Lessons Learned
Rabinowitz Honors College Graduation Spring 2022
Good evening. It is such a delight to be with all of you this evening celebrating the remarkable achievements of these 2022 Rabinowitz Honors College graduating seniors. It has been a long road from Fall 2018 to this moment. There were more than the normal obstacles, disruptions, and for some of us terrible, grievous losses along the way. I’m certain during the worst part of the pandemic, not a few of you wondered whether you’d ever reach this moment. For all those reasons you as individuals, and collectively as the class of 2022, will always have a very special place in our hearts.
We went through the pandemic together. When we needed to jump to online only classes, you stuck with us. As faculty and administrators we fumbled along trying our best to reinvent the way we teach and provide all the other services associated with college life. We even had an online open mic with me memorably trying to lead a group sing-along using Zoom software that had not yet been optimized to coordinate sound. The resulting cacophony could only be described by the phrase “a joyful noise?” And it was joyful to be with students, even in that diminished way trying our best to make college happen. Through it all, you did everything you could to help us manage a situation that had been unimaginable when you began, and we are so very grateful to you for the way you responded. Your persistence in the face of those challenges helped us rise to the occasion and find a way to carry on when many of us thought it couldn’t be done.
So, with that in mind, I want this to be a special graduation speech. At the very least I want you to leave today knowing that I am confident that having been tried by fire during your
undergraduate years you leave us with more resilience, grit, and a greater capacity for flexibility than previous students. All of this bodes well for your future. When you encounter the minor setbacks and disappointments that are simply a part of every life and career, you’ll see them in the total context of your life as opportunities rather than roadblocks.
There is, however, another thing that you are taking from your unique four-year journey on the way to this degree. It’s something that haunts all of us, but that contains an incredible life-changing lesson. We all live with the reality of witnessing the loss of over 1 million Americans to the pandemic. We will always know that during this period more than 6 million people lost their lives across the globe. (World Health Organization, 5.21.2022) And, for some of you, this period will be seared in your mind as the time when you lost a parent, a grandparent, a sibling, a co-worker, a friend. This grief that haunts all of us can be debilitating. But I want to suggest that in time, and seen in the context of the long lives ahead of you, it will be a source of strength for you as individuals and for all of us collectively.
Having lived through this moment you are aware in ways most 22 year olds are not, of the preciousness, the precariousness of the lives we’ve been granted. It may sound like a cliché but you won’t be able to “take life for granted” after witnessing how easily it can be snatched away and on such a monumental scale. While it may be true that none of us can maintain the hyper-vigilance that follows the immediate shock of loss, rest assured that underneath it all, you have been changed by what happened.
Now this is not the first-time humans have had to face losses of this magnitude. In 430 BCE a plague struck Athens carrying away something like a third of its population. The Athenian general and historian Thucydides left us a “real-time report” of what it was like that included
his assessment of the impact the plague had on his people. He points out how, during that event there was nothing that could be done to mitigate the effects of the disease. Once it struck, it simply had to work its way through the community carrying away those who were affected along with anyone who dared to care for those who were already sick. As a result, Thucydides concluded, life in Athens became noticeably coarser. He said:
People were more willing to dare to do things which they would not previously have admitted to enjoying, when they saw the sudden changes of fortune, as some who were prosperous suddenly died, and their property was immediately acquired by others who had previously been destitute. So they thought it reasonable to concentrate on immediate profit and pleasure, believing that their bodies and their possessions alike would be short- lived. No one was willing to persevere in struggling for what was considered an honorable result, since he could not be sure that he would not perish before he achieved it. What was pleasant in the short term, and what was in any way conducive to that, came to be accepted as honorable and useful. No fear of the gods or law of men had any restraining power, since it was judged to make no difference whether one was pious or not as all alike could be seen dying. Thucydides, II.vii.3-54
Now I would be lying if I were to say that I saw no resemblance between Athen’s response to the plague, as Thucydides describes it, and our own moment. There has been a devolution in our collective ability to live and work together. Weirdly, and disappointingly, instead of banding together against this common enemy, it has been used by some as a tool for dividing us politically, and overturning basic norms that are so central to our democracy. That at least is the way the story is being reported to us by the media, our modern day “Thucydides,” in the this fraught political moment.
