In keeping with the 41-year Pitzer College tradition, the senior class selected this year’s commencement speaker. I am most pleased to introduce Sarah Weddington, well known for her work on issues affecting women through her many roles as attorney, legislator, presidential advisor, professor and expert often called upon by the national media. She is perhaps most well known by many of us here today as having argued the winning side of the landmark Roe vs. Wade before the United States Supreme Court in 1973 at the age of 26. She is the youngest woman to ever win a case in the Supreme Court. Ms. Weddington has had a rich and varied career distinguished by her advocacy of women’s rights and by many firsts. She was the first woman from Austin elected to the Texas House of Representatives and the first woman ever to hold the position of US Department of Agriculture’s General Counsel. She has served as assistant to the president of the United States and was designated by President Carter to direct the administration’s work on women’s issues and leadership outreach. She is the author of A Question of Choice. Please join me in welcoming Sarah Weddington.
First I have to talk to the seniors. Thank you so much for this invitation. It is really a delight. And I have been so worried about speaking today. I went to the President’s Brunch and have been talking to everybody about this feeling of responsibility. What can I say in 20 minutes because our schedule says at 2:02 the graduating seniors are presented. What can I say they will remember?
As I walked in I was thinking about what I would be saying and how can I meet this burden of responsibility; I listened to the trumpets that signaled the approaching faculty, seniors and trustees and I’m thinking, “What will I say that they will remember?”
And then I’m watching the seniors come in, and sure enough, there are some without shoes, some with shoes with no socks, you know, the traditional graduation. And there was one young man with white ear plugs and I said, “Well, Sarah, your problem is how to get him to remove the ear plugs.”
There are so many things I wish I could say. But first it was thank you.
I was asking some of the trustees if they had seen Lord of the Rings. And I was so glad because Susan Pritzker, your outgoing chair of the Board of Trustees, has not only seen it multiple times, she’s read it completely twice.
And I was asking her that because do you remember that scene in Lord of the Rings, the second of the trilogy, The Two Towers, remember the good people have retreated to a keep, a defensive structure. And their backs are against a mountain. They cannot go that way. And in front of them the Orks, in overwhelming numbers, with overwhelming superiority, are coming at them. And you realize how bad those grotesque people were by how bad their teeth were. The Orks are coming at them and they have broken through the outer defenses. And you have begun to think, “Will those people be able to survive?”
And the Orks are breaking through the inner defenses and your thinking, “Will the day be saved, will it all be lost, will they perish?” And then on the fifth day, on the top of the hill, reinforcements appear. Reinforcements by horseback with armor who were in small numbers, much outnumbered by the Orks. But they looked down and they saw people in trouble. They didn’t have the numbers to save them but they decided it was worth their very best efforts to try. And down they rode. And the day was saved.
In fact, it was your trustee Russell Pitzer, for whose grandfather’s orange groves gave us the privilege of being here, who reminded me those defenders came with trees. Remember the trees that came and with those big legs came right on down? And I thought, these are the reinforcements.
You see, I wish we could give you a good world to go into. But I’m afraid we have failed in that task. We gather here, some of us in our present, and some of us by webcast. This is my first webcast experience. It’s a new day. It’s a glorious day of celebration.
Usually when people have that thing about “It’s all about me,” I hate that. I really resent people with an attitude of “It’s all about me, I don’t care about anyone else, I don’t care about what happens any place else, it’s all about me.”
I have an office in an old house right across from a school and there are all kinds of signs to say that the place is reserved parking but occasionally students will park there. And I usually just take the information and put a note on the car that says, “We’ve taken your information, please don’t park here again but I’m not going to tow you because I know how much it would cost you.”
There’s one car I’ve towed. It was a car that I looked in and there was a T-shirt that said, “It’s all about me.”
This actually is a day about you, and I couldn’t be happier. But it’s a day about you and our hopes for you and our hopes of what you will be for us and for a wider world. I think about this day and I am so mindful of all the problems. We have a cataclysmic battle that will be happening within days as to who will sit in our nation’s highest court when there is a vacancy and the appellate courts in the meantime. What will be the character of the judgments of our courts?
