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Chancellor Holub's Remarks at Graduate Commencement

May 22, 2009

I extend an enthusiastic UMass Amherst welcome to students, families, friends and faculty for coming today to celebrate our graduate students on the occasion of their commencement. I am especially pleased to be here because I still feel I’m making up for my lack of attendance at my own commencement exercises. I earned three advanced degrees and somehow I never managed to walk across the stage and receive them. I have lived to regret my failure to celebrate my achievements, and I’m delighted that you won’t have these regrets as you go forward into new and exciting futures.

I know from experience that completing a graduate degree is a tremendous accomplishment, and that the path to the masters or doctorate is a difficult one. It is fraught with long hours spent studying and researching, meeting tough deadlines for a heavy workload, with career worries and family issues and fiscal woes – and these difficulties persist for many years of graduate study. Yet in spite of these obstacles you faced, you are today at the end of that arduous path, reaching that coveted degree that seemed so distant just a short time ago.

You have undergone considerable stress and effort, and today you can finally count yourselves among the educated men and women in our society.

But what does that really mean “to be educated”? How can we tell whether someone has education or doesn’t have it? When I look out upon the graduates today, I see … a lot of people wearing strange robes and funny hats. Is that what education means? Well, like any advanced degree recipient worth his salt, I decided that if I didn’t know the answer to this question, it would probably be best to look up some authorities who might have greater insight into these matters than I do. As it turns out, however, among educated men and women there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of respect accorded to education. Albert Einstein, probably the most brilliant physicist of the twentieth century, once quipped that “the only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” Oscar Wilde, the great Irish playwright and essayist, appears to have concurred with Einstein. He wrote: “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” Karl Kraus, a brilliant Austrian essayist from the early twentieth century remarked once: “Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.” Perhaps my favorite citation about matters of education, however, comes from Sidney Smith, the English clergyman, writer, and wit, who once remarked about the Cambridge educated Thomas Macaulay: “He not only overflowed with learning, he stood in the slop.” This deprecation of education on the part of the most eminent writers and thinkers may make some of you wonder why you went through all of this work for your degrees. Was it just to receive a piece of paper? Was it just to be able to call yourself a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst? Was it just to stand in the slop of learning and knowledge?

I think Einstein, in another mood and more reflective on the essence of education, can help us out here. Ruminating on what it means to study at a great educational institution, he wrote: “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education . . . is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.” Thank you very much, Mr. Einstein. Now I think we have a better idea of the value of your education. It’s not so much what you learned, certainly not so much the facts and the knowledge that others had already gathered, but the ability for each and every one of you to go out and do something that goes beyond what you’ve learned. What I hope we’ve provided for you at UMass Amherst is not a dull and lifeless slop of learning, but the tools to excel outside the university and to find satisfaction in whatever you choose to pursue. “Education,” to cite Einstein one final time, “is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” And I hope that in this sense all of you take pride in calling yourselves educated today.

Education also entails obligations, however. You are destined to be leaders in your communities, in the Commonwealth, and in the nation, and you will require your education and learning to know what you should and shouldn’t do. You have the heavy obligation that comes from being educated individuals. But you also have one other obligation, and that’s an obligation to your alma mater. As you know, we are a public institution, but we are increasingly reliant on private giving to provide quality education to you and to the generations that will follow in your footsteps.

So take what we’ve given you here, but don’t forget to give back something of what you’ve taken.

In closing I would like to draw from the words of Betty Shabazz. Mrs. Shabazz was the widow of Malcolm X and earned her PhD. in Education Administration here in the 1970s. When she first saw her future husband at a speaking engagement she described his walk to the podium by noting “the way he was galloping it looked as though he was going someplace much more important than the podium.” I can say the same for you today; you too will walk with a confidence that lets everyone know you are going someplace much more important, that you walk toward a new level of professional success that is so richly deserved. Subsequent generations of UMass students will be looking to you for inspiration, mentoring and financial support. I hope you will answer the call to serve this institution that has given you so much.

On behalf of the entire UMass community I extend my heartfelt congratulations to you and your families for this most special achievement. May this Graduate Class of 2009 enjoy all the best that life has to offer!