Vice presidents, deans, and faculty of the college…Ms. Ramos and Mr. Izaguirre… Trustee DiMartino, Vice Chancellor Schafer… Senator Schumer… honorees and distinguished guests … and most of important of all, men and women of the class of 2007… I address you all, more simply as friends, and welcome you to The City College of New York’s 2007 Commencement!

First – I know that this remarkable class will bear with me for a moment while I address your family and your friends.  The longer I live and the more I see – and not only as a proud parent myself, but also as an educator – the more certain I become that the redemptive and the transformative possibilities of the human spirit are very much built by education, but that their foundation lies in the love and in the support that we receive from our families. Without that foundation, nothing worthwhile can rise.  

Now, I say this as one who knows from hard personal experience that “family” embraces many relationships, including those who are related to us by birth – and those who by grace “choose” to love and to teach us – and even those with whom chance has thrown us together in common cause.

Today we come together as husbands and wives and children, as parents and grandparents, as aunts and uncles, as friends and lovers, and as classmates, teachers and mentors.  We come together to celebrate a milestone in the lives of our graduates.  But it is not only the hard work of the city college class of 2007 that we celebrate.  We also celebrate you – our families, and friends, and loved ones, because it is your love that has brought our graduates so far. They – and we – owe you a great debt of gratitude, and we applaud you.

I would also like to say what a privilege it is to be joined on the dais by the four gentlemen we honor today, as we acknowledge their lifelong achievement with honorary degrees and the president’s medal.  Together they represent some of the best possibilities of a great university – and they honor City College by their presence. I congratulate them all.

Now, to the graduates of the class of 2007: congratulations!  Congratulations for all of your hard work and long nights –for your determination and for your achievement!  You have made it! You have every reason to be very proud – as we are very proud of you!

You follow in the footsteps of some remarkable men and women.  You follow City College graduates who have transformed the world. They have changed how we see ourselves.  They have changed how we see others.  They have changed what our possibilities are – our possibilities as individuals and our possibilities as a nation. 

They have done well, but they also have done good, and we and the world are immensely richer for that.

I have no doubt that you will follow in that tradition.  Let me repeat: I have seen the work and commitment of many of you at close range, and I know what you can do already. I am absolutely convinced that you will take on the mantle of leadership from our generation, and you, will in turn shape the 21st century.

So – it might be fair for me to ask:  Are you ready?  Are you ready for leadership now?
 
To my knowledge, no one is leaving CCNY to immediately become the president of the United States. Unless I missed it, no one is leaving the College next week to become the CEO of a major media corporation, or the head of a major research laboratory, or the nation’s health care “czar,” although every one of these possibilities and countless others will be open to you in the future.  Like every person on this dais, you will probably start your careers at the entry-level, or you will begin your professional studies at grad school or law school or medical school on a new “bottom rung” of a new academic ladder. 
 
So you might ask me: “Why even bother to think about “leadership” now?  Isn’t it something that happens later?  Isn’t it something that happens when you’re higher up the ladder of success, when you are president of this organization or CEO of that organization or director or just about anything?  Don’t I have more immediate things to worry about?”

My answer is “no.”  Leadership does not just “happen” to you later in life.  Contrary to wishful thinking, leaders do not magically spring into existence just because they reach the top position on the organization chart – whether that organization is a university or a company or a country.  Leadership does not come from position.  Leadership comes from courage, passion, conviction, and most of all from practice.

When I was a young boy, the mixed race son of a white mother and black father – growing up in abject poverty, abandoned by my mother – and living on the wrong side of the color line in the black housing projects of my home state of Indiana, it certainly did not appear to most people that I had any kind of future at all.  It certainly didn’t occur to anybody that I had a future as a leader – except to my father, Jams “Buster” Williams.  He was an alcoholic who faced many struggles.   He barely had two quarters to scrape together himself. 

But often, during those very difficult early years of my youth, my dad told me: “son, you’ve got to be ready when that tap on the shoulder comes.”

“Son – you’ve got to be ready when that tap on the shoulder comes”

Ready for what?  I really did not know – not consciously, anyway.  But as I look back, I realize that he, along with others who to my great good fortune came into my life, was teaching me by counsel and by example that I needed to set my own terms about who I was, and about who I could become, teaching me not to allow others to limit and circumscribe what my life possibilities might be.  

The family and friends of my youth – most of us thrown together by chance in a time and a place far from where we are today, in a world very different from today – were telling me that that the tap on my shoulder would come.  And they insisted that, even as a youngster I could begin – in fact I had to begin, right where I was – to get ready for it.  They were teaching me that I could learn to be a leader – that I could practice the habits of leadership – long before I had the slightest idea that one day I would be standing on a stage like this one.

