Commencement 2004

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Opinion

Commencement 2004

6/4/2004

By Kenneth C. Green

Springtime in Academe. This is the time when commencement speakers across the land regale, bore, entertain, and attempt to challenge the Class of 2004.

This year’s commencement speakers will echo the themes articulated by the ghosts of commencement speakers past: this era will be the best of times, the most challenging of times. No question these will be interesting times. (FYI: contrary to conventional wisdom, a quick Google search suggests that this is not an ancient Chinese greeting/curse.)

For the graduates who began their college careers in the late 1990s, the world they “enter” with their new college degrees is very different from the one they knew as college freshmen. They (and we) live in a world and an economy that is post Y2K, post-dot.com, post-9-11, and (hopefully) emerging from recession.

The good news for this year’s graduates is that the job market may be improving. Early indicators suggest that employment opportunities should be much better this year than in recent years. The welcome employment upturn notwithstanding, job options for (and salaries of) new college graduates will be well below the levels posted in the closing years of the Clinton/dot.com era.

On the technology front, computers have become less inexpensive: over the past four-to-five years Moore’s law assures that laptops and desktops continue to “do more for less.” Cell phones have become ubiquitous; wireless networks and services—on and off-campus—are becoming so.

Step back a bit and we see that the whole concept and connotation of wired has shifted significantly in recent years. Recall, for example, the annual “Wired Campus” report from (the now departed) Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine. It was an unpopular (unpopular among campus officials!) effort to rank U.S. colleges and universities on their technology services and resources. Today the notion of “wired”—access to/using lots of technology—increasingly points to “wireless” students who wander campus with their cell phones, PDAs, and notebook computers.

Also on the IT front: over the past four years, through the rise and demise of the dots, the Web continues to touch more of what we do and how we do it, on and off campus. To paraphrase the 1972 observation of George Bonham, founding director of Change magazine, technology and the Web today, like television in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “dominates much of American life and manners.”

As in past years, some of this year’s grads will stay on, migrating from alma mater in the spring to grad school in the fall. Over the course of their undergraduate years they were touched—carefully, appropriately, magically, and metaphorically—by faculty (by some of us!) in the arts and sciences. We became their mentors, suggesting and then fostering an interest in a faculty career and life in academe.

The distance from baccalaureate graduation to graduate school is one of time, place, and space. It also represents a leap of faith.