Remarks by Lee A. Witters on the Occasion of Class Day for the Dartmouth College Class of 2002

Posted 06/08/02

Good morning to the Class of 2002 and their families & friends. Coming to the Dartmouth Medical School in 1985 as a physician, biochemical researcher and teacher of medical students, I had no idea that my career path would lead me into this world of the undergraduate. That journey has contained the most cherished and rewarding moments of my professional life…and this morning represents for me the apex of that journey. Thank you all very much for inviting me into your world.Swayne wins Wilson fellowship for

The Class of 2002….the palindromic class. We shall not see your like again….for 110 years! When some of your daughters and sons return then for their 80th Dartmouth reunion, things will likely be very different, although construction will still be ongoing in the Berry Library and after 110 years a tree that your class should plant before leaving Hanover will finally have gotten big enough to erect another rope swing on the banks of the Connecticut. Palindromos, a Greek root meaning "running back again"….2002…wonderfully symmetric, but symbolically oscillating inwardly through a comfortable middle. Perhaps also symbolic, in part, of much of your time at Dartmouth, inward directed and comfortable, while life swirled on outside those 2's at each end.

Being a professor is being a time traveler; I move my life experiences through time to bring them to my students. Time has also given me a very special affinity for all the members of this class. I have taught over 200 of you and interacted with many more through the premedical community and in other campus gatherings. Some of you have become dear friends. But many of you don't know me at all…and may be wondering why I would feel an affinity for you. That affinity is because of what happened… to time…during my years as a student and during yours. Woody Allen has defined time as "nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once". When I was a student, nature failed to do this and everything in the world outside my small college seemed to be happening at once. From a church in Birmingham, to the book depository in Dallas, to a bridge in Selma, to the first body bags at the Da Nang airbase, to a motel balcony in Memphis and to a hotel hallway in Los Angeles, that age smashed the serenity that was my student life. The "outside world" moved into my "inside world" creating fear and uncertainty about my future.

Perhaps unlike any other short period of time since, your four years at Dartmouth has, to my perception, also been a failure of nature to keep everything from happening at once. From villages in Kosova, to Columbine High School, to a country road in nearby Etna, NH, to Lower Manhattan, Washington, DC and a field in western Pennsylvania, and to the streets of the Middle East, everything seemed to be happening at once, as overwhelming tragedy truncated the ticking of time. While all of you have been touched by these events, here within our very small world you have been buffered and, perhaps, in some ways, comforted by imaginary walls that surround our campus. Now you prepare to breech those walls….and perhaps you confront the same fear and uncertainty that I did.

Let me suggest to all of you that, like a palindrome, in that outside world you will retain your innate capacity to oscillate, to simultaneously look back at what has happened and forward to your future. But, for a few minutes, I would like to remove each of those "twos" from your ends and suggest ways in which you might leave that comfortable middle bulging symmetrically, perhaps to help nature restart time. I have brought with me two gifts for you… two gifts of my own journey through time… by which you can do just that.

The first gift to you is from my own college commencement speaker. I recall vividly ascending the stairs to the platform at Oberlin that June, not to receive my diploma, but to take my seat near to the commencement speaker. I was there, not because of my academic performance, but because a few of my friends had secretly nominated me as one of the class officers. In the stir that was the 1960's, the campus was alive with the foment of the civil rights struggle and the emerging conflict in Southeast Asia. The activist tradition that has been Oberlin since its founding diminished any student interest in class office, leaving me unchallenged in the election that followed my nomination and I was swept by virtual acclamation into office. The only honor that was a perquisite of that office was a good seat for the commencement….on the platform. Soon the commencement speaker rose to make the traditional commencement address.

The speaker began reminding us, as I have you, that we were about to leave the safe security of our college world. Then the speaker retold a story penned by Washington Irving, the tale of Rip van Winkle. What is usually remembered about that story is that Rip slept for 20 years. The sometimes forgotten point involves a sign that was on the inn, nearby to which Rip took his long nap. When he went up the mountain to begin his nap, the sign had a picture of King George III…..20 years later, when he came down, it had a picture of George Washington. The awakened Rip was completely lost; he knew not who or where he was. His confusion reveals to us the whole point of the tale…..it was not that he had slept for 20 years, but he had slept through a revolution, a revolution that had changed the course of history…..and Rip knew nothing about it. Our speaker went on to caution us that there is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.

Revolutions come in two basic flavors…..those of social action and those of thought, knowledge and creativity. Revolutions of social action are the most obvious. As a Dartmouth graduate, you have an unusually strong and respected voice granted to you by society. Use your voice, your energies and your lives to change our social world! The list of which societal challenges demand revolution is long, but contained within them are the very roots of the fear and anxiety created by the collapse of time. These include economic disparity, prejudice, the degradation of our planet, the tragedy of violence, exploitation and abuse, the availability of food and education to all, inequities in health care and the human rights of all who dwell on this globe. Stay awake!

