President Brodhead, Trustees, members of the Duke University Community, thank you for inviting me to come back to my alma mater for this important occasion. I am grateful for the honorary degree, and moved by the opportunity to address the graduating seniors.
To the Class of 2013: Let me start by saying congratulations ...
... and by reminding you to thank your mothers and wish them a happy Mothers' Day ...
... and by admitting that I'm still bitter about the Louisville game.
I was a student here in 1986 when Coach K took the team to the finals for the first time. We lost to Louisville then, too, so you and I share that particular agony.
However, you had the good fortune to be here on campus when Duke won its fourth national championship.
I never got to see us cut down the nets, but I did see us beat UNC, in Chapel Hill, when Michael Jordan was the star of the team.
The fact that Michael Jordan recently turned 50 years old tells you how long it's been since I was a student.
No matter how much time passes, though, I always feel connected to Duke. I love visiting my favorite landmarks, especially the Duke Gardens, where I used to go when I was stressed out before exams and needed to clear my head. I went yesterday, because I wanted to make sure I was centered before giving this speech.
There's also my feeling of deep connection to the community my classmates created during our four years, and to the lifelong friends I made here -- in short, to the people. I doubt there is a word that captures the combination of experiences and places and people that we summarize under the label "Duke." The best one I can think of is "connected." And this is a word I'd like to talk about for a few minutes on your Commencement Day.
In August, 1982, I left my home in Dallas, Texas, to come here to Durham. To mark this rite of passage, my parents gave me a terrific present: the cutting-edge Olympus B12 portable typewriter, with a carrying case included. One of its best features was how light it was: Amazingly, the whole bundle weighed just 12 pounds!
It was during my time at Duke that the personal computer displaced the typewriter as the technology of choice on campus. Those of us in the computer science department actually resented the change. There were so few computers available, and all of a sudden the humanities majors were hogging our machines to write their papers.
We had to do our programming in the middle of the night, usually in the creepy basement of the old biological science building. We'd set up contests -- who programmed the fastest or made the fewest mistakes -- kind of like a prehistoric hack-a-thon. The punishment for the losers was a trip to the biology lab at the end of the hall, where they had to touch the scariest mutant frog specimens.
CONNECTION, AN INTRODUCTION
The personal computer -- and later, after I'd graduated and taken a job at Microsoft, the Internet -- started a communications revolution. My kids are a few years younger than you, but raising them has proved to me that the way you communicate is the single biggest difference between you now and me a generation ago.
One popular way of describing this aspect of your lives is to say that you're "connected." Some pundits have even started to refer to you as Generation C. One recent report overdid the c-thing by saying you are "connected, communicating, content-centric, community-oriented, always clicking." It went on to say that, for these reasons alone, you will "transform the world as we know it."
Of course, all the hype about how connected you are has contributed to a counter-narrative -- that, in fact, your generation is increasingly disconnected from the things that matter. The arguments go something like this: Instead of spending time with friends, you spend it alone, collecting friend requests. Rather than savoring your food, you take pictures of it and post them on Facebook.
I want to encourage you to reject the cynics who say technology is flattening your experience of the world. Please don't let anyone make you believe you are somehow shallow because you like to update your status on a regular basis.
The people who say technology has disconnected you from others are wrong. So are the people who say technology automatically connects you to others. Technology is just a tool. It's a powerful tool, but it's just a tool. Deep human connection is very different. It's not a tool. It's not a means to an end. It is the end -- the purpose and the result of a meaningful life -- and it will inspire the most amazing acts of love, generosity, and humanity.
In his famous speech "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood."
With 50 years of hindsight, I think it's fair to say Dr. King was premature in calling the world a neighborhood. Back then, Americans lumped whole continents into something they referred to as the Third World, as if the people on the other side of the planet were an undifferentiated mass whose defining feature was that they were not like us.
But as a result of the ongoing communications revolution, your world really can be a neighborhood. So the ethical commitment Dr. King spoke of is yours to live up to.
What does it mean to make of this world a brotherhood and a sisterhood? That probably sounds like a lot to ask of you as individuals, or even as a graduating class. I'm pretty sure none of you will respond to the annoying question "What are you going to do after graduation?" by saying "I plan to have the ethical commitment to make of this world a brotherhood."
But you can change the way you think about other people. You can choose to see their humanity first -- the one big thing that makes them the same as you, instead of the many things that make them different from you.
It is not just a matter of caring about people. I assume you already do that. It's much harder to see all people, including people whose experiences are very different from yours, as three-dimensional human beings who want and need the same things you do. But if you can really believe that all 7 billion people on the planet are equal to you in spirit, then you will take action to make the world more equal for everyone.
PAUL FARMER, TESTAMENT TO CONNECTION
Paul Farmer, the Duke graduate I admire most, is a testament to the deep human connection I'm talking about. As many of you know, Paul, who's here today, is a doctor and global health innovator. For years, he travelled back and forth from Boston, where he is a professor of medicine, to Haiti, where he ran a health clinic giving the highest quality care to the poorest people in the world. Now, he lives mostly in Rwanda, where he's working on changing the country's entire health care system.
I first met Paul in 2003, when I went to see him in Haiti. It took us forever to walk the 100 yards from our vehicle to the clinic because he introduced me to every single person we met along the way. I am not exaggerating. Every single person.
As we moved along, he introduced each person to me by first and last name, wished their families well, and asked for an update about their lives. He hugged people when he greeted them and looked them in the eyes throughout each conversation. If you believe love plays a role in healing, there was healing happening at every step of that journey.
When we finally reached the waiting area outside the clinic, I saw a lovely garden with a canopy of flowering vines. Paul told me he built it himself, for two reasons. First, he said, it gets hot, and he wants to his patients to be cool in the shade while they wait. Second, he wants them to see what he sees, the beauty of the world, before they have to go into the clinic for treatment.
The next day, I visited a different clinic in Haiti. The clinic was there for the same reason as Paul's -- to provide poor people with the medical care they desperately need but cannot afford. The doctors worked there for all the right reasons. But I noticed that the patients were waiting outside in the scorching sun. Inside, it felt like the doctors considered themselves health providers, and the patients were recipients. There was no sense, as there was in Paul's clinic, of an equal partnership with the community.
Experiencing those two clinics one right after the other showed me that Paul made a moral choice to do the hard work of deep connection. He took the time to do the little things: provide shade, remember surnames, and make eye contact. These small acts were born of a big idea -- the boundless dignity of all people.
