David J. Steinberg, President, Long Island University
Commencement Address - May 9, 2004
C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University

It is always a special joy for any university president to look out on a sea of happy faces waiting for the conferral of their degrees. This is especially true for me today. I see a host of men, and, proudly, even more women. I see graduands from every part of the globe and every background. Some of you are younger while others are older. In your excitement, in your happiness, and in your competence I hear, to celebrate Walt Whitman, "America singing."

During this graduation season I am conferring approximately 5,700 degrees at seven different graduations, including 3,748 graduate degrees. Two hundred thirty-seven individuals are receiving doctoral degrees, including Ph.D.'s, Pharm.D's, Psy.D.'s.
What coherence links all these degrees? Is there something that transcends this babble of acronyms and different letters? The answer is, "yes," and that connectivity is at the core of all higher education.

Whatever your degree, undergraduate or graduate, it has been designed and taught to help you make your way in our society and in this new century. We have provided you with a skills set that can help you secure employment, can lead to a good living, and can offer you professional opportunities and rewards. Our University trains nurses, pharmacists, marine scientists, librarians, social workers, psychologists, accountants, public administrators, teachers (thank God, so many teachers), and many, many other professions that provide career ladder opportunities in our society. What all of you have received, at the undergraduate or graduate levels, are the tools needed to reach a higher orbit, to participate in the secular dream of America, to gain opportunities that were not available to your grandparents or your parents. Such an education can be effective when excellently taught by a committed, very skilled faculty. When we speak of "access to the American dream," this is what we mean.

But there is a second, more important, shared unity in your several degrees that has nothing to do with how much you will earn over a lifetime or by your place on a career ladder, or through contributions made to our society by your work in a classroom, or a hospital, or wherever you may find employment.

I speak instead of the "value added" that has occurred in your own souls through an enlarged capacity to think, to reason, to seek the meaning of life. To be able to analyze rationally; to be able to discern truth from falsehood; to be able to see beauty and understand it; to encounter the glories of other eras and other cultures and to appreciate them; to know yourself -- your strengths, your weaknesses, your insecurities, and your shortcomings -- all of these things, so essential to a full life, are happy "fellow travelers" in your pursuit of a degree. You have learned in the classroom and outside of it. You have learned from faculty and fellow students. You have learned alone.

You have learned, in sum, not only specific expertise required by your particular degree, but so many other things that, both large and small, shape the human being you now are. Long Island University has given you an enhanced capacity to love and to accept others and yourself. If, I ask, "what is the great end and real purpose of living," the answer can be found in the words of the prophet, Micah, who answered that eternal, existential question by enjoining each of us "to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God." And, if you happen to be a secularist, simply rephrase Micah's words - "to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your loved ones and your fellow human beings."

Our modern university is an intellectual citadel, a seat of learning, a bulwark against ignorance and a treasure house of knowledge. Its core business can never be measured by normal corporate yardsticks, since it trades in a gossamer of services and ideas. It exists to educate you and to serve society by advancing the sciences, the arts, the healing professionals, the society's professional needs, education and technology. It is also both defender of culture and critic. It must be a repository of the verities embedded in the American dream, encouraging free and open inquiry, even when such inquiry may be politically unpopular or deemed irrelevant by the larger society. Our university, like others, is a mysterious, wondrous place, a redoubt for the mind and spirit, a self-renewing community of learners. As a member of that community, you are linked to other graduands here today, despite their different colored hoods and several degrees. Indeed, you are also linked to men and women graduating elsewhere this commencement season. And, you are linked to generations past, and those still to come.

And thus, even if you were never to get that job of your dreams, your capacity to love, to lead a life of value and virtue, and to find personal fulfillment are grounds sufficient for these years of effort (and cost) made by each of you. Every year I end these commencement remarks by quoting the same post-modern, deconstructionist philosopher. You know him as Yoda. What he said to Luke Skywalker, I say to each of you: "May the Force be with you."

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