Revolutions of thought, knowledge and creativity, on the other hand, are the easiest to sleep through, because you often don't see them happening. Yet they equally demand your attention and participation. Let me give an example from my own field of medicine and biology. Had I had fallen asleep on that commencement platform and woken just this morning. I would have missed the emergence of the revolution in biology. Biology is center stage and you, even the non-biologists among you, are the mistresses and masters of ceremony. You will witness changes in medical care that no one in history has ever seen. Advances in your lifetime will usurp for pre-eminence every single advance ever made in the recorded history of medicine……and might well allow a great majority of your children to actually return for their 80th Dartmouth reunion. While you will be the recipients of these spectacular achievements, your voices in the decisions about when and how to use them are now more important than the voices of the biologists and physicians who discovered them. Your wakefulness should enable you, for example, to participate in very necessary debates about the ethics of gene manipulation and selection (as eugenics surely re-emerges), about the use and confidentiality of genetic information, about the cloning of human beings, and about the genetic manipulation of other species.

On the other hand, your wakefulness and voices are also needed to elevate the health of all of Earth's citizens. Millions of people on this planet are lacking even the basics of a healthful life, not because of lack of technology, but because of the inattention of those whose lives are healthful. While you might witness the Class Day at Dartmouth of one of your children in, say, 30 years, 10% of children born world-wide on the same day as your child will not live to the age of 5 and the majority of those born today in, for example, sub-Saharan Africa, will not even be alive in 2032. Stay awake!

Revolutions of any type can carry inherent danger, as they homogenize our point of view and narrow our horizons of how things are. For this, you must also remain awake. For example, the new era of medicine has catalyzed a resurgence of materialistic thinking, determinism and reductionism in the explanation of things biologic, a trend, which, in my view, is very dangerous. We can avoid this resurgence by striving for a great awakening between the sciences and the humanities, our task being, as noted by William Faulkner in his Nobel Laureate address, to "make out of the material of the human spirit something which was not there before." As the biological revolution peaks, there will be an increasing tendency to want to explain all of human nature, at the level of its atoms and its molecules. But are we more than our atoms? Is our plasma only muons and quarks? Will we only understand our biology from a DNA sequence or a 3-dimensional protein structure? Physicochemical explanations may tell us the "how of life", but will they tell us the "why"? These "why" questions…Why does life exist? Why does it have the characteristics we observe?…Why this place?… in this universe?…..acknowledge a purpose to life that may not be within the domain of science to answer. Some, like William Blake, have even warned:

"May God us keep From single vision and Newton's sleep!"

The vision of salvation through science is a familiar one today, but perhaps not the only path to understanding our biology. Is, as Mary Midgely, a moral philosopher, notes, science "the only way to understand the world we live in…a perceptual and social world, a turmoil of light, colors and noises, love and hate, danger and hope, friends and enemies, plans and despairs?"

Choose a revolution…or two! Stay awake!

The second gift is from one of my college professors…..that of joy in a life of discovery. And so I say …use what Dartmouth has given you to explore mystery. Ken Kesey, a voice of my generation, said of exploring mystery: "It's that little moment where your mind goes, Whoa, wait a minute! That's where stuff happens." The protagonist in CP Snow's "The Search" found in the solution of mystery a tranquil ecstasy.

"It was as though I had looked for a truth outside myself, and, finding it, had become for a moment a part of the truth I sought; as though all the world, the atoms and the stars were wonderfully clear and close to me, and I to them, so that we were part of a lucidity more tremendous than any mystery".

When we confront mystery, we make the greatest leaps in knowledge and consciousness. I believe that the ultimate gift of Dartmouth to you is that of curiosity and of a passion to explore things mysterious or new. This gift also carries with it a responsibility to be a steward of these mysteries and take what you learn of them to all who live on this planet.

Each of you will encounter your own mysteries lying outside those now removed ends. Benjamin Cardozo, the eminent jurist, officiated at a wedding 70 years ago in which he gave his view of some of these mysteries:

"Three great mysteries there are in the lives of mortal beings: the mystery of birth at its beginning; the mystery of death at its end; and greater than either, the mystery of love. Everything that is most precious in life is a form of love. Art is a form of love, if it be noble; labor is a form of love, if it be worthy; thought is a form of love, if it be inspired."

You have earned a most precious gift at Dartmouth and must guard and explore life's mysteries whatever their form or purpose.

And so, in closing, let me remind you that all revolutions and mysteries are eternal. They did not begin with you or me and will not end at our passing. The personal revolution of my commencement speaker ended on that motel balcony in Memphis. His message of remaining awake, however, lives on in all the revolutions that each of us will confront in life. In the message from my professor, I transmit to you a love of mystery and of the joy of discovery. The gifts of these two individuals were passed to me….and now I, humbled and privileged, have traveled through my own time to bring them both to you. I entrust them to you; they are now your messages… pass them on through time to your own students, whoever they might be. They are now twice removed, as with the ends of your palindrome. Being a revolutionary and being a guardian of mystery, especially that of love (itself "running back again" within the word revolution), should be the "stuff" that Dartmouth has given you. In a few lines of poetry, James Merrill captured this "highest good":

"Love merely as the best
There is, and one would make the best of that
By saying how it grows and in what climates……
To say at the end, however we find it, good
Bad, or indifferent, it helps us and the air
Is sweetest there. The air is very sweet."

To say at the end…of Dartmouth…..however you have found it….good, bad or indifferent…on this day, in this place…with dear friends at your side and family all about…it helps us and the air is sweetest here…the air is very sweet indeed.