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Nathan Hatch Graduate 91��Ƶ Commencement address

2013-05-18T17:55:00-04:00

Delivered at Notre Dame Graduate 91��Ƶ Commencement Ceremony, held May 18, 2013 in the Compton Family Ice Arena

It is a double honor to return to this place, which so profoundly nurtured my own sense of calling as a teacher, scholar, and administrator. I arrived here in the fall of 1975 as a newly minted historian of early America. I found the History Department and the College of Arts and Letters an ideal academic home: impeccable intellectual standards, great commitment to teaching, and creative thought about what kind of discourse should animate a distinct place like Notre Dame. I remember fondly the intimidating intellectual presence of Father Marvin O’Connell, the powerful intellects of Marshall Smelser and Fred Pike, the good cheer of Vincent DeSantis, the wisdom of Philip Gleason, who seems to have read every book about any subject, the great teaching of Father Tom Blantz, the
stimulation of other new young colleagues like Jay Dolan, John Van Engen, Tom Kselman, and Diane Murray.

I also remember the fateful day, when Mike Loux, a new dean of Arts and Letters, called two weeks before classes began in the fall to see if I would stop what I was doing to take on a job in administration. Mike was a brilliant leader and, under his tutelage, I became intrigued with the challenges of working, on behalf of one’s colleagues, to strengthen this university. It was a distinct privilege to work with Provost Tim O’Meara and Father Ted Hesburgh. Father Monk Malloy gave me the enormous privilege of serving as Provost here and I learned a tremendous amount from him as well as from colleagues in the Provost office: Carol Mooney, Father Tim Scully, John AffleckGraves,Father John Jenkins, Chris Maziar, and Dennis Jacobs. My debts here are many and large, indeed.

It is also an honor to be here on this special day for those of you receiving graduate degrees from Notre Dame. Let me salute your signal accomplishments. This is a day to celebrate, to take note of all that your newly minted degree represents, and to give thanks to family and colleagues who helped make possible your course of study.

One thing I can promise those of you who are being awarded degrees today. The value of your graduate diploma from this place has never been higher. Notre Dame has been in the business of graduate education for a long time, for over 75 years, but the University’s ascendency as a research university and its commitment to graduate education has been marked in recent years. I was privileged to have a small hand in these efforts some twenty years ago. But the progress in recent years has been remarkable: investment in graduate support, in laboratories, in the library, and, most importantly, in bringing to Notre Dame faculty of the first rank.

Let me congratulate Father John Jenkins, Provost Tom Burish and especially Vice President and Senior Associate Provost Chris Maziar, who is also serving as Interim Dean of the Graduate 91��Ƶ. Also, let me acknowledge the deans of the colleges, and so many faculty who have been responsible for making Notre Dame a truly distinguished university in the Catholic tradition. This sterling quality is certainly being recognized nationally and it will serve you graduates well as you move out from this place and begin to apply what you have learned here.

This morning I want to leave you with two simple messages, the first about intellectual curiosity and the importance of learning as an end in itself; the second, about what scholars are now calling “grit.” or resilience. Curiosity and Grit.

I trust your graduate education at Notre Dame offered one gift above all: to whet your appetite for understanding. The very reason a university exists—its heart and soul—is to inspire passion to learn, to explore, to discover, to understand. In these walls, I trust you have been gripped by the power of a great novel, or dazzled by hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, or the intricacies of the human genome, or stirred by a play or concert, or amazed by a brilliant analysis of comparative politics. Most of all, I hope that your intellectual grounding in your respective discipline here has generated questions, and methods of inquiry, that will animate your work for years to come.

Professor Nancy Hopkins, who teaches at MIT, remembers her own moment of intellectual awakening. She does so in frankly romantic terms, describing her “crush on DNA.” After hearing a lecture by James Watson on the wonder of DNA, she admits she suddenly fell in love with a subject that promised to unravel the very mysteries of life. I hope that you have experienced such moments of awakening—and that their memory will be a continuing inspiration.

