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For all its passivity, promise is a loaded word. It requires belief, faith, even hope. We have the promise of peace, the promise of the recent graduate, and the promise I made to you and have yet to keep. All are potentialities. All assume the best of humanity. As I sat on the green of Dartmouth College below the tower of Baker Library, I looked at my classmates here to celebrate our 25th reunion and wondered, have we lived up to our promise?
When we entered college twenty-nine years ago, we promised our parents, however obliquely, we would do our best to make good on their investment. They had spent the preceding eighteen years scrimping and saving, carpooling and cajoling, all in an effort to provide us with the best undergraduate education available. We were the thousand chosen that year to attend this Ivy League institution. Then, as now, that was supposed to mean something. Did our parents ask us to find a cure for cancer, solve world hunger, turn the tide on global warming? Or did they simply want us to soldier on by making a living, providing a few grandkids, and do no harm to best of our abilities? Did they ask too little of us? What did they really invest in? Does having an Ivy League education deliver the goods? And by goods, I mean change makers, thought leaders, individuals who can alter the flow of history.
When I received my letter of acceptance I was utterly in shock. I never felt as though I was Ivy League material. I didn’t have straight A’s, wasn’t captain of a sports team, didn’t have a compelling life story revealing my ability to overcome great odds. I actually thought they had made a mistake. My first fall on campus, I worked so hard I did manage to get straight A’s and pnemonia to boot. The rest of my Ivy League career wasn’t as illustrious but was respectable enough, especially once I got over the freezing winters and narrow cultural diversions. Since graduation, I have struggled with that imposter complex. The good news is that I know I am not alone. Ellen Gordon Reeves captured this sentiment well in her blogpost for her 25th Harvard reunion, “You Haven’t Changed A Bit.”
She writes: "The warped reality in the Harvard community is this: if you win a Pulitzer, someone else won a Nobel; if you make a billion dollars, someone else made two billion. One Wall Street banker with two Harvard degrees notes, "Among Harvardians--at least with respect to measuring their own achievements in a do-I-go-to-the-reunion-or-not context--the glass is half empty rather than half full. Nearly 45 years after graduation, I still remember thinking in September of my freshman year that I wasn't bright enough to be at Harvard, and part of me still feels that way! This is a dumb way to go through life, but there it is!""
We may not be Harvard but my classmates are certainly an impressive lot. Many have graduate degrees. Many are accomplished in their various fields. Many do much for their local communities as donors and volunteers and a few have influence that goes beyond their townships. However, despite the high brow of an Ivy League education, my classmates for the most part are not captains of industry (except for one guy who invented the World Poker Tour and he was too important, too busy and too rich to bother returning to the reunion), we haven’t found a cure for cancer, and we aren’t leading the effort to solving world hunger. We are employees and employers, we are artists and musicians, we are lawyers and filmmakers and doctors and teachers and environmentalists and yes, even hedge fund managers. Some of us are rich, most are comfortable and a few couldn’t attend the reunion because the price of travel to the far reaches of New Hampshire was prohibitive. We are doing our life’s work or we are bored in our jobs or unemployed or changing careers yet again. We are married, we are divorced, we are single by choice, and we are still searching for that one true love. We are parents. We are childfree. We are struggling with our health or the health of loved ones. In short, we are much like everyone else doing our best to make the most of this one “wild and precious life*.”
By these measures though, we have not lived up to the promise of an Ivy League education. We
