dick fenno graduation talk i am delighted to be here with

Dick Fenno

Graduation Talk

I am delighted to be here with the Class of 200 6 . And I

congratulate you on your accomplishment. You are a fearsome

class. When I heard you were corning, I retired! Which gives me

one advantage in talking with you. I am not the person who gave

you that C+ when you deserved a B; and I'm not the person who gave

you that B+ when you deserved an A. In that respect, I come with

clean hands. I come, too, as a student of American political life

and I want to use that experience as my window on today's ceremony .

Each of you, I'm sure, has your own idea of what political science

is all about. And in the years ahead, no matter what your career,

you will have occasion to use your political science education .

Some will use it playing politics, others will use it discussing or

Graduation May 21, 2006 (7 /20/06)-1

D.359. Box 36, Folder 6. Original in University of Rochester Rare Books and Special Collections. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

consuming politics. All of you, I hope, will enjoy--and profit

from--your use of your major.

I was once a political science major, too. And thinking back now,

I can remember only one effort--among many I'm sure--to tell me

what political science was all about. In my second year of

teaching, I was in vi ted--wi th some other rookies--to my first

conference to meet and listen to the leading professors of American

politics. I remember only one minute of the conf erence--when the

main speaker told us that he had discovered the idea that

distinguished political science from all other disciplines. When

he said that, us rookies sat up straight and listened! Then he

said, "This idea is ours. We own it." Now we were on the edge of

our seats! Then after a pregnant pause, he uttered one word--

"citizenship!" Wow--a big wind up, a quick pitch, and much head-

scratching.

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The idea of citizenship seemed important alright, I must have

thought, but hardly likely to carry a full load of political

analysis and explanation in the field of American politics.

And yet--here's the point--I never forgot it! Why not? Because

the citizenship idea has been important and useful to me ever

since. In my teaching, I began every undergraduate course by

saying to students: "This is a citizen's course." And it is

helpful to me, now, to think about the idea of citizenship when I

think about our graduation ceremony.

' \

Citizenship may seem to be a pretty cut and dried, technical and

legalistic subject. But I've seen quite a lot of it. And

personal experience tells me otherwise. In 1975, I got an early

lesson in the political side of citizenship. At the invitation of

the Cuban government, I went to Havana and taught a short course on

Graduation May 21, 2006 (7/20/06)-3


Congress to the English speakers in the Foreign Office of the

Castro government. My passport was taken from me in Mexico; and

the U.S. government had made it clear they would be unable to

protect me. For eight days, I had no effective citizenship. My

passport was returned only as I walked off Cubana Airlines in

Jamaica. And I' 11 remember forever the rush of relief when I

touched friendly soil. Citizenship, I concluded, is not only a

legal idea. It is a political idea--and a very emotional one, too.

Citizenship ceremonies here at home carry similar emotions and

teach large political lessons. In the late 19'90' s, I sat beside

Congressman Chaka Fattah in a packed gymnasium in Philadelphia, and

watched 200 individuals from 23 countries raise their right hands,

take the oath of allegiance, and become citizens. I watched them

melt into a crowd of happy, supportive relatives and friends. And

I heard several mention the word "vote." They had made it into

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the public, political life of the country. Our nation's politics

have been reshaped over and over by waves of multi-cultural

citizenship celebrations with the same upbeat spirit as this one.

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frhree years ago in San Jose, California, I watched Congresswoman

Zoe Lofgren preside over the citizenship ceremony of a former Major

in the South Vietnamese Army. He had saved the lives of three

downed American airmen by pulling them from their burning plane and

sheltering them. In combat, later, the Major had lost both his

arms. He had come to America, but his efforts at citizenship had

been stalled. At the behest of the American Veterans of Foreign

Wars and of her large South Vietnamese constituency--Congresswoman

Lofgren had sponsored a private citizenship bill, shephered it

through the Congress. Six TV cameras, a dozen newspaper reporters,

Graduation May 21, 2006 (7/20/06)-5


a VFW contingent, and lots of Vietnamese friends and relatives were

there. An INS official administered the oath. Then one of the

airmen whose lives the Major had saved was piped in to tell the

rescue story blow-by-blow over loud speakers. Then the former

Major spoke. Everyone hugged and cried. Once again, a citizenship

ceremony captured the promise of participation in American

political life.]

