Transcript: Commencement Speech by New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof

Chancellor Cantor, members of the board of trustees, parents and guests, and most important of all,

graduating students:

I hope you students now appreciate that ancient truth, “the tassle is worth the hassle”! And a special

congratulations to all you moms out there: Happy Mothers Day! Pretty awesome way to celebrate, isn’t it

– watch your little baby get that big degree! And for you graduates, just a friendly tip: Your parents are so,

so proud of you right now, which if you’ve learned anything at university means of course that this is an

optimal moment – to ask for money.

I’m especially happy to celebrate with you here in Syracuse for a couple of reasons. First, my late

colleague William Safire was a devoted Syracuse man. Even on our black and white pages, he proudly

bled orange! And this year, Bill would be insufferable, what with SU success in basketball and lacrosse

alike. Truth is, I’m just jealous. Second, what Syracuse is doing under Nancy Cantor with the Scholarship

in Action program is an important reaffirmation of the university as a public good in American life. I

promise not to bore you with a discussion of public goods—economics textbooks are behind you! But the

idea of a public good is central to our history, including public schools and national parks, Sesame Street

and government sponsored science research. Yet we as a country have been inching away from this

vision of shared projects as American wealth has become polarized, with the top 1 percent possessing a

greater net worth today than the bottom 90 percent. The United States has gone from having the best

education system in the world to number 17, according to one recent study. Universities are among the

most important public goods we have, and thank you to SU for your leadership in making that point.

Granted, it’s a tough time to graduate. There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a couple of graduates at

another university. After commencement they jump into a taxi, still in cap and gown. The taxi driver

congratulates them, and they proudly say, Class of 2013. And the taxi driver reaches back and shakes

hands and introduces himself. He’s beaming as he adds, “class of 2003.” In journalism, we call that kind

of story “too good to check.”

Yet in a larger perspective, whatever the challenges of this job market, we’re so lucky to be alive in this

time and place, enjoying this public good of a university education. Let me tell you about a friend of mine,

Tererai Trent. She grew up in rural Zimbabwe and wasn’t allowed to go to school because she was a girl.

So she herded the family cattle in the fields. But she’s brilliant and figured out reading and math from her

brother’s school books, and for several years did his homework for him. But the teacher got suspicious

because the brother was a poor student in class and kept turning in brilliant homework. So the teacher

beat the brother until he confessed, acknowledging that it was his supposedly illiterate sister who did the

homework. That just got everybody mad at her. So Tererai was married off at age 11 to a man who beat

her and was jealous of her intelligence. But Tererai is a reminder of the human capacity for resilience, and

when your own dreams are blocked, I hope you’ll think of her. She wrote down three goals on a piece of

paper and buried the paper inside a tin can under a rock. Her first goal was that she would go to the

United States to study. Second, that she would earn her B.A. and M.A. Third, that she would earn a Ph.D.

These were absurd dreams for an uneducated Zimbabwe cattle herder, but she began secretly studying

and took correspondence courses that she aced, and then was accepted to study at Oklahoma State.

She dug up the tin can, pulled out her list of goals, and checked off number one. Then she earned her BA

and MA, and went back and dug up the can, and checked off number two. And then, two years ago, she

earned a PhD, and went home and dug up the can and checked off the last goal. Now she has used her

own education to start a school of her own in her village in Zimbabwe, because she feels so lucky and

wants to spread that gift of opportunity.

People like Tererai remind me that a basic truth in the world is that talent is universal, but opportunity is

not. You can use your education to chip away at that challenge. You all benefited from opportunities, and

many of you are receiving degrees because you were able to receive financial aid. In the coming years,

as you pay down those debts, you’ll have the chance to pay that forward.

Now, I’m not saying you should all enlist as aid workers. We also need bankers and management

consultants, comedians and computer scientists. But I hope you’ll find some space in your life for

engaging in a cause larger than yourself. Just keep your mind open for moments when you make a

difference.