“Never lose a holy curiosity,” advised Albert Einstein. Be relentlessly inquisitive, every day, about the world around, its promises and mysteries. I make this point for two reasons. First, it is crucial for the vitality of your own sense of calling longterm. Whether you will be spending time teaching, or in research, in public service, or in management, keeping alive a flame of curiosity will give motivation and meaning to what you do. Thomas Jefferson once said that the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. Your work will continue to seem worth doing if it is animated by sustained inquiry. How can things be understood better?

What new insights have others developed in a given field? How can human interactions be structured more positively? Any job can become routine without this kind of intellectual vitality. I also want to make this point about continuous learning because today the ideal of learning for its own sake is under steady assault. In the context of a constrained economy, and scarce public resources, we are hearing a drumbeat that the primary purpose of higher education should be its economic utility. The most pressing question today seems to be how much does college cost in relation to the salary that a college graduate can command. These themes resonate not just from nervous parents but also from Congressional Committees, from the Education Department itself, and from dominant influences like the Gates and Lumina Foundations. In states like Florida, Texas, and North Carolina there have been open discussion that suggest the value of higher education should be evaluated strictly in terms of return on investment. And Virginia has begun a statelevel data collection to link graduates’ salaries back to their colleges and majors. This kind of accountability may have its place, but it also brings into question the value of learning itself and the vital importance of a liberal arts education—in a time when in Andrew Delbanco’s eloquent rendering, the liberal arts are becoming marginal or merely ornamental.

We need intellectual curiosity on all fronts. We need it desperately in the so-called STEM disciplines. We need it in the social sciences, in the arts, and in professional fields of law, medicine, business, and divinity. While all of learning for its own sake is questioned, the greatest threat is to humanistic inquiry, which has been at the heart and soul of a place like Notre Dame. Literature, philosophy, history, the Classics—these fields are the ones most easily targeted as irrelevant or unnecessary. Michael Malone, in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal defending the Humanities, states the point bluntly: for the humanities “to image that they have anything approaching the significance or influence of technical fields smacks of a kind of sad, lastditch desperation. Science merely nods and says, ‘I see your Jane Austen monographs and deconstructions of ‘The Tempest’ and raise you stem cell research and the iPhone’—and then pockets all of the chips on the table.” (This does not mean to disparage science and technology in any way; only to suggest the comparative vulnerability of disciplines that have less economic utility.)

All of us need to redouble our efforts to defend the “higher” purposes of a college education despite our economic woes, just as C.S. Lewis did in his address during World War II, “Learning in Wartime:” In that address he defended the importance of the life of the mind even when civilization was literally crumbling. “Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun.” Andrew Delbanco’s book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be is an eloquent reminder of the real, higher aims of colleges and universities. Learn, keep learning, and inspire others to learn. That is my first piece of advice. The second is far more practical and addresses how you approach the jobs you will now undertake: in colleges, in research labs, in NGO’s, in government, in museums, in libraries. This is advice for any kind of position that you pursue.

I want to talk with you about some surprising studies about what make people successful. Those of us in the academy are particularly prone to believe that intelligence is the key to success: the spoils, we think, generally go to those who are brilliant, to those who analyze and write well, to those who are quick on their feet. This morning I am going to suggest an entirely different theory of success, one that offers both encouragement and challenge to us all.

My theme today is a character strength called “grit.” Before she taught psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Angela Duckworth taught math in middle and high school. She spent a lot of time thinking about something that seemed obvious: students who tried hardest did the best and students who didn’t try very hard
didn’t do so well. Duckworth wanted to know: what is the role of effort in a person’s success. Duckworth’s research focuses on a personality trait she calls “grit.” Grit is “sticking with things over the very long term until you master them.” She writes that “the gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina.”

