dick fenno graduation talk i am delighted to be here with
TRANSCRIPT
Dick Fenno
Graduation Talk
I am delighted to be here with the Class of 200 6 . And I
congratulate you on your accomplishment. You are a fearsome
class. When I heard you were corning, I retired! Which gives me
one advantage in talking with you. I am not the person who gave
you that C+ when you deserved a B; and I'm not the person who gave
you that B+ when you deserved an A. In that respect, I come with
clean hands. I come, too, as a student of American political life
and I want to use that experience as my window on today's ceremony .
Each of you, I'm sure, has your own idea of what political science
is all about. And in the years ahead, no matter what your career,
you will have occasion to use your political science education .
Some will use it playing politics, others will use it discussing or
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consuming politics. All of you, I hope, will enjoy--and profit
from--your use of your major.
I was once a political science major, too. And thinking back now,
I can remember only one effort--among many I'm sure--to tell me
what political science was all about. In my second year of
teaching, I was in vi ted--wi th some other rookies--to my first
conference to meet and listen to the leading professors of American
politics. I remember only one minute of the conf erence--when the
main speaker told us that he had discovered the idea that
distinguished political science from all other disciplines. When
he said that, us rookies sat up straight and listened! Then he
said, "This idea is ours. We own it." Now we were on the edge of
our seats! Then after a pregnant pause, he uttered one word--
"citizenship!" Wow--a big wind up, a quick pitch, and much head-
scratching.
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The idea of citizenship seemed important alright, I must have
thought, but hardly likely to carry a full load of political
analysis and explanation in the field of American politics.
And yet--here's the point--I never forgot it! Why not? Because
the citizenship idea has been important and useful to me ever
since. In my teaching, I began every undergraduate course by
saying to students: "This is a citizen's course." And it is
helpful to me, now, to think about the idea of citizenship when I
think about our graduation ceremony.
' \
Citizenship may seem to be a pretty cut and dried, technical and
legalistic subject. But I've seen quite a lot of it. And
personal experience tells me otherwise. In 1975, I got an early
lesson in the political side of citizenship. At the invitation of
the Cuban government, I went to Havana and taught a short course on
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Congress to the English speakers in the Foreign Office of the
Castro government. My passport was taken from me in Mexico; and
the U.S. government had made it clear they would be unable to
protect me. For eight days, I had no effective citizenship. My
passport was returned only as I walked off Cubana Airlines in
Jamaica. And I' 11 remember forever the rush of relief when I
touched friendly soil. Citizenship, I concluded, is not only a
legal idea. It is a political idea--and a very emotional one, too.
Citizenship ceremonies here at home carry similar emotions and
teach large political lessons. In the late 19'90' s, I sat beside
Congressman Chaka Fattah in a packed gymnasium in Philadelphia, and
watched 200 individuals from 23 countries raise their right hands,
take the oath of allegiance, and become citizens. I watched them
melt into a crowd of happy, supportive relatives and friends. And
I heard several mention the word "vote." They had made it into
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the public, political life of the country. Our nation's politics
have been reshaped over and over by waves of multi-cultural
citizenship celebrations with the same upbeat spirit as this one.
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frhree years ago in San Jose, California, I watched Congresswoman
Zoe Lofgren preside over the citizenship ceremony of a former Major
in the South Vietnamese Army. He had saved the lives of three
downed American airmen by pulling them from their burning plane and
sheltering them. In combat, later, the Major had lost both his
arms. He had come to America, but his efforts at citizenship had
been stalled. At the behest of the American Veterans of Foreign
Wars and of her large South Vietnamese constituency--Congresswoman
Lofgren had sponsored a private citizenship bill, shephered it
through the Congress. Six TV cameras, a dozen newspaper reporters,
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a VFW contingent, and lots of Vietnamese friends and relatives were
there. An INS official administered the oath. Then one of the
airmen whose lives the Major had saved was piped in to tell the
rescue story blow-by-blow over loud speakers. Then the former
Major spoke. Everyone hugged and cried. Once again, a citizenship
ceremony captured the promise of participation in American
political life.]
These experiences tell me that citizenship may not be the key to
all political science. And we may not "own it." But it is, for
sure, one very big idea.
