 Thank you. Good morning. I want to, before I begin, I want to take a picture of the most important people here. Smile. Okay. President Sullivan, trustees, Board Chair David Daigle, Governor Peter Schumlund, Senator Patrick Leahy, members of the faculty, proud parents, and above all, lucky graduates of this great university, my alma mater. Thank you. Are you ready to go out and change the world? More power to you. But can you put it off for just about another 20 minutes or so? Because I have a few things I want to tell you, and you pretty much have to listen to me because I could be older than your grandmother. Thank you for the honor of this platform to offer some parting words about what really matters out there in that world you are about to disrupt. I hate to say it, but you've already made one mistake. You've stuck it out for four years here instead of dropping out of college after a year or two to learn computer science and coding and have fun in all-night hackathons where you build cool apps like FaceSwap Live. What were you thinking? I mean, you could have already started a tech company and taken it public. Instead, you had chosen to spend four years stretching your minds in another direction, not just packing them with information, but discovering new ways of thinking. And you've given yourself time to have an identity crisis and find new ways of being in the world. What a waste. Well, lately, we're all hearing a rallying cry in the presidential primaries to go back to old ways of being, to make America great again, like the good old days in the mid-50s when I was in college and America was really great. Back then, men wore the pants. Women had to wear skirts. And it was cold at UVM in the 50s. I mean, really cold for most of the year. But women could never wear pants, not even to walk the half mile from the freshman campus to an 8 AM class, unless the temperature was below 10 degrees below zero. Who would even make a rule like that? Well, someone who could wear pants any damn time he pleased. So we developed blue knees. I still have them. And if we had dared to speak up, we might have chained ourselves across the entrance to Billings and chanted, we want pants. But in the 50s, protests weren't allowed and certainly not to disrupt the skirt as quo. In my graduating class, we had only one African-American student. His name was Bill Pickens. And he was tall, handsome, brilliant. He was elected the first African-American president of the Boulder Society, the first African-American president of a fraternity, and the first African-American president of the entire student body. Bill was all we needed, or so the powers that be thought then. But some good things about the old good old days weren't great for a lot of people. Today, the number of undergraduate and graduate students of color at UVM is 374. That's 374 times more students of color here since I was here. And when I was your age, I wanted to study English. I wanted to be a writer. Well, my father was an advertising guy from the Mad Men era, sort of like Don Draper might have been before he met Peggy Olson. And my dad was prepared to pay my tuition to a state university, but only if I majored in something that gave me a backup skill. You know, in case I didn't meet a husband right away. Well, I said to him, but I want to be a writer. Gail, a BA in English isn't going to earn you car fare if you can even get a job. Why don't you study something practical? Well, my dad told me the university of Vermont had a very fine home economics department. You want me to get an MRS degree? Why did you spend all those years editing my copycat Nancy Drew mystery stories? My father was adamant, and I was resigned until I found out that home economics at the UVM was the closest thing to a business degree. So while my father thought I was learning how to make cherries flambé, I was actually taking courses in economics, public speaking, design, even advertising. And fortunately, in those days, as now, UVM encouraged students to find our own niches. And so I decided to take a double major, English, and the one I never told my friends about, Homed. Well, I graduated, and I got a good start on a career. And I managed to hold off marriage until I was all of 23. That was a big deal in those days. And when I said I do with a medical student, he got the advanced degree while I earned my PhD. That was the degree that wives used to get for putting hubby through. And so I had my first child at 25, and I had a great job writing new journalism for the most innovative magazine of the 60s and 70s, New York Magazine. And I really thought I had the world on a string until I lost control of the yo-yo. Seven years after graduation, I stumbled into failure. My marriage imploded. I was suddenly a single parent. I had to give up my dream job to stay home with my toddler and also earn a living. Now, I'm not going to tell you that failure is fun. But what I didn't realize back then is that failure has its benefits. Failure can be an essential experience of our trying 20s. It teaches us resilience. Failure set me free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I didn't die from it. I still had a daughter whom I adored. I still had a typewriter, and I still loved writing. So I sat down and wrote my first book, a novel. It failed. Now, two seconds ago, I told you that failure was freeing. That's your first failure. A second failure will