Duckworth has developed a “Grit Scale.” You rate yourself ona series of about 10 items such as “I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge” and “Setback don’t discourage me.” She has found in a variety of settings that a grit score was the best predictor of success: She found that among West Point cadets, at Ivy League institutions, at the National Spelling Bee competition, and among underprivileged students seeking to complete college. People with less talent often compensate by working harder and with more determination. The grittiest students, not the smartest ones, often do the best. Similar themes are evident in the work of Paul Tough whose books “How Children Succeed” and “Whatever it Takes” challenges the so-called cognitive hypothesis that success depends primarily on cognitive skills. The thesis of these books might be called the character hypothesis: the notion that noncognitive skills, like persistence, selfcontrol, curiosity, resilience, and grit are more crucial than sheer brainpower to achieving success. “Character is created by encountering and overcoming failure,” Paul Tough suggests. One of his articles is entitled “What if the Secret of Success is Failure?” This kind of “grit,” or staying power, is important for two reasons. Your generation tends to have interests many and varied. In college many of you doubled majored and in graduate school, your interest has ranged widely. Even within your own discipline, you may be intrigued by very different sets of questions and approaches. Your enthusiasms are worthy and intense, but sometimes fleeting. Your have not been known for persistence: sticking to something until you really master it.

My advice to you, as young professionals, is to become really good at something. It is better to master one discrete thing than dabble in ten interesting projects. Being the faithful steward of a small responsibility will convince others you can be entrusted with larger things. Publishing one firstrate academic article will carry more weight than a slew of second-tier work. This is not to say that, over time, you won’t branch out, and that you will not take on many different assignments. You will. But when you have a challenge, learn to master it, no matter how difficult. Don’t retreat to something easier, more interesting, or more familiar. Don’t dream about what might be. Learn to sprint up the hills. Your generation also needs to cultivate a second quality of “Grit:” to understand the how to cope with disappointment and failure. The timeless, if uncomfortable, truth is that true strength of character is almost always forged by encountering and overcoming failure.

On this bright and auspicious day, I wish I could promise you graduates the road would always rise up to meet you, that the wind would always be at your back, that the sun would always shine warm on your face. There will be many of those days, I am confident. But there will also be hard days when schooling, or job, or family, or your own sense of selfworth seems to crumble around you. “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick,” Steve Jobs noted in his famous 10 commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. Jobs had revolutionized the world of personal computers in 1984 with the MacIntosh, but then the project faltered, and he was fired from the very company he had founded. “It was awful tasting medicine,” he said, “but I guess the patient needed it.” Jobs concluded that getting fired was actually the best thing that could have happened to him. Why? Because it drove him to reassess everything, to rekindle his creative fire, and to redouble his effort and commitment. It made him resilient.

Why is coming to terms with failure important? Because all of us encounter turns that seem to go nowhere, launch projects that fizzle, or get caught in organizations into which we do not fit. Particularly in this day and age, no one is exempt from the school of hard knocks. The key is how we respond to such setbacks. Do we lose heart, or do we learn things about ourselves? Do we blame others or do we change our approach? Do we become more skittish or find a way to bounce back, to get back into the saddle? In this day, the biggest problem with a fear of failure is that we will not take risks. And in this economy, as traditional jobs and careers disappear, and as some academic fields wax and others wane, you will have to take more risks, become more entrepreneurial. As Thomas Friedman recently stated: “Need a job? Invent it.” You cannot make big bets, experiment early and often, if you are terrified of failure.

Thomas J. Watson, the legendary leader of IBM counseled: “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.” The point is to lean into disappointment and setback. Become more gritty. This morning you may think I have taken you in two entirely different directions. I have extolled inspiration, the joys of learning, the importance of thinking and understanding as ends in themselves. And I have said, as a young professional you need perspiration, to be more gritty; focused, tough, able to overcome setbacks and disappointment. I have spoken about inspiration and perspiration, traits that may seem opposite or contradictory. Actually, I do think they are linked more tightly than one might think. No one was more relentlessly curious than Thomas Edison, yet he regularly related his insights to a relentless work ethic: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Accordingly a genius is often merely a talented person who has done all of his or her homework.” Another brilliant inventor, Louis Pasteur, put it this way: “Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goals: my strength lies solely in my tenacity.”

This morning, I extend the heartiest congratulations on this special day. And I commend to you the conjoined virtues of relentless curiosity and sustained focus and hard work.

