2,009 graduate from Brown with 'gift of learning' at their sides

Brown awarded a total of 2,009 degrees during Commencement ceremonies held on Monday, May 27. Of those, 1,506 were undergraduate degrees, 280 were master's degrees, 75 were doctors of medicine, and 148 were doctors of philosophy.

Commencement weekend offered a variety of speakers, from those who presented Commencement Forums May 25 to students addressing their classmates Memorial Day. Here are excerpts from many of those presentations:

"You lose credibility unless you kill some really nice people." About the character named Pussy, who was killed at the end of the second season: "We liked him but he was a goner."

– Robin Green '67, writer/producer for “The Sopranos” in the forum titled “Conversations with Godfather”

“About 30 percent of our aging is hereditary. That means 70 percent of our aging is within our control…. One very potent aging accelerator is suppressed anger. People who keep emotion bottled inside seem to age faster.”

– Mark E. Williams, M.D., of the University of Virginia in the forum titled “The Truth About Aging”

Present in all of George Orwell’s writing “was a sense of decency.” Orwell changed his name from Eric Blair to George Orwell “because he didn’t want his family to be affected by his writing.”

– Dan Leab of Seton Hall University in the forum titled “The Orwell Files”

“Memory is what’s involved in the creation of a play. What a playwright needs to do is recapture the things that have inspired him … something (he’s) passionate about, something that needs investigation…. I try not to be clever, but rather surprising in my writing…. Most stories have already been told and told well, so I must find a way to tell the story in a way that surprises people.”

– Playwright Donald Margulies in the forum “Play Memory Play”

"Making a documentary depends on trust between the person holding the camera and the subject…. People would much rather disclose than keep a secret…. If I thought the presence of the camera would keep me from getting to the truth of their lives, I'd do something else."

– Documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles P '02 in the forum "Romance of the Real"

President Bush “specializes in just-in-time inventory: He doesn’t want to know more than he needs to know or know it one nanosecond sooner than he needs to know it. He doesn’t have a warehouse…. The down side is that now he needs to know everything about everything…. Does he have the capacity to stock the warehouse? Bush is no dummy, but over the years he’s been intellectually lazy. He’s not by nature curious about things that don’t immediately affect his life, [but] once it gets into his ‘in’ box, he gets very interested and focused…. He has the brain power; it’s a question of will and time.”

– Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent for Newsweek, in the forum “George W. Bush and the Sept. 11 Effect”

“What brains do well, machines do poorly.”

– John Donoghue, professor of neuroscience, in the forum “Mind Moving Matter”

“Shakespeare was never meant to be read in a book. His plays were meant to be seen live, which is why he never bothered to have his plays published while he was alive. They weren't written to be held up for posterity; they were to be performed so that people could enjoy them.”

– Filmmaker Oren Jacoby in the forum “Do Words Still Matter?”

“I think we have lost something with respect to orality in our teaching practices. If you're going to teach Shakespeare, you'd better teach him as rhetoric and not poetry. All of his long soliloquies are making a rhetorical argument and often swing back and forth between views.”

– Robert Scholes, professor emeritus of modern culture and media,in the forum “Do Words Still Matter?”

“Although it's not the college that exists today, it's how we want to remember it. ... We don't all know all of the campus all the time. We, despite ourselves, remember it like this.”

– Robert Emlen, University curator and senior lecturer in American civilization, on the 1825 view from the northwest of Brown's campus - showing University Hall and the then-new Hope College - at the forum “Imagining Brown: How a Picture Became the Icon of the Campus”

“In the open society that is the American ideal, no doors should be closed to people willing to spend the hours of effort needed to make dreams come true. So hold fast to your dreams, and work hard to make them a reality. And as you pursue your paths in life, leave tracks, Just as others have been way-pavers for you, so you should aid those who will follow in your way.”

– Remarks made by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the Baccalaureate service May 26

“Whether in the Congo or Kosovo or Afghanistan, the warnings (of future crises) were ample, but the responses were meek. Although it is encouraging that prevention is becoming more and more the battle cry of the day, it will be a long way before it becomes the prevailing mode of policy implementation. ... I think things have to get very, very bad before there is usually a large intervention. ... I think producing, in the sense of consciousness, a caring community is especially important. ... I believe, at the bottom, you have to build communities, and you have to care about each other.”

– Remarks made by Sadako Ogata, former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, at the May 26 Ogden Memorial Lecture, “From Human Security to State Security.”

“September 11^th beckons us to think differently about the kind of nation and world we want to build for our children. We need to change direction, recover a sense of urgency about saving our babies, redefine the measure of American success, and make sure that principles of justice rather than power, money and militarism guide our feet and national priorities…. I don’t begrudge anyone their first, fifth or tenth million or billion if they are earned on a fair playing field and after children’s crucial survival needs are met. But something is out of kilter when just three of our wealthiest Americans possess greater wealth than seven million American families combined and the revenues of 19 state governments with 25 million citizens.”

– Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, speaking at the Brown Medical School Commencement Convocation May 27

“What if Odysseus didn’t go back to Ithaca? What if he stayed with Calypso or turned back and sought adventure in different parts of the world? The story would have been different, but no less incredible. Here is my challenge. Reset your compasses or throw them away altogether. We are wayward salmon. Years ago we went out to sea and came here, to a new home. Now we set out again.”

– From Edward Smith’s May 27 senior oration titled “Finding New Homes”

In the book “Don Quixote,” knight and squire battle between belief and doubt, a battle that also characterizes the graduate school experience. “We begin with confidence, with the belief that our insight is original. … Then later, perhaps while studying or in the laboratory or performing research in the field, we sense a change…. We challenge what we have read and footnote those who hold opposing views…. And yet we continue our pursuit, placing more trust in what we are writing more than what we are reading.”

–from “Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and the Graduate Experience,” the student address presented by William Worden, Ph.D. ’02, at the Graduate School ceremony May 27