Sun 8 Jun 2008
Erika Williams ‘08, Phi Beta Kappa Speaker, “Get a Machete.”
This is hard. But let me just tell you about a statement that was really reassuring to me. It’s buried in pages and pages of contract, regulation and equipment specifications for the position I’m taking next year. I am going to study capuchin monkeys in dense forest in Costa Rica. The sentences read as follows: “The project also has machetes to give out. These you keep over the year as well.” Lets just pause and think about what this really means. To me, it meant this: If you want to clear your own path, you can find people who will, quite literally, give you a large jungle knife to do so. It suggests we can have confidence that others will be supportive of our wandering in to new territory. Supportive and excited enough to help equip us to go. That’s what a machete is: this proof of support, this sharing of excitement.
This seems like the most clever and interesting speech of the week-end, at least on paper. Or perhaps I am just an Buckaroo Banzai fan boy.
June 9th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
On a related note, I enjoyed JK Rowling’s speech at Harvard:
http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html
One area that Harvard, I hate to say, kicks Williams in the ass, is graduation / class day speakers. Of course, Harvard is Harvard, and they have the luxury of attracting huge names. Still, given that, they do a great job choosing unconventional people. Pretty much every graduation speech, including nearly all five speakers at Williams this year and the Rowling speech, follow more or less the same template: don’t be afraid to take risks, failure is OK, think outside the box, use your privilege to do good. The question is how those thoughts are expressed. My four favorite examples are from four of my favorite people: JK Rowling and Conan O’Brien at Harvard, Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes cartoonish) at Kenyon, and a few graduation speeches by Barack Obama. The only graduation speech I loved that broke the usual mode was “Ali G’s” totally-in-character speech at Harvard, which was absolutely hilarious, but of course he had the luxury of conveying no message of any sort whatsover, let alone anything inspiration.