Office of the President

New Student Convocation — September 3, 2006

To All That Shall Be — Yes!

New Students in the Class of 2010! Transfer Students in the Classes of 2007, 2008 and 2009.

At this moment, most of you rather would be doing things other than listening to me make a speech. Even if the car is unpacked, your room certainly is not yet set up. You are encountering all kinds of unfamiliar faces and just beginning to make new acquaintances. Family farewells are looming within the next few hours, perhaps including a few tears from more than a few parents. A full schedule of orientation events will keep you busy for the next three days. You still need to buy books, acquire course materials, and get ready for your first classes on Wednesday.

So why are we using this valuable time for a formal academic convocation? On Sunday of Labor Day weekend, why is virtually all the faculty marching in a procession in their academic caps and gowns? Why does the Mayor make a special effort to bring greetings on this occasion year after year? Why do we send out advance schedules telling you that you have to be here, and then send the resident assistants through the halls to make sure you actually do interrupt your work and come to the chapel?

The answer is: community. The very formality of a special event like this marks a rite of passage that is important, both for our individual lives and for our collective identity as a college community. Think of this as an initiation ceremony.

In a little less than four years, we shall come together in this chapel for another similar ceremony. Just as this is your New Student Convocation, that will be your New Alumni Convocation, when we welcome you as Carthage alumni and let you know, in effect, that you have joined the ranks of those who own and run the College. Two days later will come your graduation commencement in the TARC, when you receive your diplomas and move on to yet another stage of your lives. All these events are rites of passage. They help to define both our individual and our group identities.

Four years or so ago, I wrote letters to a number of you congratulating you on your confirmation at church. Even while introducing Carthage to you, I tried to underline in your minds the importance of that event. Your confirmation marked an important step toward adulthood, with all of its freedom and responsibility. Most religions and most societies observe some "coming of age" ritual, and "confirmation" is what Lutherans, Catholics, and many others call that.

Throughout your lives, you will celebrate and mourn other key events in some formal way. Before too many years go by, most of you will marry, and that wedding could become quite elaborate. The birth of children is likely to lead to some kind of baptism ceremony. As the years go by, funerals of family members and friends will grow more frequent. Then, of course, there are the birthdays, the anniversaries, and the parties celebrating new jobs, promotions, and eventual retirements in your careers.

As you mark each of these special events, you will be weaving the fabric of your lives. You will be defining yourselves and your communities. The inspiration you draw from such moments will depend very largely on the attitudes you bring to them. Like life itself.

Here at Carthage, new banners went up along the streets this past week to welcome you to this college. Each year, the school adopts a theme for the academic year in an effort to give our collective moment in time some special identity. You see those words emblazoned on the banners and on the programs for this convocation.

This year, we have chosen a comment from the personal meditations of Dag Hammarskjöld-"To all that shall be-Yes!" Bishop Paul Stumme-Diers suggested those words, and they do sound enthusiastic and forward-looking-just right for people launching their college careers.

During some of the coldest days of the Cold War, from 1953 to 1961, Mr. Hammarskjöld was the most widely respected Secretary-General the United Nations has ever had. There was never any doubt about his personal integrity. His actions encountered criticism from all sides, and both Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and French President Charles de Gaulle became his firm opponents. Nevertheless, the United Nations of Mr. Hammarskjöld's day did offer hope that the organization would eventually justify the grand vision of its founders.

Mr. Hammarskjöld's professional biography seemed like an unbroken record of personal success. When he was a young boy during the First World War, his father served as Prime Minister of Sweden. Highly intelligent, Mr. Hammarskjöld received an excellent classical education, and studied law and economics at the Universities of Uppsala and Stockholm. He rose through the ranks of the Swedish civil service, eventually representing Sweden at the United Nations before being elected Secretary-General. For eight years he dealt with one international crisis after another, until his airplane crashed in Northern Rhodesia in September 1961. He was on his way to negotiate peace in the Congo.

Today, on the street banners and on your programs, you see photographs of Carthage graduates who also have achieved professional success. No one among them is very old. Implicitly, we are suggesting that when you see them, you are looking at yourselves not too many years from now. For all that shall be-Yes!

Let me tell you a little about each of those individuals. By the way, there are thousands more Carthage alumni like them.

Audrey Bork Mazzuca teaches honors biology at Crystal Lake High School part-time while she cares for her young son. When she graduated here nine years ago, she won full scholarship offers for the doctoral programs at Rice University and the University of Illinois, but she chose teaching over laboratory research.

Alan Schultz came to Carthage as a successful businessman, having already managed the Australian division of the Snap-on Tool Company. He now lives in Fort Worth, Texas, where he does emergency response work for train derailments and chemical spills. He also owns a barbecue restaurant.

Jodi Hathaway-that's her professional name. We knew her here as Jodi Habighorst. She graduated just four years ago with a double major in music composition and theatre/communications. Now she is the morning anchor, producer, and reporter for the NBC television affiliate in Billings, Montana. Her newscast is the top-rated morning broadcast in the state of Montana.