You, your second week here, gathered in Avery Auditorium to talk about 9/11. And some of you responded by watching the news together and by giving blood and helping to organize all kinds of efforts to heal a troubled world. You lit candles. You looked at how the world had changed.
I hadn’t thought about it till this morning talking to people that this is the first year graduates have gone through their entire college careers after 9/11. Remembering the sacrifice of people who were public servants; firefighters.
I’ve been to Ground Zero, I’ve been so fortunate to get to go, and I was talking with a man with the transportation department and he said, “What happened?” Some of you are New Yorkers, you know how they don’t pay attention to anybody telling them anything. And one of the subway cars had driven up right under 9/11 and the word came through their earphones, the engineer and the conductor, get those people out of there. And they said to those on the platform, “Get back on the train! Get back on the train!” And they did. And not one person in the subway was lost.
You see, you look back and you think of small things people did but that saved many lives. Or you think about the Kyoto Treaty which we as a nation have refused to endorse but the cities are starting to do that—mayors, city councils, who are saying, “We’re going to sign.”
When you think about the world, Tom Friedman has just written a book called The World Is Flat. And Hirschel Abelson, your trustee, told me that’s his newest book and it’s on his nightstand. But I thought about how the world is going to be your place of work. You see, I think about all that and I remember the words of Bob Hope who said to a group of graduating seniors, “The world is out there waiting for you. Don’t go.”
Sometimes it would seem nice if you could stay here a little bit longer. But we’ve come to celebrate you.
You see, you have traveled more that many of us, you’ve been in Nepal, you’ve given back, not just been there. You’re now going to Costa Rica. President Trombley is the only college president in the world, I think, you has increased the capacity, the land square mass of a college by 400%, quadrupled the land mass because of a gift in Costa Rica. That’s great.
We know how extraordinary you are, and how special you are, because there are very few like you.
George Burns died at 100, but when he was 96 he said “I can do anything today that I did when I was 18. It just goes to show how pathetic I was.”
But we look at you and we think how far beyond where we have been able to go your path will take you. A southern gentleman was once asked what is the most important gift you can give future generations? He said, roots and wings. You do need roots. And your roots, when storms blow and the hard times come, your roots will keep you upright, will support you, will give you nourishment, will give you gifts. These are your roots: your families, friends, fathers, mothers, grandparents, sisters, brothers, spouses, people who have been special in your lives and they have a very special role as your roots.
They have sometimes made financial sacrifice. I was listening to one person outside; he obviously didn’t know who I was; he was talking to the person next to him and he said, “Yeah, I’ve given a lot to have my son graduate today. But I don’t know whether he’ll be able to educate his children. I think I’ll have to die and leave the money." But they see you as an extension of your best selves.
Your roots are in your education. Your roots have to do with the 60’s, with those who believed it was important to solve problems and who have given much in that way.
I had a great time yesterday with Leslie Dashew, who is one of your trustees, and her father has this great 72-foot sailboat. So she invited me to go sailing and it was a glorious day yesterday. And she talked to me about Pitzer and what it was like for her to be among the first of the graduates.
Frankly your roots are in your values; values that have to do with caring, not just about yourself, but about a wider world. Today we celebrate your roots and we look for you to spread your wings. Where will you go? What will you do? You are probably wondering the same thing.
I was on this day some years ago. There are a couple of things I’d like to tell you. One: You are going to make a lot of course corrections. I look back and I think about what I thought I was going to do when it was graduation day from college and if you had said to me “What are you going to do?” I would have said I was going to teach eighth graders to love Beowulf. And I tried. And I thought I should go to graduate school. So I talked to the dean of my little liberal arts college, smaller than this one, and I told him, “I think I want to go to law school.” And he said, “You can’t.” And I said, “Why not? I have good grades.” And he said, “No woman from this college has ever gone to law school. It would be too tough.”
You know that moment I decided I was going to law school. I went to the University of Texas in Austin with five women among 250 in the entering class. Now it would be almost 50% women in just about any law school.
