Remarks by graduating senior Drew Higgins ’16
“The Importance of Narratives”
Thank you President Poskanzer, and welcome faculty, staff, families, friends, and especially, the Class of 2016.
First, like all good speeches, I will open with an apology: to my classmates, I am sorry. Some of you I’ve never had the pleasure of knowing, and you have to sit through me, a relative stranger with equal life experience — or less, who knows — pontificating and telling you what I think about our time at Carleton.
For this reason, I confess to mostly hating graduation speeches. And yes, I do recognize the irony of that. But you kind of hate them too, don’t you? A little? Because they’re cliché. Sappy. Not all, but most. Too often, I think, they aim to generalize a graduate’s entire four years, to perfectly define and distill the wealth of our experiences into advice that we must heed as we leave this pristine, collegiate — and very, very humid — quad.
To me, this just feels wrong. I fundamentally dislike anything that generalizes our lived experiences, especially when it generalizes them into some maudlin montage.
Who am I to tell you what this place and these years have meant to you? For all of us, it’s different. Which is part of the greatness of Carleton: that we’ve all had our own experiences here — because of the majors we selected, the activities we pursued, the company we kept, or because of who we are.
Regardless, we’ve been given the freedom to have those experiences, and this community has chosen to celebrate, not demean, the diversity of experience among us. Don’t mistake me: I’m under no illusions that we do so perfectly. We don’t. But we try to — we, at the very least, believe it is important to — and that’s worth being grateful, for that’s more than many other institutions.
Yes, there are things that bond us; of course there are. We’ve shared this campus, with its stately oak trees and distinguished chapel. We’ve shared devoted professors we’ve admired and ones we griped about over Moodle posts. We’ve shared joy: the joy of the first real day of spring in Minnesota, of concerts and Rotblatts and unexpected Friday Flowers. When you edit out all the taxing, trying parts of college — subzero winters, occasional and not-so-occasional loneliness, the quiet, unnoticed moments of hard work and exhaustion in the bowels of the Libe — I do have to say that, it is a very nice montage. If we are to stomach montage, Carleton’s is not a bad one to stomach.
But to my point: for me, the joy of dancing to Smash Mouth or T-Pain or whoever — while obviously beloved in my memory — feels minor in comparison to a thousand other joys I’ve known here. Small things: a run along the Cannon, every dinner I had on the front porch of CANOE house, that time my roommate woke me up by yelling “Drew, there’s a cat on my bed!” when Lyman was traipsing around her pillow at 5 a.m. These are joys I know, but there are so many other joys that only you know. These are things that Carleton has meant to me, but only you know what it means to you.
We all have the right to our own narratives, and maybe you know how Carleton fits into yours, but probably you’re still parsing it out, and rightly so: our narratives evolve in the continuum of our experiences. They shape our views, perspectives, and beliefs, and they should not be generalized, lumped together, or ignored — in a 5-minute graduation speech, or elsewhere. You needn’t look further than the polarization of our political system for an example of what happens when they are. It does not matter where you fall on the political spectrum, if anywhere. When we demean the differences between us, we feed anger and fuel hatred. We end up with problems like — but not limited to — Donald Trump. And it is, on some level, not even about demeaning — it’s about not listening. To be deaf to some narratives means creating the kind of culture where select stories are put on pedestals, and others, tossed aside.
So I’m talking about graduation speeches, but you are all intelligent people; you know what a metaphor is, and so you know that I’m also speaking in somewhat veiled terms about larger issues: xenophobia, racism, hierarchies of oppression, the importance of diversity and discourse. My classmates — thankfully — engage frequently with these ideas, academically and otherwise, and I don’t wish to delve into them now, if only because they warrant more attention than the minutes I’ve been allotted. But I believe, and I posit to you that, at the heart of these problems and conversations which often feel so looming and amorphous, there are people. There are narratives that we must value and seek to know, even when they are foreign to us. Especially when they are foreign to us.
As a writer for The Carletonian, I interviewed and spoke with people at Carleton I never envisioned I would: students, deans, security officers, Northfield neighbors — I once even wrote a story about a loose chicken that was wandering around outside the dorms — and it change the way I perceived this place. I’m never short of amazed by the power of stories to do that.
This idea is related to, and much more eloquently expressed by, American author Jonathan Franzen, in his 2012 essay “Pain Won’t Kill You.” Franzen is a bit of a curmudgeon, and his essay centers around his love of birding, so take that as you will, but at the end of it, he writes: “When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people… there’s a very real danger you might end up loving some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?”
Who knows what might happen to you then? My four years at Carleton have in many ways been a long process of answering that question, of getting out of my room — metaphorically and literally — and putting myself in relation to the very real people in front of me. I only hope that I have listened to them half as well as they have listened to me.
Congratulations to the Class of 2016, and thank you.