Intellectual and Moral Purpose Still Meet at Catholic Universities

2005-05-03T20:00:00-04:00

Almost three decades ago, fresh out of graduate school, I arrived at the University of Notre Dame to teach early American history. I have lived and worked at the institution since that time, serving as provost for the last decade. It has been quite an unexpected pilgrimage for a Southerner, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and I deeply appreciate the way Notre Dame has extended its welcome to me over the years, taking me seriously as a colleague and fellow laborer in the challenge of building a great university, and one with a distinct religious identity.

My recent decision to become president of Wake Forest University prompts me to step back and reflect on the experience. Taking stock is also timely given the recent death of Pope John Paul II and the election of Pope Benedict XVI, who have both exerted such a powerful influence on world Catholicism and Catholic higher education in America. As long-term professors themselves, both took a keen interest in Catholic universities.

Deciphering life at Notre Dame has been intriguing for a historian who studies church-related higher education. Sometimes the process has been lonely. I recall attending a mass with more than 100 Roman Catholic bishops who were meeting at Notre Dame. As they processed resplendently into the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, vestments flowing and incense wafting, my wife and I took note that we were the only non-Catholics in attendance.

I have also enjoyed rare privileges. In 1998 I visited Rome with the president of Notre Dame, the Rev. Edward A. Malloy. The purpose of the trip was to call on a dozen or so senior Vatican officials, cardinals, and archbishops responsible for various dimensions of the Catholic Church’s ministry: education, finance, the laity, worship, ecumenical affairs, and missions. On our final day in Rome, we were invited to an early-morning mass with Pope John Paul II in his private chapel. Seeing the historic depth and global reach of the church made it the most memorable week of my life.

However, I came home puzzled about one thing that bothers me to this day. It is the mood of distrust that the Vatican expresses toward Catholic higher education in the United States — the 230 institutions that enroll some 600,000 students. Since the publication in 1990 of Ex corde Ecclesiae, Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities, a document designed to shore up the Catholic mission and the authority of local bishops, Vatican officials have decried the state of schools like Boston College, Georgetown University, Notre Dame, Santa Clara University, Seattle University, and Villanova University. In 1996, after years of work, the American bishops adopted norms for applying the document to colleges and universities here — only to have them rejected by the Vatican for not being sufficiently “juridical.” One imagines a stern and worried father lecturing a wayward child, hoping to find some way to regain tighter ecclesiastical control over these institutions, particularly their theologians.

That worried distrust stands in striking contrast to the flourishing experiments in Catholic higher education that I have witnessed at Notre Dame and elsewhere. While I am deeply aware of the struggles and failures of Catholic institutions and of the powerful secular undertow in academic life, what I find remarkable is how creative and intentional these communities have become in renewing their Catholic identity. In part, that may be a reaction to strident critiques from Rome. More important, I think, are the convictions that spring from deep within those institutions to set a course that is faithful to a distinct mission. What Martha C. Nussbaum, a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, concluded about Notre Dame in Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Higher Education (Harvard University Press, 1997) can be said of scores of other Catholic universities: “Drawing on a long Roman Catholic tradition of inquiry and higher education, Notre Dame has constructed a genuinely religious education within a first-rate research university with strong guarantees of academic freedom and a commitment both to Socratic searching and to international study.”

It has been almost 40 years since leading American Catholic universities declared their independence from church control in the Land O’Lakes statement that the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, then president of Notre Dame, helped to craft in 1967. Predominantly lay boards took ownership and control of Catholic universities, setting a course that included academic freedom for faculty members. Father Hesburgh’s dream of independence sprang from his conviction that Catholic universities in America, as private institutions, could prosper only if they mobilized lay Catholics. His vision was to unleash the energy, resources, and expertise of American Catholics on behalf of a distinctly Catholic higher education — an outcome he thought unlikely under tight ecclesiastical control.

I am convinced that the experiment has been enormously successful. The generosity of American Catholics has propelled many institutions to a competitive academic level, bolstering endowments, facilities, faculty support, and financial aid. Catholics and non-Catholics alike are attracted to these academic communities, where religion is taken seriously and is studied and practiced intelligently. Catholic colleges and universities also manifest tremendous models of collaboration between clerical and lay leadership. Far from losing its soul, Catholic higher education has emerged as a vital influence within the broader American society and the Roman Catholic Church itself.

