Graduate School-Newark
School of Public Affairs & Administration
Graduates, Parents, Spouses, and Family, Faculty and Administration,
Congratulations, graduates. We participate today in the happy ceremony in which you receive an advanced degree, but only you know the actual
narrative arc of your experience, the triumphs, the frustrations and re-calibrations, the deepening understanding of yourself and your work,
the enlarged sense of community with which you leave Rutgers Newark. The word that marks this day comes from the Latin 'gradus, ' – and implies the passage from one stage of experience to another.
The visionary writer and artist William Blake wrote his Songs of Innocence and Experience in 1793. Blake, a pronounced failure in his lifetime,
etched his poems by hand onto copper plates, along with the images and illustrations of his words. He considered "Innocence and Experience" to
be "the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul."
We know now that the forces within us, our deepest, most fierce desires, all that arises from experience, from struggle, even from suffering, is
equal in aspect to any vision of light and innocent hope, and just as necessary to our understanding. Blake also wrote:
We are put on Earth a little space/
that we may learn to bear the beams of love
Blake acknowledged that love, though dimensionless as the soul, has weight. Love is evident, not in itself, but in what it demands and
accomplishes, in how it occupies the space we share. Nathaniel Hawthorne exclaimed of his protagonist in The Scarlet Letter,
'She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom!'
Graduation implies freedom. Freedom is space, light, room to implement your changed and deepened perceptions. And you graduate today knowing
that your experience here at Rutgers Newark places you at the heart of the American ideal that a university be more than an ivory tower or a
bucolic cocoon.
One hundred and one years ago, Rutgers Newark began in an era in which the abolition of slavery was decades old. This wholly American
experiment was steered by progressive political liberals who believed education was the means to freedom. They created an institution
responsive to the city itself, and dedicated to the needs of urban, working class students. The New Jersey Law School opened its doors in
1908, combined with Dana College, and became the University of Newark in 1936. The new institution was entirely housed in the old brewery at
40 Rector Street. During the Depression and the bleak years of World War II, the small, urban university struggled to survive. There were 9
graduating seniors in 1945, and 13 faculty members.
A few miles away, Rutgers, recently designated a public university, had long wished to merge. The University of Newark became the Newark
Colleges of Rutgers University in 1946. Today, 31 modern buildings on 38 acres replace the brewery, razor blade factory, stables and
brownstones that once housed classes. Now we are 10,500 graduate and undergraduate students, 22 graduate departments and programs, and
400 faculty, 99% of whom hold the Ph.D, JD, or the equivalent, such as the MFA. Rutgers Newark is ranked among leading doctoral granting national universities, and ranked No. 1 for student diversity. That ranking is the result of allegiance to a mission: a mission of excellence, faith, and belief in the Jeffersonian principle that “peace is best preserved by giving information to the people.” Here at Rutgers Newark, education itself is the chief means of empowering individuals – not just for their own liberty and gain, but for the larger American ideal that we truly progress collectively, rather than alone.
Frank Kingdon, first president of the University of Newark, spoke of a University not separate from the city, whose pursuits were "higher than
politics or the necessities of daily life" ... whose efforts would result in "nothing less than truth and justice for all citizens."
That struggle is founded on courage, like the courage possessed by 25 students, who, forty years ago on a cold February day in 1969, occupied
Conklin Hall, armed with food, blankets, tools and chains. They took to heart the words of Langston Hughes,
"America never was America to me, and yet I swear this oath: America will be!"
Through diplomacy, rather than violence, they came to a set of agreements that led to the establishment of the Equal Opportunity Fund, and
to rapid increases in enrollment and hiring of African-Americans, Latinos, and women. People have put themselves on the line, risking their
very lives, so that we can stand together in this room today, and bear witness to triumph and achievement.
I came to Rutgers Newark to help create a new Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing, and I especially congratulate our first group of
17 MFA graduates, who began the program two years ago as our inaugural candidates. They graduate having written a novel, a collection of
stories or a collection of poems as their Theses. Writers among them have published in nationally prominent literary magazines and websites,
and won national awards such as the Stegner Fellowship and the Hurston Wright Award for College Writers. MFA students are reaching out to
Newark, teaching Rutgers undergraduates, Essex Community College students, and local high school students. Often drawing on the important
writers and books featured in the MFA’s monthly Writers At Newark Reading Series, they are working to inspire the writer in every reader.
Our graduate writers understand that writers don't write simply to publish, just as no graduate student comes to Rutgers Newark purely to get a
degree. Rutgers Newark graduate students are committed to more than themselves: they link one generation to another, one culture to another.
The logo of the Rutgers Newark MFA Program is "Real Lives, Real Stories." Over half of our students are nontraditional students, and nearly
half are students of color – a statistic unequalled in any other MFA Program in the nation. Our students' stories poems and novels will help
comprise a new American literature.
I'm a writer, and I write in the steadfast belief that books and stories matter. In a sense, we are all writers. We live our own stories by
first imagining them, inventing the language in which we move and feel, inventing the versions of ourselves we wish to attain, and imagining
the worlds in which we want to live.
I'm talking to you today because my vision for a new MFA Program has been inspired, from the beginning, by the stated mission of Rutgers Newark.
Four years ago, when I told people that I was taking a job that involved establishing and directing a new MFA program in a state university,
a job that involved a commute from Boston and the establishment of a whole new life, friends and fellow writers asked me if I if I had lost my
mind.
You don’t want that job, they said.
