, my grandfather, got out a long piece of red ribbon. He tied one end to Uncle Hubert’s belt buckle. The other end he tied to his own pocket book. And with a large sewing scissors, he ceremoniously cut the ribbon in the middle, declaring this act to be the “severing of the financial umbilical cord.” Uncle Hubert was now a college graduate. He had come of age. Henceforth he would need to earn his own keep. It is a ceremony that has been repeated with every subsequent graduation in our family. This too, is the wisdom of the ancients. I of course recommend that when you return home this evening you also perform the ceremony of the severing of the financial umbilical cord. But whether you do or not, the realization of financial adulthood should already be upon you. Financial independence is a major milestone, one of the most important you will ever cross. Take Home Lesson. Sever the umbilical cord. ANECDOTE 3. Let me tell you some wisdom I learned from Crazy Aunt Ethyl. Aunt Ethyl was raised by a very strict stepmother who was suspicious about everything and everybody. When Ethyl married, her stepmother told her to avoid her in-laws because in-laws try to run your life. Avoid neighbors too, who will try to pry into your affairs. And never trust people trying to help you, heal you, or sell you things.” All through her life Ethyl followed that advice. She was suspicious and stand-offish, and given to bizarre worries. And sometimes in her emotional isolation she would go out into the garden and beat hell out of the geraniums. Everybody thought she was crazy. Crazy Aunt Ethyl turned 96 this year. In her old age she is full of regret. “The family was ready to love me,” she told me, “and I never let them. You have to trust people,” she went on. “You can’t be stupid about it, but trust is the beginning of love; without trust, life is a lot harder than it needs to be.” And she wept. And she beat the geraniums. The lesson is clear. Humans are social animals, just as we taught you in MMW-1. In the absence of social connections humans become miserable. Take Home Lesson. Trust other people. Don’t beat the geraniums. ANECDOTE 4. Aunt Hazel was the exact opposite of Crazy Aunt Ethyl. Aunt Hazel would be 105 if she were still alive this year. Hazel had a good deal of tragedy in her life and her death was a lurid murder. Throughout her life Hazel made a point of seeing the positive side of everything. I took her out to dinner when she turned 70. She dressed entirely in white for the occasion, but she ordered spaghetti. In the course of dinner she dropped her fork, and the red sauce splattered all over her immaculate white dress, and people at other tables turned to look. Surveying the damage, she said brightly, “Doesn’t the red tomato sauce look pretty on a white background?!” Lesson. There is a positive side to everything, even disasters. Dwelling on the positive makes life a lot more pleasant. When we left the restaurant, people whom we didn’t even know made sure to say goodbye to Hazel. A bright outlook is a magnet for human affection. Take Home Lesson. Spaghetti sauce looks nice on white. ANECDOTE 5. A voice that echoes down through the generations is that of my great, great, great grandfather, who was born during the Jefferson administration and who is particularly remembered in the family for wasting time and not amounting to much. Great, Great, Great Grandfather on his 96th birthday in about 1885 is said to have looked down at his 9-year-old great, great, grandson (my grandfather) and to have remarked, “You know, they always say ‘Business before pleasure,” but I’m 96 years old today. If I’m going to enjoy anything, I reckon I’d better be about it.” In other words, don’t put off worthy projects or true enjoyment of life. Not marriage, not adventure, not a career you can love. If Great, Great, Great, Grandfather had put off marriage as he put off everything else, I shudder to think what would have become of Great, Great Grandfather, and of Great Grandfather, and of Grandfather, and of Father, and of me. Take Home Lesson. Don’t put stuff off. ANECDOTE 6. In the last few years of their mission together on this earth my parents went about distributing strange little cards to friends and strangers alike. Each card contained the same simple little text, one that Mother had composed and Father had photocopied over and over. Mother called the text her “philosophy.” It was a slightly saccharine, overly simplistic, rather obvious little passage urging people to be tolerant and to be constructive. My sisters and I were occasionally amused and often embarrassed when our ancient parents forced their home-made tract into the hands of such captive audiences as traffic policemen and museum guards, bank tellers and people innocently standing beside them in check-out lines. They were too charming to resist, but too eccentric to take seriously. I suspect they tended to be dismissed as harmless crackpots, and they made us want to hide and pretend we didn’t know them. But here is what the card said:
That was the text, simple, and silly, and obvious … and necessary … and difficult. The hard part, of course, is the bit about responsibility at the end. It’s easy and often mindless to preach tolerance, especially when what we are asked to tolerate is far away. It is a thankless but equally important task to preach responsibility. Take Home Lesson. How you act is what you are responsible for. So this then is a first approximation of what you will be wishing at the age of 90 that you had paid more attention to when you graduated from college. Happily you know already know it:
It’s hardly a complete list. When you return home, ask older people what they wish they had known a generation or two ago. You’ll get a different list. After all, every old person is a library, and every family generates its own wisdom. Your time at UCSD has changed what you do, what you say, and how you act because it has changed your abilities. You have better resources than you have ever had before to do more, to speak with greater wisdom, and to act in ways that contribute to the general welfare. Today’s ceremony celebrates these new abilities, and especially that portion of them for which UCSD can claim direct responsibility and for which we therefore can appropriately share your justifiable pride. In my quality as the Dreaded Jordan, and on behalf of all my colleagues in Moo and of all the others who have contributed to your years here, I congratulate you, I thank you, and I hold the highest expectations about you. May your parents, and all those whose lives you touch, rejoice in you. And may you ever be worthy to accept the trust and the love of others. And may you never beat hell out of the geraniums. |