I would, however, like to turn our attention to a different perspective on what’s happened, and bring to mind something that’s hinted at briefly in Thucydides’ description but that I think is more easily visible in our time
I start by reminding us that unlike what happened in Athens, in our time there was a global, collective effort to produce vaccines that blunted the worst possible outcome, avoiding the certainty that millions more people would have died had we not mounted the scientific, social and political will to bring those weapons to this fight. And, while I know that vaccine mandates remain controversial, I ask that you focus for a moment just on what a genuine miracle it was that we were able to create, test, and produce several effective vaccines in so short a period of time. So, where Thucydides saw only a slow descent into despair and lawlessness in Athens, our experience reinforces our faith in the power that science and collective action can have when we are faced with a monumental challenge like covid-19. Seniors, especially those of you who are about to dedicate your lives to research in the sciences and medicine, I hope you find your faith strengthened by what you experienced in your covidcollege years. I promise that our faith in what you will be able to do in the future has most definitely been elevated as a result of what we’ve all witnessed in our lifetime.
Secondly, in Thucydides’ description, those who tried to care for the sick almost always found themselves infected and dying. Given this reality, the natural human empathic response to suffering was necessarily blunted to a degree unprecedented in Athen’s history. While it is true that in the earliest phases of our pandemic many nurses, doctors and first responders were infected and that a significant number of those heroes lost their lives, it is also the case that as we learned what we were dealing with we got better at protecting those who by profession and personality remained willing to risk their lives to help our sick and protect all of us. And so, again it was through science and collective action that we preserved a degree of empathy that was stolen from the Athenians by the plague’s devastating effects. If you lived in NYC, and
perhaps this was true throughout the country, the 7PM call to gratitude to first-responders is clear evidence of how different our moment was from Thucydides’ Athens. So, again seniors in all majors, don’t allow current political discord to blot out the memory of how through science and collective action we remained both grateful to and supportive of our covid-heroes.
Thirdly, I ask that for a moment, no matter where each of us stands on the political spectrum, that together we remind ourselves of the way families and communities came together to mourn and grieve over those who were taken from us. Those in this room who lost a friend or family member know exactly what I am referring to here. And even if you didn’t lose someone yourself, almost all of us know someone who did. We may have lost our sense of safety and security, but this disease did not threaten our humanity. Seniors, you are young, and if you are lucky before the pandemic you hadn’t yet experienced much in the way of death and mourning, but by living through this tragedy you’ve been given a window into the way our rituals surrounding death have the power to knit together a community that is otherwise riven by political and economic divisions.
So, those are three ways in which I think this experience marked all of us, but especially our graduating seniors. After all, the pandemic happened for you during those critical years between 18 and 22, a time when you were just coming to understand who you are and what kind of life you aim to pursue.
Looking ahead, I am hopeful you will take note of and remember that covid-19 struck specific communities disproportionately, and how that disparity had everything to do with the way resources like healthcare, housing, and jobs are distributed and almost nothing to do with the disease itself. And I am hopeful that we all will refl ect on the extent to which global
pandemics require global responses. With a mutating disease like covid, none of us is safe until all of us are protected. These realities mean that we continue to have much work to do, and I hope you see that as the takeaway from my talk tonight.
We have been watching all of you since the first day you stepped onto Hofstra’s campus. We’ve seen you successfully navigate the most difficult 4-year college experience that anyone before you had to face. During those years you transformed yourselves before our eyes from somewhat anxious high school students worried about how this whole “college-thing” was going to work out, into self-confident “just about to be – college graduates” who know so much more about themselves and the world they are about to enter. What is astonishing about your graduation is how far you’ve come and what that means for you and for all of us in the future. Your potential is limitless; we know this to be true because we’ve seen firsthand what you are capable of achieving under difficult circumstances. You’ve been tested and are emerging stronger because of it.
Our delight in the coming years will stem from watching as your lives and careers unfold. We’ve invested a great deal of ourselves in your future. You don’t have to be a business major to know a good investment like that always pays off in the long run. In the meantime, please remember that RHC will always be here for you. We’ll keep the snacks and coffee machines at the ready. We’ll want to keep you engaged as mentors to the next generation of students who come behind you. In short, please stay in touch. Hofstra and RHC will always be your home.
Warren G. Frisina, Dean