Evan Miller
What Does Williams Mean to You?
I was going to talk about What Williams Means to You, and I wrote a pretty good if pretty hackneyed speech about those things recent graduates are supposed to remember with a warm heart and open purse: you know, midnight philosophizing, spontaneous tomfoolery, athletic achievement, and the inimitable feeling of making a brilliant point in a class that you didn’t do the reading for. But I realized that none of that is really going to matter in, I don’t know, an hour and a half, so instead of talking about your Williams experience, I’m going to talk about a much more valuable concept, which is the Williams name. If any of you mothers were planning to save today’s program, go ahead and take out a pen, turn to page 3, scratch out “What Does Williams Mean to You?”, and replace it with “What Does Williams Mean to People You Will Be Trying to Impress?”
In my opinion, Williams just isn’t famous enough. We’ve got accomplished professors, stimulating classes, smart kids, and a jaw-dropping endowment, but when I tell folks back home I go to Williams College, they look at me as if I just told them instead I’m studying at the McDonald’s Academy of Cheeseburgers. (Fortunately, they’ll be able to recycle that expression when I tell them what I’m actually doing for a living next year.) I think you and I deserve a lot better. You’ve worked hard for four years and paid several hundred thou — sorry, your parents paid several hundred — well, OK, you, your parents, or some old rich person in need of a tax write-off plopped down several hundred thousand dollars, and at this point, I’d feel a lot better about that investment if it bought more than just a liberal-arts education.
When I say Williams deserves to be famous, I mean really famous. I want to be watching television one of these days and behold the college-bound protagonist cursing the name of Dick Nesbitt and the hand-drawn frowny face next to his tear-stained signature. I want to see the day when prominent hip-hop artists, in the most assured of terms, extol the merits of rolling down Spring Street sipping a strawberry-banana smoothie. And I hate to say this, but the greatest day of all would be that day when terrorists recognize the political and cultural importance of Williamstown and plan to plow an explosive-laden construction vehicle into the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance. (I’m told that the second-highest form of flattery is jihad.)
This sort of fame takes a lot of work, but if we coordinate — if we use a little teamwork — we can make our diplomas the most valuable documents on earth. Here’s the two-prong plan.
Prong one. This applies to ambitious people. You all have got to be famous yourselves. Write books. Rob banks. Whatever it takes. Then, tell the world how you could not have done it without Williams College. Better, be specific. Say you could not have done whatever the hell it is you go off and achieve without having taken at least two courses that emphasized the writing process and had 19 students or fewer, or without having had your medieval notions of good and bad dispelled by a sufficiently post-modern professoriate.
Prong two, for everybody else. In a few years, take some time to reflect about why you are what you are — how your life has been a triumph of will or perhaps a concession to circumstance, how your dreams have been shaped by your surroundings, and the particular influence of this college. Now I know the last two days have largely consisted of people telling you to remember this, meditate on that, and be grateful for everything, but nobody’s been demanding quite enough of you. If you’ve learned anything here, it’s that clear thinking happens best in the course of clear writing and clear speaking. One thing Williams hasn’t taught you is that the most important subject you will ever study is yourself. So put your life under a microscope, and then write down what you see. Keep a diary, even if you only update it once or twice a year. Don’t be shy about telling your friends, your family, and your fellow pilgrims in this life what, in your judgment, Williams meant to you. I’m asking this because your listeners are sure to be impressed. Thank you.
June 4, 2006