- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 1
- 1
-
Sparkle (1)
A quick scan of the star-studded 2011 college commencement key-note speaker line-up discloses an interesting trend. Seems like everybody wants to talk about failure. Usually commencement speeches are all positivity and light. They tend to be about how new graduates have the world in their hands; how anything is possible; how they, the freshly educated and trialed-by-fire scholars, must move on to be the new world leaders. So why, in Heaven's name, would so many of the aged and sage graduation key-noters dwell on things gone wrong? How is it that suddenly failure is a good thing?
In Conan O’Brien’s now famous Dartmouth speech this year, he said:
There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized .... Whether you fear it or not, true disappointment will come. But with disappointment comes clarity, conviction and true originality.
Denzel Washington’s message includes some of his own failures and a very strong directive to the huge University of Pennsylvania audience:
Every graduate here today has the training and talent to succeed, but do you have the guts to fail? If you don’t fail, you’re not even trying.
Samantha Powers, Special Assistant to President Obama, not only extolled the importance of failure at Occidental’s graduation ceremony, but she noted that failure was the focus of the Class Day key-note speech the day before.
Thomas Cobb told Rhode Island College grads:
When I told my friends that I was going to speak today about failure, a few were happy to remind me of some of mine. And I’ve had a lot. And I don’t mind being reminded of that. I’m proud of my failures. Montaigne said, "There are defeats more triumphant than victories."
Failure is a mark of progress; success is the end of progress.
And Dr. Jennifer Redig shared with the Oregon Health and Science University School of Medicine a quote by George Bernard Shaw:
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
Even business leaders who addressed graduates spoke about failure. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told students at Babson College in Massachusetts to "fail spectacularly." And Barbara Desoer, president of Bank of America Home Loans, encouraged MBA grads at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business to embrace risk and view challenges as opportunity. Similarly, Steve Poizner, Engineer, entrepreneur and former Insurance Commissioner of California, implored University of Texas’ Cockrell School students to take a risk and choose paths other than the safe ones.
And finally, in Michelle Obama’s speech to Spelman University’s all woman graduates, she focused on the school founders’ tradition of overcoming moments of defeat when she told graduates that they had an “obligation to see each set- back as a challenge and as an opportunity to learn and grow.”
For the graduates of 2011, the college years have likely been much more challenging than their parents’-- financial aid more difficult to secure, internships and jobs harder to come by and less financial support from home. Many students left for college while their families were in crisis -— perhaps a jobless parent or a down-sized household. Many didn’t have the luxury of leaving for the same reasons. Some of these students had to delay their college entrance to help with family finances, to step in for ailing parents or grandparents who could not afford health care or assistance with chronic illness or simply because not enough money in scholarships came through. In addition, an increased number of students have had to stop out from college once they’d already begun and delay graduation because of similar set-backs. The drop-out rate for first and second year students has risen to 24.5%, meaning that currently nearly one-quarter of entering freshmen do not return to school their sophomore years. The college experience, in these years of our current economic woes, simply has not been the cushy, insulated playground of yore.
Studies show that college freshmen report the highest level of stress and depression in history. And that stress and depression are on the rise for all students, largely due to economic limitations. Profound economic and family concerns make college study much more challenging. The demands on a college student to work, budget her money and her time and study