These experiences tell me that citizenship may not be the key to

all political science. And we may not "own it." But it is, for

sure, one very big idea.

Our graduation ceremony, too, is a citizenship ceremony. Our

ceremony, too, reflects personal ambition; and it celebrates hard

work and accomplishment. Our ceremony, too, has a flavor of

success and a feeling of optimism. Here, too, we see proud

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families and warm friends, joyful celebrations, and the charting of

new careers. Both ceremonies celebrate enlarged possibilities in

American public life.

The requirements of a political science major (or double major),

far exceed, of course, the basic requirements of legal citizenship.

Our ceremony celebrates an educational achievement that opens a

much wider participatory window, and it focuses a set of

expectations on you that are more demanding and more challenging.

It is your political science education and how you might use it as

citizens that we especially celebrate. We don't know where or how

you will register your educational experience--in this country or

abroad, in your neighborhood, town or city, in a public

organization, a private association or in your home. But your

. diploma carries with it the assumption that you will participate

somehow in the national political conversation. And your teachers

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have prepared you to improve that conversation when you join it.

Graduation, like citizenship, exemplifies the optimistic and

constructive side of American political life. Like citizenship,

graduation is a very big idea.

When I began a course in American politics by calling it "a

citizen's course," my goal, I told each class, was to introduce

them to the best scholarly research--to help them to become

informed, critical and constructive consumers of--and participants

in-- our national political conversation. That conversation, I

said, could be found in the New York Times, The Washington Post,

Wall Street Journal and the PBS Newshour. I could be that specific

because nearly all the country's operative political conversation

could be found in that handful of news outlets.

Today, my courses would still be "citizen's courses" but those four

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media reference points--which served so well for 30 years, are now

incredibly inadequate. The internet, cable TV, Direct TV, talk

radio, the 24 hour news cycle, The Daily Show, Fox News, blogging

and googling, have swamped us and created a vastly more competitive

and chaotic media-driven marketplace. They have generated a

quantum increase in sources of information which have, in turn,

radically altered citizen political conversation--and citizen

political activity.

We now have a multi-sided civic conversation that is increasingly

over-simplified, shrill, combative, polarized, and self-

perpetuating. It is driven by media competition and it never

stops. It sucks up all the civic oxygen needed to consider and

construct compromise. The short-term swallows up the long-term.

It magnifies our divisions and shrinks the prospects for agreement.

It is all conflict all the time. The media have no interest in

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getting things done, no interest in proposing--much less working

for--solutions. They have no stake in compromise. The

contemporary media are drawn to--and they live by--controversy.

They scan the horizon for potential conflict into which the rest of

us can be drawn. They turn us into combatants who attack one

another. My own favorite fantasy is to have the power to call a

24-hour national "time out"--no fighting allowed. But we are

surrounded, instead, by round-the-clock conflict. And it has made

the job of citizenship harder than ever.

In which case, your challenge, as I see it, is to use your

knowledge and your training to nudge the political conversation--

whenever and however you can--in a calmer, more measured, more

constructive and yes, more scholarly direction. You graduate today

with special citizenship skills. You have learned to tell a good

analysis from a bad one. You can examine values, recognize bias,

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evaluate evidence, test alternatives, interpret trends, assess data

and verify examples. You can specify the circumstances under which

self-interest can be morphed into mutual gain. That's the gift

from your teachers--high analytic standards.

I do not mean to eliminate partisanship. Far from it.

Partisanship drives all democratic political systems. We value it,

and we assume that you will act as partisans. What we teach,

however, is not partisanship; we teach analysis. And we think we

know that extreme unending partisanship without constructive

analysis is no long-term formula for anybody's success .

In my view, the important thing is that you employ your classroom

lessons to keep America's political conversation as calm, as

constructive, as continuous and as independent of the media hype as

possible. Our pollsters tell us that there is, throughout the

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country, "a hunger for consensus." If you can identify and give a

positive constructive nudge to those politicians who most value

negotiation and who work the hardest at coalition-building--in any

party and at any level of government--you will, to my mind, be

practicing citizenship in its finest form.

Well, graduation speakers will pontificate--as I have. And that's

that! Now, each of you will prepare to follow your own star. And

each of you will find--in the philosopher's words--"a truth that is

true for you." So, go for it, fellow citizens, and good luck!

' . \

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dick fenno graduation talk i am delighted to be here with

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