Address to English Graduates, 20 May 2000 Carolyn R. Miller Graduating students; parents, spouses, children, and friends of graduates; fellow faculty members; and staff members— This is a happy day for our graduates, a day of culmination, achievement, and celebration, possibly a day of relief that you thought might never get here. Today is called "commencement" because it’s the beginning of your life as a college graduate, or as a master’s graduate. But today is also an ending, when you take leave of the department and the university where you’ve spent your time and effort. My task is to say farewell on behalf of the faculty of the Department of English, and I’m honored to do so at our first commencement of the 21st century. So first, we congratulate you for what you’ve ended. We know you’ve worked hard—we saw to that. We’re proud of your effort, your intellectual growth, your many achievements in your studies here at NC State. Some of those achievements are highly visible—the awards and distinctions that have been acknowledged here already. But let’s not overlook the less visible achievements—the extra effort you put in on an exam when others had already finished and left the classroom, the sudden insight you came to late at night while working on a term paper, the conversation that helped another student understand a complicated idea. These are also worthy achievements, and worth recognizing. But enough of looking back to what has ended. Let’s turn to what is commencing, to the future. I have some wishes, some hopes for you . . . First, I hope that when you meet people in the future, at work or in your neighborhood, and tell them you were an English major, you don’t hear the kind of response my colleagues and I have heard all our lives: people tell you, in perfectly good English, "I never was any good at English," or "Guess I’d better watch my grammar." What a conversation-stopper: how do you go on from there? English shouldn’t be perceived as a punitive discipline that exists only to brandish red pencils or to pull mysterious literary symbols out of strange places for no good reason. We all need to work to change this reaction. Better teaching, both in the colleges and in the grade schools and high schools, should help everyone have a more intelligent and confident relation to their own language and better awareness of the ways in which symbols work to shape our thoughts and emotions and social lives. And I challenge you, when you encounter comments like these, to do some teaching on the spot, to help people understand the flexibility, the adaptiveness, and the power of language in their lives. Make them wish they had been English majors. I hope, next, that you’ll find productive and challenging ways of life in the 21st century. When I was a little girl, I guess when I learned subtraction in grade school, I figured out how old I would be in the year 2000. It seemed to me the limits of the imaginable—both the year 2000 and being that old. Now here we are, and of course it’s just another year: it’s not the edge of the conceivable universe. But since you are English majors, you also know that the year 2000 is highly symbolic. I think this is a particularly good time to be an English major, that the 21st century needs people like you. We’re going through a transformation that many people are calling the Information Technology revolution, the transition to a digital economy. But the hardware developers, systems programmers, network gurus, and silicon scientists can only do so much. Behind all the hype, all the technology, all the day-trading and e-commerce, what we have is a transformation in the way we communicate, the way we exchange information and use symbolic forms; this revolution has been compared with the earlier changes in the technologies of language, with the development first of writing and then of the printing press; both these earlier transitions initiated profound and lasting changes in many dimensions of social, mental, and economic ways of life. So without attention to the human dimensions of information technology, I believe its transformative potential will be incomplete and ineffective. We will need people like you who understand reading and writing—to redefine what it means to be literate, to reorganize how government provides services, to rethink how people gain access to information they need, to create new modes of education and creativity. You need to be in the middle of all this. I hope, then, that you’ll find ways to make a difference, ways that English majors should be especially prepared for. The abilities that you’ve developed are valuable and efficacious. Information technology will not change the fact that the world responds to people with the ability to see connections and relations, to make a vague idea come alive, to show the human consequences of projects and policies, to identify with people who are different from themselves. These are abilities of insight and expression that are nourished by the study of language, literature, and rhetoric. They are the powers of eloquence—including empathy, imagination, storytelling, metaphor, and ritual. And if you can marshall these powers, you are responsible for how you use them, for how you’ll make a difference—whether in the pursuit of dot-com stock options or in the pursuit of social justice. Think what progress we could make if every former English major in the country did just one thing to advocate for hungry children, for open space preservation, for AIDS research, for arts funding, for organ donor programs, for literacy education—you name it. There are many ways to make a difference. I hope you never stop being a student. By that I don’t mean that you should all go to graduate school, or enroll in continuing education courses (though some of you certainly should). I do mean that you should keep reading, keep learning, keep asking questions—keep your minds open. There will be much to learn in the new world of technology, and you’ll find as you grow older that there’s more and more to keep your mind open about. It’s a privilege to be a student, as some of you will discover when you get your first job, a privilege to engage the ideas of other people who have thought hard about tough problems, who have illuminated the way the world is and the way it might be. Don’t give up that privilege just because you’ve graduated. Finally, I hope that you’ll keep in touch. Keep in touch with your families as you commence your new path in life; they helped put you on it—by helping or maybe by resisting. Keep in touch with the friends you made here at NC State—not just for crazy reunions or Wolfpack nostalgia, but because enduring friendships are some of the best ways to find and keep your bearings over the years. You’ll need those friends not only to remember who you were but to know who you are. Keep in touch with us, your teachers and advisers. We want to know what you’ll do, how well you do, and what mattered to you about your education here. So answer those questionnaires the Alumni Office sends out, check our website every now and then, but even better, come back to Tompkins Hall and visit. Keep in touch with a favorite professor or advisor. One of the great rewards of a life as a teacher is the students who come back, sometimes years later, and teach us about the very many forms that success can take. A student I taught in the late 1970s has retired after 20 years in the Navy. He’s just come back to Raleigh with a wife and two-year-old son to begin again. So let’s not make too much of this day in the year 2000, for your lives will be full of endings and beginnings. Robert Frost would agree that commencement may be an illusory symbol: "You’re searching," he said, "For things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings./ Ends and beginnings—there are no such things./ There are only middles." So think of commencement in May 2000 as an event in the middle. If Frost is right, then my last hope for you is that you get out there and stay in the middle.