Graduation advice that's timeless

I'm not sure how many college graduates actually tune in to the message of their graduation speakers.

Milton Freedman, the Nobel prize winning economist, was the keynote speaker when I graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1975. I have positively, absolutely no memory what he said. If the graduates today are anything like those of us from 33 years ago their minds are focused on getting a job after graduation, packing the car for the trip home, and the party after the ceremony.

But I came across two graduation speeches this month that impressed me -- one during my daughter's ceremony at Quinnipiac College where she received her doctorate in physical therapy and one at Boston College where my son will graduate in May 2009.

Given by two different types of individuals, the speeches had different but important themes: the use of knowledge and how learning doesn't stop at the completion of an academic education.

Carlton Highsmith is a businessman in Hamden, Conn., home to Quinnipiac, and his focus was on the duty graduates have to themselves and their communities.

He quoted Winston Churchill: "We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give."

He went on: "Could it be that you have a greater purpose in life? You're smart and perceptive enough to be able to look around you and realize that there are people the world over -- as well as right in your own hometowns and neighborhoods -- who are less fortunate than you. There is no shortage of pain and suffering in the world. And as simple as it may sound, each and every one of you can do something that will make a difference in the lives of those less fortunate than you."

He noted the "isms" that his generation -- the Boomer generation -- sought to overcome: me-ism, racism, sexism, and classism.

"Please recognize that whatever you choose as a profession in life, there should be room in your heart as well as on your calendar to do something significant to help someone else," he said.

With my son David graduating from Boston College next May, I paid some attention to this year's commencement as a barometer of the quality of the speakers for next year. This year it was historian and author David McCullough, who entitled his address "The Love of Learning."

His main point was that the Information Age puts an inordinate amount of information at our fingertips. But our access to information doesn’t make us educated; our ability to recall that the most ancient living tree in America is a bristlecone pine in California that is 4,700 years ago (a fact cited by McCullough) isn't enough if it has no content.

"Information is useful. Information is often highly interesting," he said. "Information has value, sometimes great value. The right bit of information at the opportune moment can be worth a fortune. Information can save time and effort. Information can save your life. The value of information, facts, figures, and the like, depends on what we make of it -- on judgment."

You can have all the facts in the world, he said, and miss the truth.

"It can be like the old piano teacher's lament to her student, 'I hear all the notes, but I hear no music,' " he sad.

He encouraged the graduates -- and by way of extension anyone else who listened -- to embark on a lifelong quest of learning.

"Read," McCullough implored a society that, unfortunately, is reading less and less all the time. Read the trashy thriller, he said, but also read or re-read the classics.

I'll take him up on that. The last classic I read was "Huckleberry Finn" a couple of years ago. McCullough suggested Cervantes and "Don Quixote."

Afterall, I know the musical "Man of La Mancha" by heart. I may as well get the literary context from "Don Quixote" while I'm at it.