Convocation 2017: Closing Remarks by Dean Carlos J. Alonso

During your stay in this institution, we have endeavored to train you how to think, write, and speak like a member of an academic field, as a participant in an intellectual community defined by the mores and conventions of your discipline, leaving in the process little time, or room, for much else. Indeed, looking back at the foundational myth of the modern university, one can detect readily a desire to place the institution in a location of exception with respect to the social, as an enterprise that derives its force and reason for being from its insularity, from its distance from societal concerns. This is part and parcel of the apprenticeship model of graduate education, and explains to a large degree the sense of loneliness that we have all felt at one time or another while in graduate school, as if we all had to re-create for ourselves, and within ourselves, the principal tenets of our chosen discipline, and thus engage in a project of intellectual self-fashioning that necessarily had to keep the world at bay. Given the effort that you have expended in achieving this goal, you would be justified in thinking that the triumph that you celebrate today surely should be enough.

And yet: The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote in the early twentieth century an aphorism that comes to mind to describe what I am hoping to convey to you as you leave this institution: “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella, no me salvo yo,” which can be loosely translated as “I am myself and my circumstance, and if I do not redeem it, I cannot redeem myself.” Since November of last year, most academic institutions in the nation have been buffeted by the unexpected outcome of a general election whose principal ideological contours appear to issue from a version of this country that is felt by some of us to be unsettling and unfamiliar. I do not want to challenge or bemoan the results of that election here, but to invoke it as an object lesson for all of us. Using the very analytical tools that you have learned at Columbia and which we live by, we should endeavor to understand the phenomenon down to its root causes. But perhaps more important is for us to be chastened by the very surprise with which we received this event.

For in hindsight now, all of the pieces were readily available that would have allowed us almost to predict, as opposed to being surprised by, the results of the last election: the indifference at the radical concentration of wealth and resulting income inequalities; the disregard for a lowered standard of living for many of our middle-class citizens; the shrugging of shoulders at the seemingly wanton police killings of black citizens; the lack of concern with the pollution of the public sphere with misinformation; the conundrum that, on the one hand, our current economic system has ushered in the wondrous, wondrous world in which we live, but that it also has a continual propensity to naturalize inequalities, and to produce narratives of success about individual effort that justify those inequalities. All of these circumstances point to the loss of our sense of the commons, of the belief that we have some responsibility to our brethren, and that our fundamental assumption should be that what is best is what is good for the largest number of people. Had we allowed ourselves to see these phenomena, we would not have been staggered by the events of November.

The university may have been created to keep the world at bay outside its walls, but we should not allow that mythological foundation to determine our relationship with our surroundings. The very distilled concentration, the monomaniacal attention to your intellectual projects that has allowed you to be where you are today is a decided strength, but it can also lead imperceptibly to a withdrawal from the world that is not that different in its effects from outright neglect. Struggling against the insular experience in which you had to immerse yourself to be successful in graduate school will perhaps be the most taxing, the most demanding task you will undertake in the next chapter of your life.

Everything that you have learned at Columbia will only acquire its full significance when you are able to articulate its meaning for the commons. Hence, in spite of the requisite headlong plunge into our disciplinary milieu, we must never lose sight of the larger social context that will endow our work with its ultimate significance. We are, as a society, at peril of losing that sense of responsibility toward the common good without which our work will be diminished, but more important, without which no understanding or application of justice may sustain itself. Your studies have endowed you with powerful analytical tools and equally effective powers of persuasion, and you should use them to protect the health of the social compact; to strengthen the resilience of our common bonds. Strive to be happy as an individual, but always keep in mind Ortega’s admonition that if you do not also endeavor to redeem your circumstance, your own fulfillment will be in jeopardy. Never lose sight of the fact that many persons—even absolute strangers—have contributed to this personal success of yours that we celebrate today, and that the best way to acknowledge that debt is through your renewed commitment to the essential business of being human among, and alongside, other human beings.

We arrive, then, at the end of this magnificent ceremony. Go forth to be our representatives and emissaries to the world, and all of us at Columbia will rejoice in your inevitable achievements. Make us, and your relatives and friends, prouder still about you than we are today.