Tim Wassenaar performed in a barbershop quartet with three of his buddies here at Carthage. He graduated in 1998 and from the Chicago Medical School in 2002. Now, he is doing advanced hematology training at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics.

Tim Rucks has been Carthage head football coach for the past eleven years. He played here under legendary coach Art Keller, was drafted out of Carthage by the Denver Gold of the United States Football League, and then signed as a free agent with the New York Jets. For five years, he was sports editor with the Pioneer Press newspapers in the Chicago suburbs. It might surprise you to learn he double-majored at Carthage in English and Political Science and was the Political Science Department's outstanding graduate for 1983.

Perhaps I should end this speech right here. I have told you about five successes sporting smiling faces-well, Coach Rucks does look a little intense. With luck, you and those in the balconies paying the bills would leave thinking Carthage really is worth $30,000 a year.

(Actually, the true cost of your education is much more than we collect. On average, the College subsidizes each student each year by several thousand dollars, thanks to our gift receipts from alumni and friends as well as our endowment and summer conference income. Those who went before you are helping to pay your way here. You will do the same for those who come later.)

But I still need a few more minutes of your time. Because there was more to what Mr. Hammarskjöld said. His full meditation went like this:

"-Night is drawing nigh-"

For all that has been-Thanks!

To all that shall be-Yes!

He wrote those words in his late forties, the year he became Secretary-General.

Most of you are in your late teens. Are you grateful for everything that has ever happened to you? Are you ready to say "thanks" for all the events of your lifetime?

For virtually all of you, the first major public event truly etched in your minds was the attack of Sept. 11. You were about thirteen at that time. You will never forget the images of planes flying into skyscrapers, smoke billowing out, people falling from eighty stories high, buildings collapsing, thousands fleeing through the debris in the streets. Are you ready to say "thanks" for that?

And if that has been, what shall be? Humans find it much easier to tear down than to build up. It is simpler to destroy than to create. If a group truly wishes to set back civilization, they can do tremendous damage. Such could be the threats your generation faces. Are you prepared to say: "To all that shall be-Yes"?

Mr. Hammarskjöld wrote those words only eight years after a world war that had claimed some 50 million human casualties. What could he have been thinking?

Well, I have reached a point in this speech where it is time to go back to the basics, and to conclude right there. Carthage is here to help you achieve professional success, but also to encourage you to do much more than that. You are minds, you are bodies, and you also are spirits.

On the basis of what I have told you about their professional lives, what do you actually know about Mr. Hammarskjöld or those alumni on the banners and programs? Do you understand what makes each one of them a unique human being? There still is much one could learn about them, isn't there?

Mr. Hammarskjöld's meditations were published with the title, Markings, only after he died. They were far too intimate, far too revealing, far too personal, for him to want them made public during his lifetime. He began writing them as a young man only for himself; as he aged, he realized they might have value for others. They were his spiritual diaries. In an act of courage, he left a note to a friend giving permission for their publication.

In his Markings, Mr. Hammarskjöld stands revealed as anything but the jaunty optimist that might be suggested by "To all that shall be-Yes!" In fact, he was extremely hard on himself. In his work, he drove himself unmercifully, yet he admonished himself for all kinds of shortcomings. Like St. Paul, he felt a thorn in the flesh. He never married; loneliness and death were recurring themes in his mind.

Yet, he discovered beauty in nature, he loved poetry, and like mystics across the ages, he grew into an all-consuming sense of God. He joined the Swedish Alpine Society, and, in the last year of his life, wrote an article about Mt. Everest in National Geographic magazine. To himself, he had written:

Be pure and dare-

In this fight with the mountain,

With myself against me.

In short, Mr. Hammarskjöld had to muster all his faith and all his courage in order to say "thanks" and "yes."

The alumni on the banners have their own stories, just like you and all those around you. We get glimpses of who they are from their own words.

Audrey Mazzuca writes: "I have several former students who are now in college studying to be high school biology teachers. When they come back and see me, I know that I have accomplished my mission."

Alan Schultz emphasizes putting himself into the position of his customers and helping them get away from their problems when they do something as simple as going out to eat.

Jodi Hathaway works as youth minister at her church, volunteers for the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life, and performs the Star Spangled Banner before athletic contests in Montana.

Barely thirty years old, Tim Wassenaar says the hardest challenge he has faced was dealing with his father's death. That experience reminded him "how fragile life is, and how you can't count on the future, or doing things down the road."

Tim Rucks remarked: "The challenge that taught me the most was to give away a promising and successful writing career to go into coaching. People thought I was crazy, but what it taught me was sometimes the road to true happiness is not always the safe one, and it taught me that to get ahead and achieve true happiness, you have to be able to accept risks. It also taught me that success is doing what truly makes you happy."

So, as we greet you today, we recognize you for the wondrous creatures you are. We have chosen you, and you have chosen us. May your minds, bodies, and spirits flourish on this campus.

Mr. Hammarskjöld wrote:

You dare your Yes-and experience a meaning.

You repeat your Yes-and all things acquire a meaning.

When everything has a meaning, how can you live anything but a Yes.

Welcome to Carthage.