I finished law school and I could not get a job with a law firm. They would say things like, “But women have to be home to cook dinner and lawyers have to work late. How could you do both?” As you might guess, I never got a job offer. My male colleagues did get those great jobs and they disappeared into the back rooms of those law firms and you have never heard of them.
But because I didn’t have that all-important job, making great money, I went to work for a professor and a group came to me, mostly women, some men, and said, “We need help.” And they talked to me about how information about prevention of pregnancy was not easily available, how abortion was illegal, but California had changed its law so people with enough money could go to California but others ended up in really bad straits. And they said, “We really need help.”
As I look back, if they had said to me, “Sarah, would you mind trying a US Supreme Court case, I would have said, “No way.” In fact, when I went back and wrote the book A Question of Choice, I said to them, “Why did you come to me? You knew I had never tried a case.” I had done uncontested divorces, wills for people with no money, and one adoption.
And they said, “Sarah, we wanted a woman lawyer, you were the only one we’d ever heard of, and we needed someone who would do it for free.” And that’s how I got the case.
I will never forget January 22, 1973. I had not known if I was winning or losing the case so I ran for the legislature in Texas and had just been elected and was in the capitol in my new office and the phone rang. It was a reporter from the New York Times and the reporter said, “Does Ms. Weddington have a comment today about Roe vs. Wade?” And I said, “Should she?” And the reporter said, “It was decided today.” My assistant said, “How was it decided?” The words came back, “She won it, 7-2.”
A minute later I got a telegram from the US Supreme Court. It was collect. But I think about how long that’s been. FedEx was incorporated but you couldn’t send anything FedEx. There was no e-mail. There was no Lexus-Nexus. They sent it airmail. And you know how long that took.
I look back and I think how much I have been able to do that I didn’t see for myself when I walked across a similar stage. I’ve learned that flexibility is very important because you are going to hit some moguls and some waves and you need that flexibility to get over them. You need to be a citizen of the world as you more than almost any graduating class are: 60% having participated in things outside this country. And you need to lead.
There are lots of definitions of leadership but the one I like (I wrote it) is the one that says, “Leadership is the ability and the willingness to leave your thumbprint.” You’ll have other issues but you have a chance to lead.
Three years ago, January 2001, I got a call from Time magazine and they said “We’re going to do a special issue of 80 days that changed the world, and we would like for you to write the piece on 1973.” I was honored; I wanted to write it; they said 1500 words. So I started writing those perfect 1500 words. (And the senior class speaker, I thought, had some perfect words in what she had written.) And then they called back and said, “The war is going to start. This is going to be in the March issue; the war is going to start, 1000 words.” So I had to cut it. That was painful. Then they called back and said, “The war is starting: 300 words is all you get.” Here is the cover of Time magazine, March 31, 2003. And here is the cover of what was planned to be the cover of that issue, 80 Days That Changed the World. So I thought, “What could I say in 300 words that would make a difference.” I had a collection of old buttons. I had one that was a coat hanger in the middle with a slash across it and red around it. I was wearing that button on an airplane one day and the flight attendant kept looking at my button. She would look and then she would go past and then she would come back and then look again and finally she stopped and she said, “What do you have against coat hangers? It reminded me of the lessons of history; they are sometimes important.
I’ve been so fortunate; I had lunch one time in Arizona with Barry Goldwater, Sr. who said the true conservative position is, “It’s not the government’s business.” I’ve met a lot of other people who came from many perspectives but who thought individuals should make the most important decisions for their lives.
And so we gather. I remember one commencement that I attended where all the families organized themselves into sections. And they said to everyone in their section, “When your graduate comes across, if you cheer for mine, I’ll cheer for yours. It’s more fun that way.” And it was. And I’m sure it will be today.
President Trombley, on your behalf, has given me a crystal bowl with the inscription of today’s date and occasion. Our spotlight is now to be on you. But in my mind, I will be replaying that scene from the Two Towers. And when I ask, can the world be saved, can our nation’s perilous journey be corrected, can we meet the needs, the human needs, the environmental needs, the world needs, from my despair, I will look to the hills and see reinforcements. And I will remember that on May 15, 2005, on a stage at Pitzer College, reinforcements appeared.