freak you out for sure. I was overwhelmed with doubt. Had I chosen an impossible dream, but instead of giving into my fears, I embraced my new expertise at being a failure, and I spent all my frequent failure miles on another dream. I dared to apply for a fellowship to Columbia University to study under the professor of my choice. This time, the answer was yes. I chose the anthropologist, Margaret Mead. If I had consulted my father, he surely would have said, oh, no, you're not choosing the humanities again. What can you do with a degree in anthropology? But it was when I came under Mead's tutelage that my intellectual life began to finally take shape. Margaret Mead was the new American cultural prophet. She encouraged me to be a cultural interpreter. She used to say, whenever you hear about a great cultural phenomenon, Gale, a revolution, an assassination, a notorious trial, an attack on the country, drop everything. Get on a bus or a train or a plane. Go there. Stand at the edge of the abyss and look down into it. And you will see a culture turned inside out and revealed in a raw state. Well, I took her advice and ran with it. And one night, in 1968, after I put my daughter to bed, the famous editor of New York magazine, Clay Thelker, barges into my apartment. Gale, what do you know about politics? Well, my mother's a natural born bomb-throwing Irish rebel, and my father's a country club Republican. So I know about politics. It's about fighting at the dinner table. Great, then you'll understand Bobby. Bobby who? Bobby Kennedy. I want you to go out and follow his presidential campaign in Oregon and California. I've never written a political story. Gale, he's running against Gene McCarthy in the Democratic primaries. It's the best story. This is the time to start. You have to leave in two days. But I can't afford a babysitter. I mean, Gale, the way to make your name as a journalist is not to do a lot of little stories. No matter how good they are, they won't start a new conversation. You have to tackle a big story, something that everyone's talking about, but they don't know the why. Well, I thought about my mentor, Margaret Mee's words, get on a bus or a train or a plane, go there. So I asked my sister, Patricia, to stay with my child. I swallowed my fear, and I took the dare. Being the only woman journalist on the bus with nationally known reporters is exhilarating, also intimidating. So I spend most of my energy on pretending I'm not scared. One day on the campaign, the senator is taking a yo-yo trip up and down the Cascade Mountains of Oregon in a tiny plane through rain squalls. Well, I'm not crazy about flying in this kind of condition, but none of the senior correspondents want to go. So this is my big chance to show how not scared I am. And maybe I'll get a story that nobody else would. Well, in one rural town after another, Kennedy faces a hostile crowd of gun-toting residents. I mean, men with, I swear, dead possums or raccoons slung over their shoulders. Some shout at threats on his life. Kennedy pretends not to hear. He climbs the steps of the courthouse and in full, unprotected view, tries to engage the crowd in a friendly discussion of limiting the spread of guns. You can imagine how popular that was with this audience. This is courage. Back on the plane, the seat beside the senator is empty. All of a sudden I hear, would you like to sit up here in New York? New York, that's me. So I sit beside the senator. He asks an aide to hand him JFK's overcoat. It's a poignant moment. Five years after the president's assassination and Bobby is still wearing his older brother's clothes. We talk about this in my interview. And as we approach Portland, a hard rain smears the windows. We can't see that another plane is headed straight at us. All of it, once our little craft drops like a stone. Men scream, my stomach flips over. I'm sure we're all about to die. But while we're still dropping, Bobby Kennedy quips, I knew Gene McCarthy was desperate. I didn't know he was that desperate. Well, his joke gave me an insight about Bobby Kennedy's truth. He has seen so much death in his family. He is a fatalist. He knows he's a target, but he keeps right on talking about limiting the spread of guns. Two nights later, Senator Kennedy's own life is ended at the point of a gun. If I hadn't taken that risky trip, I wouldn't have had that insight about Senator Kennedy. And with my education and the humanities, I knew what I could do with that insight. I didn't have to write about politics like the boys do, focusing mainly on the horse race and daily polls. I could explore the character of the candidates. That was the epiphany. Issues are today. Character is what was yesterday and will be again tomorrow. So from then on, this became my model. When I fear, I dare. I wanna thank professors in Banco and gentlemen for proposing me as the commencement speaker. They had a motive. Together, they've revived the community's, the Humanities Center where UVM's faculty and students are rediscovering the relevance of the humanities and fine arts. But they often have pushback from dubious parents who ask, if my Skylar studied anthropology, what could he do with it? Well, Luis Van Banco has the perfect answer. What couldn't he do with it? Anthropology teaches us how to think, especially about culture. And wasn't culture the word of the year, last year? Startup culture, corporate