For goodness’ sake
Commencement speeches focus on character. Near the end of Duke’s 164th commencement ceremony, which returned in May to Wallace Wade Stadium (still in the process of renovation) after a year’s absence, more than 5,300 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students stood with their arms locked, waiting for—like so many Blue Devils before them—further instructions from Mike Krzyzewski. But first, a joke. “And when I say three— I’ll say, ‘one, two, three,’ by the way,” explained Krzyzewski, the commencement speaker, to a laughing crowd. “Some of you aren’t college graduates yet.” Coach K spoke about lessons he has learned from his personal life and his thirty-six years of coaching basketball at Duke. He emphasized attitude, belief, preparation, and execution as the keys for handling adversity: “There’s nothing more important than attitude, and it’s your choice.” He noted that he had been asked “about 100 times to speak at graduations around the country, and I saved myself for you,” adding, “I’ve dreamed of this day, just like you’ve dreamed of this day.” As a finale, he had the graduating students squeeze their locked arms and shout, “Together!”—a manifestation of his advice to find and build a team with good people and to “display your heart.”
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In a similar vein, student speaker Shannon Beckham ’16 delivered an address encouraging her peers to retain empathy after graduating, and to “not just want to be great, but to be good.” “My hope is that we don’t forget the importance of our experiences here, because they have built our characters just as much as our résumés,” said Beckham. Duke awarded five honorary degrees during the ceremony. The recipients were William Foege, an epidemiologist and global-health pioneer; Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, the president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; Charlie Rose ’64, J.D. ’68, the journalist and TV talk show host; Natasha Trethewey, a former U.S. poet laureate; and Srinivasa Varadhan, a mathematician. As degrees were being conferred en masse to members of the various schools, President Richard H. Brodhead, presiding over the ceremony, singled out a much-honored member of the Duke faculty: Blake Wilson, a pioneer of the cochlear implant, who had a newly earned Ph.D. from Duke. The implant has provided hearing to hundreds of thousands of people who were previously deaf or severely hearing-impaired.
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