Even more, Catholic higher education has an important role to play as the United States and other nations face the uncomfortable realities of the 21st century. We live in a curious age: The world seems to be growing more radically secular and more radically religious at the same time. Religion in America is thriving in popular culture and has become a significant wedge issue in politics. Yet in the realms of high culture — in the best universities, in the arts, in literary circles — secular values are the coin of the realm.

In a telling address in 1997 to first-year students at the University of Chicago, John J. Mearsheimer, a distinguished-service professor in the political-science department, suggested that students should expect to gain from their education critical thinking and self-awareness. He then specified two “non-aims” of education at the University of Chicago: truth and morality. Mearsheimer contrasted the current approach with what John D. Rockefeller and William Rainey Harper envisioned in founding the institution in the 1890s: a university permeated by a spirit of religion. “Today,” Mearsheimer said, “elite universities operate on the belief that there is a clear separation between intellectual and moral purpose, and they pursue the former while largely ignoring the latter. There is no question that the University of Chicago makes hardly any effort to provide you with moral guidance.”

By contrast, Catholic universities have not given up the dream of linking intellectual and moral purpose. They provide a middle ground where vital religious traditions can engage modern thought in a climate of academic freedom. As institutions they are committed to a given point of view, are enlivened by a founding religious community, and are typically headed by a scholar who is a priest or by a religious woman.

In addition, Catholic universities welcome a diverse range of faculty members and expect the curriculum to confront students with different ways of thinking. At Notre Dame a student can take courses on medieval life from a committed Thomist, from a staunch feminist, or from a cultural historian whose own point of view is hard to discern. The intellectual crossroads of a Catholic university avoids two extremes: the homogeneity of religious colleges and the relativism of modern universities.

Catholic universities work at building a voluntary community of reflection and engagement. Their campuses are honeycombed with discussions, retreats, and activities that challenge students to renew their faith, to engage critical social problems, and to consider professions for reasons other than self-interest. What is evident is a commitment to the holistic nurturing of students — body, mind, and spirit. If the Roman Catholic Church in America is to retain the loyalty of the next generation of its educated parishioners, particularly young women, one clear reason will be the inviting forms of intellectual exchange, faith, and service they experience in college. Those may be the greatest antidote to the “dictatorship of relativism” that Pope Benedict XVI identified in his last sermon as a cardinal.

The institutional church, I would suggest, has much to learn from Catholic colleges and universities. Bishops and cardinals could discover how to make a faith tradition powerful and enticing for modern young adults. Parishes, for instance, need more occasions for young adults to relate their faith to their professional life and to the questions raised by popular culture. The church could also glean much about how to engage fully the talents and resources of lay leaders. At Notre Dame I witness daily a tremendous model of collaboration between priests and lay persons. Last year, when the university was being reaccredited, it was Father Malloy, the president, and three lay deans who presented to the visiting committee a vision of Notre Dame’s distinct mission as a Catholic university. There is mutual admiration for the critical role that clergy and laity play, and each holds the other accountable.

Catholic universities face stiff challenges if they are to prosper as genuinely Catholic and remain accountable to the highest standards of scholarship. They, too, have much to learn from the church on which their life depends. Most important, they need to find ways to recruit Catholic intellectuals and other faculty members who are committed to the august tradition of “faith seeking understanding.”

For opposite reasons, some secularists and some churchmen disparage the Catholic university as a contradiction in terms. I believe, instead, that it represents a cornerstone of renewal, a place where the church can do its thinking and where young people are still inspired by the ideals of transcendence and compassion that so animated the life of Pope John Paul II. My hope is that Pope Benedict XVI will appreciate these lively experiments and welcome their collaboration in addressing the secularity and relativism that he condemns in today’s world.

Nathan O. Hatch is provost of the University of Notre Dame and will become president of Wake Forest University on July 1.

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