Think of the Cleveland story that has riveted us this month, of the three young women who had been

kidnapped and enslaved in a house for a decade. When Amanda Berry’s hand snaked through the front

door, groping for freedom, and she began screaming for help, there were two men on the street, one of

them black and the other Latino. It would have been very easy for them to think that she was some crazy

woman, maybe involved in a domestic dispute. Plenty of people would have moved on rather than get

involved in somebody else’s mess. We certainly would have felt uncomfortable trespassing on private

property to step on that porch and ask her what was wrong. But those two men did just that, and then

they took it upon themselves to break down the front door to let her out.

For most of us, the chances to intervene aren’t going to be that dramatic. But you too will encounter

needs and pleas, with the same sense of uncertainty about what to do. You’ll be busy. You’ll have other

demands on your time and money. You can’t help everybody. But it is possible to change other people’s

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life trajectories almost as dramatically as those rescuers in Cleveland did. Maybe it’s through mentoring a

kid in trouble. Or maybe it’s paying for a girl’s schoolbooks at a school like Tererai’s in Zimbabwe. The

point is that I’m hoping that every now and then you’ll use your education to go toward those screams for

help, and climb on those porches, and break down those doors.

And I’m hoping that for your own sake, too. What do we want in life? Well, in large part, it’s to be happy.

We sometimes think if we just win the Powerball lottery, we’ll be set forever. We’ll live on a Caribbean

beach and drink pina coladas. And I guess send annual checks to SU. But the connection between

money and happiness is tenuous, partly because wealth can be isolating. It can make us a bit less

trustful, a bit more introspective. In one University of Minnesota study, research subjects were sometimes

primed to think about money by, for example, a screen saver showing currency floating around. The ones

primed to think about money were more likely to choose to work alone and to sit farther apart from others.

Something similar happened with Jack Whittaker, who in 2002 won a $315 million jackpot, at the time the 

biggest lottery payout ever. He was a business owner in his 50’s, and he said he said he just wanted to

use the money to make his wife and daughter and granddaughter happy. He gave generously to his

church and to a foundation. But then everything pretty much went wrong. He began patronizing strip clubs

and drinking heavily, he divorced his wife and was caught up in hundreds of lawsuits. His daughter died,

perhaps of a drug overdose. And finally his beloved 17-year-old granddaughter, the light of his life, died of

a drug overdose, and he tearfully told reporters: “I wish I’d just torn that ticket up.”

So be careful of what you wish for. I wouldn’t say that money can’t buy happiness, and certainly poverty

can’t either. But the connections are more complicated than we think, and there’s growing evidence that

one of the most dependable ways to raise your happiness set point is to engage with others in a cause

larger than yourself. One longitudinal study in Massachusetts found that generosity correlated more

strongly to life expectancy than cholesterol levels did. So if you’re worried about your heart, along with

statins, maybe try writing checks, or volunteering. Or climb onto porches when you see those

outstretched hands, and help break down doors.

In a larger sense, you yourself can in a sense become a public good. Yup, little old you can add to the

public interest, just like Yellowstone or Sesame Street or SU.

Let me leave you with the story of a friend of mine, a young American aid worker whom I met when she

was working in Darfur. She saw cruelties no human being should ever have to see, and she was

unbelievably strong. She never showed fear, never broke down. And then she was back in the States

over Christmas vacation, in her grandmother’s back yard, and she totally lost it. She was weeping

uncontrollably. And you know what it was? My friend was thinking about the slaughter that she had seen

in Darfur, and her eyes fell on a bird feeder that her grandma had put up. And suddenly she thought how

incredibly lucky she was to grow up in a country where we pretty much take security for granted, where

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even in an economic downturn we take food and clothing and housing for granted – and even have

enough left over to help wild birds get through the winter. And she thought about the responsibilities that

come with that good fortune.

Well, the same is true of us. The fact that we are all here right now truly means that we have won the

lottery of life. We were all born in the right place at the right time, and the implication is that we have some

responsibility to try to pay it forward. So my advice is find some issue that you care about, and in your

spare time try to do a bit of good for the world. There are plenty of selfish pleasures in the world, but

maybe the most selfish of all is altruism. The blunt truth is that our efforts to help others have a pretty

mixed record, but they have an almost perfect record of helping ourselves.

So congratulations, graduates, on this gorgeous Mother’s Day. Go out and change the world just a little

bit. As you bleed orange, go one step further and become bleeding hearts, orange bleeding hearts. Go

and be, like Syracuse University itself, a public good!

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