Our graduation ceremony, too, is a citizenship ceremony. Our
ceremony, too, reflects personal ambition; and it celebrates hard
work and accomplishment. Our ceremony, too, has a flavor of
success and a feeling of optimism. Here, too, we see proud
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families and warm friends, joyful celebrations, and the charting of
new careers. Both ceremonies celebrate enlarged possibilities in
American public life.
The requirements of a political science major (or double major),
far exceed, of course, the basic requirements of legal citizenship.
Our ceremony celebrates an educational achievement that opens a
much wider participatory window, and it focuses a set of
expectations on you that are more demanding and more challenging.
It is your political science education and how you might use it as
citizens that we especially celebrate. We don't know where or how
you will register your educational experience--in this country or
abroad, in your neighborhood, town or city, in a public
organization, a private association or in your home. But your
. diploma carries with it the assumption that you will participate
somehow in the national political conversation. And your teachers
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have prepared you to improve that conversation when you join it.
Graduation, like citizenship, exemplifies the optimistic and
constructive side of American political life. Like citizenship,
graduation is a very big idea.
When I began a course in American politics by calling it "a
citizen's course," my goal, I told each class, was to introduce
them to the best scholarly research--to help them to become
informed, critical and constructive consumers of--and participants
in-- our national political conversation. That conversation, I
said, could be found in the New York Times, The Washington Post,
Wall Street Journal and the PBS Newshour. I could be that specific
because nearly all the country's operative political conversation
could be found in that handful of news outlets.
Today, my courses would still be "citizen's courses" but those four
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media reference points--which served so well for 30 years, are now
incredibly inadequate. The internet, cable TV, Direct TV, talk
radio, the 24 hour news cycle, The Daily Show, Fox News, blogging
and googling, have swamped us and created a vastly more competitive
and chaotic media-driven marketplace. They have generated a
quantum increase in sources of information which have, in turn,
radically altered citizen political conversation--and citizen
political activity.
We now have a multi-sided civic conversation that is increasingly
over-simplified, shrill, combative, polarized, and self-
perpetuating. It is driven by media competition and it never
stops. It sucks up all the civic oxygen needed to consider and
construct compromise. The short-term swallows up the long-term.
It magnifies our divisions and shrinks the prospects for agreement.
It is all conflict all the time. The media have no interest in
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getting things done, no interest in proposing--much less working
for--solutions. They have no stake in compromise. The
contemporary media are drawn to--and they live by--controversy.
They scan the horizon for potential conflict into which the rest of
us can be drawn. They turn us into combatants who attack one
another. My own favorite fantasy is to have the power to call a
24-hour national "time out"--no fighting allowed. But we are
surrounded, instead, by round-the-clock conflict. And it has made
the job of citizenship harder than ever.
In which case, your challenge, as I see it, is to use your
knowledge and your training to nudge the political conversation--
whenever and however you can--in a calmer, more measured, more
constructive and yes, more scholarly direction. You graduate today
with special citizenship skills. You have learned to tell a good
analysis from a bad one. You can examine values, recognize bias,
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evaluate evidence, test alternatives, interpret trends, assess data
and verify examples. You can specify the circumstances under which
self-interest can be morphed into mutual gain. That's the gift
from your teachers--high analytic standards.
I do not mean to eliminate partisanship. Far from it.
Partisanship drives all democratic political systems. We value it,
and we assume that you will act as partisans. What we teach,
however, is not partisanship; we teach analysis. And we think we
know that extreme unending partisanship without constructive
analysis is no long-term formula for anybody's success .
In my view, the important thing is that you employ your classroom
lessons to keep America's political conversation as calm, as
constructive, as continuous and as independent of the media hype as
possible. Our pollsters tell us that there is, throughout the
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country, "a hunger for consensus." If you can identify and give a
positive constructive nudge to those politicians who most value
negotiation and who work the hardest at coalition-building--in any
party and at any level of government--you will, to my mind, be
practicing citizenship in its finest form.
Well, graduation speakers will pontificate--as I have. And that's
that! Now, each of you will prepare to follow your own star. And
each of you will find--in the philosopher's words--"a truth that is
true for you." So, go for it, fellow citizens, and good luck!
' . \
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