Burns calls on graduate to be uniters, not dividers at 2017 Salem State University Commencement address for Salem State University

Commencement Address

Ambassador (ret.) Nicholas Burns

Salem State University

May 18, 2017

This is a day of hope.

Hope for the leadership, faculty and staff of Salem State University as they watch their students graduate.

Hope produced by your extraordinary President—Dr. Patricia Meservey—for her years of service to Salem State during her last commencement week.

Hope for the family members here—the Moms and Dads, the grandparents, the sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends who are here to mark a day of hope for their families.  

And the greatest hope of all resides in all of you graduating today in O’Keefe.  This is surely one of the most positive, optimistic and important days in your lives. 

As the immortal brothers of NPR’s Car Talk, