Leadership Seminar 2024 Graduation Remarks

Winston S. Churchill Senior Fellow William R. Gruver

September 28, 2024  

Tonight's graduates are part of a generation that differs from any other in my memory in
its unusual level of pessimism. When asked why, they cite a confluence of factors,
including but not limited to a public health emergency, governments that they don't trust
and that don't represent their interests, racial and religious tensions, and an economy in
which they see no future for themselves.

Allow me to quote from recent surveys about Generation Z's pessimism:
"56 percent of people aged 16 to 25 feel as though humanity is doomed in regard to the
ongoing and worsening climate crisis. Sixty percent of respondents say that their own
governments are betraying them and future generations by not acting. Forty-five percent
say climate anxiety affects their everyday lives and ability to function normally."
"Gen Z is almost twice as likely to have feelings of depression and hopelessness than
those over the age of 25, according to the Walton Family Foundation."

To members of Generation Z, including tonight's graduates, I have two words of advice:
"Chill out." The world was also ending when I was your age. School children were hiding
under desks in drills anticipating nuclear bombing raids. We couldn't go to public
swimming pools out of fear that was where one caught polio—a crippling disease
affecting young people—for which a preventative vaccine had not yet been invented.

After my first year in college, I was on a warship steaming off of Cuba in a confrontation
with the USSR that easily could have triggered World War III. While in school, an
American president was assassinated, as were two civil rights leaders. American cities
were set on fire in protest. College students were protesting against the Vietnam War,
culminating in American soldiers massacring students at Kent State University in Ohio.
Our world was falling apart, much as yours seems to be today.

Take heart. What got us through the 20th century can get you through the 21st
century—technology and great leadership. Just as nuclear power was, and still is, a
two-edged sword, so are the internet and other modern technologies. They must be
efficiently managed for good and not for evil. That's where leadership is needed.

Just as 20th-century leaders like Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan inspired my
generation to get us through our challenges, these graduates are sorely needed in
today's world. What makes me so optimistic that these young men and women will seize
the opportunities created by today's leadership and lead to better lives than they can
now envision. The last month, unlike what I see in national politics and even here at
Bucknell, they have shown me through their actions that they can find synergies, not
polarization, in diversity and respectful disagreement.

Tonight's graduates are diverse by Bucknell's standard definitions. They represent each
of Bucknell's three colleges. They represent different races and religions. They come
from ten different states and six different countries. They are majoring in twelve different
subjects. More importantly, through evidence-based thinking and respect for one
another, they have accomplished a primary goal of a Bucknell education: breaking down
barriers between academic and cultural silos to learn from one another in the pursuit of
discovering the truth.

In our current age of ubiquitous knowledge, they have achieved what should be another
primary goal of a 21st-century residential liberal arts education- the transfer of wisdom
from more experienced leaders, such as the new chair of Bucknell's Board of Trustees,
with whom they met earlier this week, to the emerging leaders of Generation Z.
Hopefully, that part of their education will continue over dinner this evening at each of
your tables.

I'll close tonight by continuing my tradition of ending each course with a poem
appropriate for the students whose accomplishments we celebrate tonight—these 19
beautiful people...said another way, and in honor of our special guests this
evening...diese neunzehn schöne Menschen...these 19 graduates who have resisted
the tendency of their peers to become victims. This poem is meant to honor and inspire
these 19 beautiful people, who by taking a non-credit course that required them to give
up their weekends and Tuesday nights, have become the emerging leaders who will
lead their Generation Z to accomplishments beyond any of our imaginations.

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Invictus
By William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

May God bless these graduates.
May God bless all of you, and
May God bless America.