culture, fraternity culture, police culture, rape culture. I asked President Sullivan, and if I could interview some of the students who studied within the humanities and were raring to go out and change the world. One of your classmates, Grace Gaskill, graduated 18 months early. Really? A year and a half early? Yes, I am really impressed with how hard so many of you have worked to get this precious degree from UVM. Grace is already out in the world doing social justice work. And the most important thing she has taken away from the program in integrated social sciences is how to be culturally competent. She's working at the raw edge of racism and trying to combat the xenophobia that is being trumped up in the current presidential campaign, all the while being fully aware of her status as a privileged white woman. Her volunteers at Catholic Charities in Boston are also mostly white women, but the refugees they seek homes for among wary Americans are mostly Muslims from the Middle East or Africa. So Grace is learning how to listen, how to appreciate the beliefs and values of these women and children whose entire lives have been ruptured. And her volunteers must also be ready to challenge misconceptions about refugees within the communities being asked to receive them. And that means helping American families to become more culturally competent. We can all use a little help in that regard. It's a huge undertaking, but it's clear that Grace is up to the task and thanks in no small part to what she learned here from her education in the humanities. Of course, we also need physicians and engineers and economists and computer scientists. And a number of you probably wanna be entrepreneurs or agriculturalists, teachers or nurses. And I so love to hear that because when I was in school, the only approved paths for women graduates were teaching or nursing. So a lot of us avoided it. And thank God, let's come back. The university has prepared all of you to become caring professionals. You know, we used to think that our large brains stuffed with a fine classical education made us, that's what made us unique as humans. Back in the 1600s, Descartes said as much, he had that famous declaration, I think therefore I am. Well, in the age of computers and algorithms and robots, does this statement define our human uniqueness? I mean, can you answer as many questions as Google? Are you ready to compete with robots? I'd say don't mess with robots. But in the future, even the most expensively educated Americans have to compete with these damnable little know-it-alls. And they're already being programmed to learn the way we humans learn. And if bots could write and think original material, what unique ability could define us as humans? Caring. We would not have advanced beyond the Stone Age if we weren't social animals who survived as a species because we cared for each other. Darwin taught us that our unique ability was to read each other's facial expressions. He concluded that all human beings share a set of universal facial expressions which allow us to feel each other's fright or pain or sadness. And those expressions are the core of empathy and compassion. Well, today we made better define what sets us apart as humans with a different declaration. I care, therefore I am. Caring may be the key to establishing the unity of mankind. It's like the original motto of University of Vermont, which in Latin is studies at rebus onestus, meaning UVM is for studies and other honest pursuits. What could be a more honest pursuit than caring? And because caring makes us vulnerable, it too is something that takes daring to do. Do you think of yourselves as daring? What is daring anyway? Well, it's the curiosity to take the less traveled road. It's the courage to say no to the status quo and try to find a better way. I think it sounds a lot like what Bernie Sanders has been daring to do. Now, you know, Bernie isn't the first Jewish socialist to win hearts and minds. I mean, let's remember that other radical, nonviolent revolutionary, also a simple carpenter who never called a poor lazy, never asked a leper for a copay and was a scrawny, arm-waving, wild-haired, progressive Jew. Guess who? Let's hear it for Jesus. As members of our millennial generation, you probably feel some pressure, not only to get a job and leave the comforts of a bedroom at home, but also to change the world. You hear it in colleges all over. You hear it in high schools. I mean, it might begin these days in preschool. Your classmate, Claire Wigan, is hardly alone. I asked Claire if she felt the pressure to change the world. A thousand times over, she said. In her first two years at UVM, she was learning about so many systems of oppression, so many terrible injustices in the world, she felt compelled to be an activist. She forced herself to climb the library steps and yell with a screen, with a megaphone. Is this a library or is it a dead tree graveyard? Paper is murder. Well, the problem was Claire comes from a mild-mannered family, and the more she yelled and screamed, the more she felt like a fraud. In her sophomore year, she had a full-blown identity crisis. After giving up the identity of activist, she felt lost. What was she supposed to do with all this paralyzing information about the injustice and repression in the world? She called her mother. Mom, I'm drowning. You're drowning? What for, dear? That's a feeling that I need