This Is the Real World

Baccalaureate Address
by Edward Foster
Professor of English and the Humanities

Professor Ed Foster, who presented one of the Baccalaureate addresses, joins graduates at a reception following the ceremonies

Human beings confuse themselves by thinking of reality as a single thing. As a result, it is customary to remind graduates that they are about to enter the real world. My contention is that this is the real world — that college is the real world as much as anything you will experience in the future.

If learning about the nature of the physical world is not real, then what is real? If examining the foundations of human behavior is not real, then what is real? If exploring the political and economic engines that make the world work is not real, then what is real? If reading the words of our most thoughtful and imaginative ancestors is not real, then what is real? If seeing and hearing the power of human creativity in art and music are not real, then what is real? Indeed, what you have been doing is concentrating your attention on those things — scientific, literary, and artistic — which are both the substance and the shapers of the world that we usually call real.

Whatever you have studied, you have learned to interpret and evaluate: to decide what counts as evidence and what does not; to separate the beautiful from the ugly; to distinguish the valuable from the trivial — and to care about the difference. In the future, besides using your more specialized skills, you will repeatedly be asked — as worker, as citizen, and as human being — to make judgments on specialists as a generalist. Happily, there will be a residuum of experience from the real world of college that will enable you to make these judgments of value; of what is temporary and what is enduring; of what your best selves should embrace or shun. You will be of society and beyond society, able to see what is right and willing to try to fix what is wrong. You have the capacity to be a conscience as well as a constructor of the new reality you will be in and help to shape.

What you are about to do, therefore, is not to leave an artificial world for a real world, but to move from one real world to another — to leave the real world in which you have had the opportunity to reflect on "real things" to enter the real world where those foundations play themselves out in practical affairs. I do not mean to dismiss or underrate the perils and peculiarities of the real world of practical affairs. That is, after all, where you will make your careers and your families and your contributions to your country and your world. I simply want to stress that what you have already done is genuine and will be relevant to what you do in the future because of who you have become.

Consequently, I want to urge you to bring as much as possible of the real world that you are leaving into the real world that you are about to enter. If you can bring your inquisitiveness about the nature of things, your concern about the truth, and your delight in the beautiful into your next stage of reality, you will continually renew yourself and enrich the world you live in. If you can inform the world of practical affairs with the world of curiosity and wonder, then you will give new life to the world you are entering. And who knows — there may even be a decent living in it. Certainly it will be a world more decent to live in.

Just one repetition. The real world of college is not just what you have learned, but who you have become. In your friendships, on your teams, in your clubs and organizations, you have not only been learning but experiencing the values of community. Communities are, after all, simply extended friendships. You have been learning how to negotiate and energize those friendships. And I am sure that no one could convince you that those friendships — and the extended friendships we call communities — are unreal. The old ones and the ones as yet unformed as you enter your next real world will be the bedrock of your life as a citizen and a fully developing human being. Now, because we live in communities, we must also live with differences and ambiguities. The inevitability of ambiguity, however, should not trap you into indifference. Because the good, the true, and the beautiful are hard to find (and sometimes even hard to recognize), try not to let ambiguity paralyze you. Interpretation without involvement, like faith without works, is empty.

John Donne said in one of his sermons, "No man is an island. No man can stand alone." Perhaps Americans are so individualistic by history and heritage that we cannot completely un-island ourselves. But if you work at the formation of friendships and communities in your new real worlds, you will enrich those worlds and your own lives — and validate the experiences of your old real world of college. Therefore, I emphasize the continuity of what you have done with what stands before you to do. With the wisdom and the judgment of your academic experience and with the humanity and compassion of your personal and social development, you are ready for your new real world. Even if we are islands, we can hope and work to be part of a harmonious archipelago.

But, as you earnestly pursue the perfection of yourselves and the renovation of the universe, don't take yourselves too seriously. Take time to be silly. It is the best antidote to self-important solemnity and the best reminder of our fragile humanity. May the farce be with you.