Why, they asked, at my, shall we say, mature stage of life, would I sacrifice enormous energy on such a project, when I had a measured
amount of time in which to write my own books, each of which has taken me an inordinately long time to complete? Time, they reminded me,
waits for no one.
My answer to them was that I simply couldn’t resist the opportunity, and that this was exactly the time in my life to commit to an endeavor
larger than myself, one that speaks to why I write in the first place. Mentors had assisted me as a young writer; this was a chance to give
back in an environment responsive to my hopes. I wanted to design and help create a literature-based program and community for writers, the
kind of writers who would be attracted to Newark, to urban activism, and to the program I envisioned. I see, in this University and city, a
kindred spirit, and one might ask why.
I don't come from an urban world. I grew up in a small West Virginia college town of 7000. My hometown was the county seat of a rural world
dominated by the mining industry. The mountainous beauty of the land masked a history of exploitation and economic struggle. Some were
relatively privileged. Others lacked even the chance to attain decent lives. My mother was a first grade teacher who by the end of her
short life had become a reading specialist, a thesis away from her doctorate. As a child, I attended the grade school where she taught.
I watched her, evenings, when, after working all day and cooking dinner for the family, she spent hours cutting out bright borders of her
own design to decorate her classroom, or invented plays about Thanksgiving and the Constitution, plays that made the ideas of freedom and
justice understandable to all the kids in her classes, not just those from town.
We lived out a rural two-lane road in a brick ranch house my father had built. Two fields down, on the same road, sat a white wooden house not
much bigger than a trailer. The house was rented to a succession of tenants, none of whom seemed to stay long. One year, a family with three
sons moved in. The youngest, Ethan, was six, and he was my mother’s student. He came to school hungry, and dirty, and tired. My mother
made sure he got breakfast through the school lunch program, and brought him clean, warm clothing my brothers had outgrown. One day, he fell
asleep at his desk and soiled himself. My mother took him to the teacher’s lounge to help him clean up and change his clothes, and she saw
that his legs were black and blue. When she asked what had happened, he said, almost apologetically, "Daddy beat me with a board."
My mother took a stand. She called authorities and said she could not send this child back to that home. Officials in child welfare told
her they had nowhere to send a child on such short notice, so she called an, older, kindly childless couple, friends who lived nearby, and
convinced them to take Ethan that night. For several months, he slept in a clean bed with a new teddy bear, was read stories and fed good
meals, got medical attention. The pale bluish tone of his skin warmed. He began to learn to read. The couple adored him and hoped to adopt
him. His older brothers, students in the same school, would peer shyly in at him through my mother's classroom door. He waved at them
happily. At recess, he brought them cookies baked in his new home.
How does the story end? Not so happily. It's a real life, and a real story. Ethan's family fought for custody. He began to visit them on
weekends as the case moved through the courts. One weekend, during the night, the family disappeared, leaving the little house empty except
for a broken refrigerator full of beer bottles, and some dirty blankets. I don't know what happened to Ethan, but I know his story is
important, and that my mother tried to make a difference. There were other kids like Ethan, in her life and in that school, whose stories
differed in the details. They struggled, but many of them found allies.
And by the time Ethan left, my mother had taught him to read. That is no small thing.
I believe we learn to live by reading, connecting symbol to experience, finding ourselves within 'the other,' seeing ourselves within the
arcs of community, culture, and history. Time waits for none of us, but stories do redeem lives. Ethan's story did not disappear, because
I told it to you. If I wrote a novel about Ethan, I might imagine his story by hearing his mother's voice, the voices of those brothers who
peered at him from the world he’d temporarily escaped, the voice of the father who beat him. They would all become equally important dreams
in my mind. Books, like dreams, defy time.
Today, in graduating, you claim your time. You graduate into a world that went from "Yes We Can" to "Yes We Did", a time of tremendous promise
and startling loss, of change and transition that Americans would not have believed possible even five years ago.
Take it on. Find a way to matter.
Remember that your work should enrich your life. Make your work a means of illumination for yourself and those around you.
As you embody the present, honor and protect your past. Don’t lose touch with your origins and your childhood self, who you were in the
beginning. "He was a child," wrote Dostoyevsky in Anna Karenina, "he was eleven years old, but he had a soul, and he protected it as the
eyelid protects the eye."
Here in Newark, we are a family, from every continent on the planet Earth. We are that glistening, turning orb in the limitless darkness of
space, warmed by the solar fire that’s found us. How fragile we are, how vulnerable, yet our vulnerability almost seems pre-ordained because
it forces us to reach beyond ourselves.
Newark native Stephen Crane wrote,
"At times he regarded the wounded. . . in an envious way. . . He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage."
In time, we are all wounded. Some of us, like Ethan, are born wounded, yet, every encounter can make a difference, and human beings alone
possess the ability to process grief and suffering, to, as Charles Dickens wrote "be truest to one another... in seasons of trial, as all
the quietly loyal and good will always be."
There will always be tragedies, graduates; there will always be triumphs, and some of each will be yours. There will be ecstasies by which
to measure the miraculously banal nature of the day-to-day. There will be sustained work that in its constancy builds all that is new. Today,
graduates, you embody that beginning.
Near the end of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky speaks of
"the dawn of a new future . . . a full resurrection into a new life."
"They were renewed by love,” he writes, “the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other."
Graduates, live from the heart. People have loved you, and professors and teachers have given of themselves, to you.
Be that source of life for yourselves and others. When you can intervene to make a difference, don’t hesitate, or the chance may be lost.
Value acceptance. Embrace difference, love, work, hope and action. Go forth, graduates, and create your lives.
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