Many of you too have already begun to practice these habits of leadership.   Today I offer the hope and the challenge that you will keep them in your heart as you move forward. 

This is what I learned in those most formative years of my life.

One:  don’t hold grudges.  Grudges sap your energy and they cloud your vision.  Grudges make you inefficient and they make you smaller.  I was so fortunate to learn this (and so much more!) pretty early on from Dora Weekly Terry, a black woman with an eighth grade education who cleaned white people’s houses for twenty-five dollars a week.
 
Miss Dora “stepped up” to take me and my eight-year-old brother into her heart and home, although she was unrelated to us and had no obligation, familial or otherwise, to us.  In all those days, I never heard her utter an angry word about the people who took such a terrible advantage of her.  When I railed against the racism of my youth, she always admonished me that being angry “was never going to take me any place that I wanted to go.”

Two: don’t worry too much about getting credit for what you accomplish.  (This is pretty closely related to number one.)  It may take some time, but people in general are pretty smart, and in the end you will receive the credit you deserve.

Three: there’s a long way between “do” and “done.”  Keep the big picture in mind, but don’t skip the details.  The best idea in the world goes nowhere if it can’t be implemented, so you have to do your homework.
 
Four: compromise your plans, not your principles.  Like the song says – you can’t always get what you want, and I’m afraid that Mick and the Stones forgot to add that you don’t always- want -what you get.  You’re going to have to give a little.  If all compromise were bad, we would have to reconcile ourselves to not moving forward at all.  So, at every point where compromise seems like the only alternative to paralysis, (and there will be many such points), ask yourself: does this move me closer to my goal, in a way that I can be proud of?

Five:  don’t ask others to do something you are not willing to do yourself.  You don’t lead by pointing somewhere and telling other people to go there.  You lead by showing people how to get there.

Six:  encourage others to lead.  Appeal to the best in others; they are looking to be inspired. In the end, your true test as a leader is that others can – and want to, and will – take up where you leave off.
Seven:  keep your sense of humor; you’re going to need it.  And laughing at yourself beats mocking others, hands down.

Eight:  show your gratitude.   No one does it alone. Everyone needs help sometime; that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you recognize the help you have received, and pass it on.

Nine: when opportunity comes your way – jump on it – even if you cannot see exactly how it’s going to turn out.  And here I think of my father, once again.

Long before he was my father – in the late 1930’s – Buster Williams and a friend were thrilled to learn that they had been accepted into Howard University.  The only problem: they were in Muncie, Indiana, 650 miles away from Howard University in Washington, D.C.  They didn’t have the money for tuition and fees, let alone a car or the money to get across country. So they decided to hitchhike – 650 miles!

Now, because my father was fair-skinned, it was vastly easier for him to get a ride than it was for his childhood buddy.  But my father was not going without his friend. So, he would hang back, often waiting a long time until his buddy was given a ride.  Then he would hitch a ride until he saw his friend standing alongside the road, and then he would ask the driver of the car he was in to let him off.  My dad and his buddy hop-scotched across the country that way for 650 miles.  My father so believed in the transformative power of education that he was willing to walk across the country to grasp that opportunity!

Finally: step up. 

Now, I know that we’ve pretty much agreed that upon graduation you will not immediately be responsible for eliminating war or world hunger in your new job.  But that doesn’t mean you won’t immediately have the chance and the challenge to step up.  Wherever you find yourself in September, difficult issues will arise – issues that you could easily ignore if they do not directly affect you.

It could be as simple as being a part of a conversation that includes offensive of insensitive remarks about others.  You might learn that a co-worker or another student was treated unfairly.  Don’t let it slide. Stand up and speak up.  You may make some people mad or at least uncomfortable. But it’s really pretty simple: when you have the chance to do the right thing, do it.  Do it now.

If you are going to be a leader you have to be willing to make the tough decisions.  You’re going to have to take responsibility not just for your own work and your own advancement (believe it or not, that’s the easy part); you’re going to have to be willing to take responsibility for the welfare of others, and for the accomplishment of the larger task at hand.  This is both the beginning and the culmination of leadership.
 
In the coming months and years ahead, I believe that you will have plenty of opportunities to step up, that you will receive those taps on the shoulder that my dad told me about when I was ten years old.  And I hope and believe that you will be ready.  You will be ready because of what you have achieved already.  And you will be ready because of what you have received – not in money and material goods, but in the love and example of your family; in the skills and knowledge you have learned from your professors; and in what you have brought to and learned from each other on this most diverse campus, this multipart chorus that sings America…this City College of New York! 

I am grateful to have been a part of your journey so far.  And because of you, I am confident that the leadership of our fragile future is in good hands.  Congratulations – and good luck to you all.