By President Dale T. Knobel

Men and women of the Denison Class of 2011, you have your diplomas in hand. The ceremony is nearly done. But it has been a tradition of our college to leave you with a thought, to issue you a “charge” as you begin your lives as graduates.

You probably recognize that this graduation event is a ceremonial bookend to your college career; the other one was the First Year Induction that took place on the Reese-Shackelford Common near the end of your first full day on campus nearly four years ago. Of course, they both can be characterized as Commencements. Each was the beginning of something, today and four years ago as well. Though you may not remember it now, in my remarks on the earlier occasion, I also offered a “charge,” something to think about as you began your undergraduate studies and life at Denison. Either charge—then or now, of course, should have something to do with what lies ahead, but it is in the nature of beginning anything that you are building on what is just past. So a proper charge is retrospective as well as prospective.

What I want you to consider is what I believe are the most misleading—and sometimes actually crippling—seven words in the experience of college students. Oh, I know you’ve heard them! They are these: “The best four years of your lives.” They have been shared with you by well meaning folks who are not currently college students themselves. To the those sharing them, the words are nostalgic. They reflect the speakers’ somewhat gilded memories of a time in life before responsibilities to careers, households, communities, mortgages, auto loans, and, yes, parental tuition bills that seem to accumulate during adult life. They also, though, capture the recognition that college offers an extraordinary opportunity to learn and intellectually grow, a luxury of time, resources, and supportive teachers and learning partners that will be difficult to match under most other circumstances in your future.

But it is not just older people who share these seven words with you. You use them yourselves. Periodically, someone writes them in our campus newspaper, the Denisonian, usually as “These are supposed to be the best four years of our lives.” I’ve heard them in the conversations that I’ve had with Denison students this year and every year. Whether in the paper or in conversation, they usually take the form of something like: “If these are supposed to be the best four years of our lives, why are we so vexed by…you fill in the blank: by other students, by my professors, by the college administration, by my family, by grades, by friends, by my laptop computer, by my philosophy paper, by my biology lab.” You get the picture.

And what’s so wrong with these words? Well, in the first place, they lead—or at least they can lead—to a misperception that the lives we—that is, you—lead here on this campus aren’t real. Yes, you often are “supported” by families or the college or both in ways—financial and otherwise--that lift some responsibilities and cares from you. Yet what happens to you here day to day is real indeed—particularly in your relations with others. Because, as happens in life off this hill, by your words and actions you daily build people up or tear people down; you yourself are daily encouraged or diminished by those around you. To not realize that is certain to make a student careless around others— fellow students, college faculty and staff, nearby Granville residents, or even campus visitors. During your very first semester at Denison we had a particularly dramatic instance of publicly voiced frustration and even anger with carelessness—carelessness in the way some interacted with others who differed from them in race, or sexual orientation, or nationality, or family background and resources. On that occasion, as we discussed it, many Denisonians got it, that this is, in fact, the “real world” where what we do or say in fundamental ways affects the lives of others. But some continued to see this as “the best four years of our lives” and, ignoring that in so many ways these four years are very real and very consequential, assumed that college life is all about “me” and my enjoyment of this time, that the “Denison bubble,” as some like to call it, exempts individuals from taking full responsibility for their behaviors and relationships. That’s careless—and a recipe for developing a habit of carelessness toward others well beyond college.

Anything else wrong with “The four best years of your lives”? Well, yes, actually. I see it; you see it. Each year among some on college campuses, this one included, an almost desperate approach to social life reveals itself. In part, this seems to be driven by the notion that if this really is “the best four years of our lives” we’d better party down right now; it’s all downhill into drudgery after this. Of course, as anyone here beyond their college years can certainly share, the end of college is hardly the end of a social life, much less the beginning of joylessness. It’s more likely to be the start of a life of rewarding relationships. And before very long, if you haven’t already, you’ll figure that out, too. But the desperation with which some college students pursue social activity shows they don’t get that now and, sadly, it frequently gets in the way of taking the fullest advantage of a college education, of getting the most out of a unique opportunity. Desperate socializing, in any event, just doesn’t seem like much fun; it’s more like work.

So about now, you’re thinking, well this is a downer. This is preachy (even my wife thought it was a little!). But, no, I don’t think that’s really what I have in mind. What I want you to know is that I fervently hope these have been really great years in your lives. I want them to have been. The faculty and staff want them to have been. Your families want them to have been. But “best”?!

Here’s the good news and where I have been heading all along. I am confident that for nearly all of you, these will not be the best four years of your lives. No, I can’t tell you which four years will be or why they will be, but I feel pretty certain they will happen. Will they be the four years in which you complete a graduate or professional degree and embark on the career you’ve aspired to? Will they be the four years in which you move beyond the entry level of a job and acquire an opportunity to support yourself by doing something with substantial responsibility attached to it? Will it be the four years in which you make a commitment to a life partner and begin to make a life together? Will it be the four years in which you discover or have the opportunity to develop an interest or avocation that enriches your daily experience? Will it be the four years in which you have a child, send them to school, thrill in their development, see them off to college, enjoy their own children as a grandparent? (Whoa—I’m getting way ahead now!) Will it be the four years in which you do something important for a cause, a charity, or public-spirited goal which reminds you that there are things more important than your own comfort? You get my drift.

Nor is it clear that these things or things like them will happen serially; they may be all mixed up with one another. They may be so mixed, in fact, that you never figure out which are really “the best four years of your life.” My goodness, I hope so! The life well-lived is likely to be one of many “best four years”—so many and so varied that in the end, you’re not really sure which four were the best. And that’s a good thing. The liberal education you have participated in at Denison is just such an education as is calculated to help you make the best out of all of the twists and turns of life, to carve out many “best four years.”

This reminds me—as I hope it reminds you—that your future is built upon your past. The Roman poet and essayist Horace, is credited with several popular aphorisms that have made their way from Latin into English. One of them applies here: dimidium facti qui coepit (h)abet: sapere aude, incipe, usually translated as “He (or she) who has begun is half done: dare to be wise.” It’s the punch line of a story told in the first book of Horace’s Epistulae, or “Letters,” where he tells of the man who waded halfway across a stream and then, not wanting to get any wetter, stopped to wait for the rest of the water to run by. There’s an analogy here about the relation of college to life. I join my colleagues of the Denison faculty in hoping that you’ve learned much about yourself, about others, and about your world and how you can make it better. You’ve got your feet wet; you’ve come halfway. Now, don’t just use what you have learned but continue to learn. And so I charge you: sapere aude—dare to be wise. And in acquired wisdom may you find the best four years of your lives—or even better—four best years repeated over and again—best years initiated by something that you’ve learned at Denison. Continue your crossing with my very best wishes.