endy Kopp,

Founder of Teach for America

At the University of

North Carolina at Chapel Hill

May 14, 2006

[The next few years] are a time when I believe you have something invaluable—the perspective that comes from inexperience. The world needs your inexperience. It needs you before you accept the status quo, before you are plagued by the knowledge of what is impossible.

Thinking back to my own senior year in college, I wasn’t intending to start something like Teach For America—or to start anything at all for that matter. As a college senior I was applying to two-year corporate training programs, seeking out political internships, and generally struggling in my search for something that I really wanted to do. My generation was dubbed the “Me Generation.” People thought all we wanted to do was focus on ourselves and make a lot of money. But that didn’t strike me as right. I felt as if thousands of us talented, driven graduating seniors were searching for a way to make a social impact but simply couldn’t find the opportunity to do so.

Well, during my senior fall, I helped organize a conference about education reform, where one of the topics was the shortage of qualified teachers in urban and rural communities. It was at that conference that I thought of an idea: Why doesn’t our country have a national teacher corps that recruits us to teach in low-income communities the same way we’re being recruited to work on Wall Street?

President George W. Bush

At Oklahoma State University

May 6, 2006

For all of you, I bring a message of great hope: There’s life after English Comp.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ)

At The New School in New York City

May’, 2006

War is an awful business. The lives of the nation’s finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer. Commerce is disrupted, economies damaged. Strategic interests shielded by years of statecraft are endangered as the demands of war and diplomacy conflict. Whether the cause was necessary or not, whether it was just or not, we should all shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us. However just or false the cause, how ever proud and noble the service, it is loss—the loss of friends, the loss of innocent life, the loss of innocence—that the veteran feels most keenly forever more. Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes war.

Americans should argue about this war. It has cost the lives of nearly 2500 of the best of us. It has taken innocent life. It has imposed an enormous financial burden on our economy. At a minimum, it has complicated our ability to respond to other looming threats. Should we lose this war, our defeat will further destabilize an already volatile and dangerous region, strengthen the threat of terrorism, and unleash furies that will assail us for a very long time. I believe the benefits of success will justify the costs and risks we have incurred. But if an American feels the decision was unwise, then they should state their opposition, and argue for another course. It is your right and your obligation. I respect you for it. I would not respect you if you chose to ignore such an important responsibility. But I ask that you consider the possibility that I, too, am trying to meet my responsibilities, to follow my conscience, to do my duty as best as I can, as God has given me light to see that duty.

Jean Rohe

Senior Speaker before John McCain

At The New School in New York City

May’, 2006

Based on the speech he gave at the other institutions, Senator Mc Cain will tell us today that dissent and disagreement are our “civic and moral obligation” in times of crisis. I consider this a time of crisis and I feel obligated to speak. Senator Mc Cain will also tell us about his cocky self-assuredness in his youth, which prevented him from hearing the ideas of others. In so doing, he will imply that those of us who are young are too naïve to have valid opinions and open ears. I am young, and although I don’t profess to possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that preemptive war is dangerous and wrong, that George Bush’s agenda in Iraq is not worth the many lives lost. And I know that despite all the havoc that my country has wrought overseas in my name, Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction.

Finally, Senator McCain will tell us that we, those of us who are Americans, “have nothing to fear from each other.” I agree strongly with this, but I take it one step further. We have nothing to fear from anyone on this living planet. Fear is the greatest impediment to the achievement of peace. We have nothing to fear from people who are different from us, from people who live in other countries, even from the people who run our government—and this we should have learned from our educations here. We can speak truth to power, we can allow our humanity always to come before our nationality, we can refuse to let fear invade our lives and to goad us on to destroy the lives of others. These words I speak do not reflect the arrogance of a young strong-headed woman, but belong to a line of great progressive thought, a history in which the founders of this institution play an important part. I speak today, even through my nervousness, out of a need to honor those voices that came before me, and I hope that we graduates can all strive to do the same.

Christiane Amanpour

CNN Correspondent

At the University of Michigan

April 29, 2006

And I dream of a new kind of Peace Corps for the 21st century…an army of American citizens going around the world, brandishing good will, good business models, good ideas and great ideals…and army of people like you, and I urge you, therefore, please to travel. You can do it on a shoestring and it will blow your mind, or, at least, it will change your life. Your eyes will be so opened, your hearts will be so full, and your minds will burst with possibility. I know you can all make your mark because I’ve been there and I’ve seen it. The world is waiting for you and it needs you now.

Does anybody remember Live Aid this time last year? Global concerts organized by Bob Geldorf and Bono, not to raise money, but to raise awareness of the world’s needs. It turned out to be the biggest civil movement in history…31 million people got actively involved. It reached an audience of nearly four billion people, and, in the end, important changes and important progress were made.

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 2006, self-absorbed is so “yesterday.” It’s out. “Cool” is now to be a citizen of our world, not just an inhabitant.

Filmmaker Ken Burns

At Georgetown University

May 20, 2006

As you pursue your goals in life, that is to say your future, pursue your past. Let it be your guide. Insist on having a past and then you will have a future.

Do not descend too deeply into specialism in your work. Educate all your parts. You will be healthier. Replace cynicism with its old-fashioned antidote, skepticism.

Don’t confuse success with excellence. The poet Robert Penn Warren once told me that “careerism is death.” Insist on heroes. And be one.

Read. The book is still the greatest manmade machine of all—not the car, not the TV, not the computer.

Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality.

Serve your country. Insist that we fight the right wars. Convince your government that the real threat comes from within this favored land as Lincoln knew. Governments always forget that. Do not let your government outsource honesty, transparency, or candor. Do not let your government outsource democracy. Steel yourselves. Your generation will have to repair this damage. And it will not be easy.

Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothi
ng to do with the actual defense of our country—they just make our country worth defending.