to shout about. All I'm learning. You need to swim out of that channel quickly, dear. Well, Claire decided to go off on a research trip to capture stories of female agriculturalists and honest pursuit, and a quiet time which allowed her to think and reflect. On return, she consulted with her advisor. She learned that there are many ways to care and to reconcile our feelings of guilt and powerlessness to change the world. Or, as Claire puts it, not to have to be so shouty about it. And that felt freeing to her. That passage took a year, which is normal. And when Claire became a senior, she teamed up with two classmates in the environmental studies program, Olivia Burt and Layla Rossvani. For their honors thesis, they have been teaching students to think critically about the alternative food movement and how to make its practices accessible to people who are not white or middle class. Now I wanna ask, did you ever dare try something you've never done before and you failed at it, but you dare to try again and again until you failed forward? Well, that's the first question I asked Finn Galloway Kane, another of your graduating classmates. And this question was routine. I just said, what were your parents' expectations of you growing up that I would be able to read? Read? Well, Finn grew up in a poor area of Vermont where he went to kindergarten dressed in a suit and tie because he thought it was like going to work. But Finn failed kindergarten. At six, he thought his problem was he was a little crazy. But going into first grade, he was diagnosed as a dyslexic. He tried kindergarten again, working with a language specialist every day. And even though reading books was always something Finn had to work at, extra hard, reading people and their needs came to him instinctively. So he kept up his hard work and caring for others all through high school, focused on community service. Finn wasn't a straight A student, but he showed that he could take on leadership roles. He won a scholarship to UVM and found a home in the Dewey House for Community Service. He spent a semester interning for Senator Leahy, lucky fellow. And I asked Finn, what's the most daring thing you've done in your life? Going to Washington DC, I never lived outside of Vermont. I knew nobody. I wouldn't have the support system I had at UVM. But he had a fantastic opportunity to be a White House intern. But I definitely doubted myself. How could he keep up with such a fast-paced environment in Washington, Capitol Hill, grueling work? I asked how he overcame his fears through failing and fixing it. That is the secret. The first time his boss handed back an assignment and said, this is not good enough, then you need to do better. Then admitted that it takes him longer to write. That meant he had to put in more hours, 55 to 60 hours a week. One week he was put in charge of creating events for 150 students who'd been incarcerated, or a family member incarcerated. So he drew on other parts of his character, his natural comic gift, his ability to connect easily with people, and he was able to make those students feel at home, even in the White House. His mentors saw Finn a natural leader. And from his time in DC, he learned that he wants to be an education policymaker. But before he's ready to take that leap, he knows he needs to spend time teaching in the classroom. But he wanted a city like Baltimore, where the public education system has failed its young people, and where racial injustice caused them to erupt in violent riots. And I've just learned that Finn Galloway Kane has been offered a position in Baltimore, teaching high school history and government. More power to you, Finn. I know what he'll say. He'll say, I can still make a great cappuccino. That's my fallback. But I don't think he'll need it. Well, in every adult life passage, we seek a truer or more pure and even permanent identity. When it will resolve at last our limitations and allow us to overcome all our weaknesses, forget it. Out of the thousands, maybe millions of life history interviews I've done, I've never heard anyone say, I finally found it a state of pure goodness and greatness. But then I haven't had a chance to interview all the presidential candidates. Maybe the best of what we take away from our undergraduate years at university is not what we're required to take, not the skill-based courses that promise to gain a submission to the hottest field or most lucrative career, but the least tangible rewards of our college years. The new furnishings in the empty rooms or our minds that remind us how to think critically and compassionately. The memorable experiences we've had with all kinds of people. Maybe it was the first teacher who dared to tell you that your precious essay was crap. Maybe it was the love interest who broke your girlish heart when you found out he only wanted to borrow your bra. Maybe it was the flush of pleasure you felt when you filled backpacks with nutritious meals for the many children in Vermont who struggle with hunger. These kinds of intangible experiences I promise you have seeped into your brain, expanded your emotional intelligence and helped to shape what people will sense about you, your character. Your intelligence will open many doors for you, but it's your emotional intelligence that will allow you to hold open doors for others. So, go forth, have fun, raise a little hell, and above all, dare to care.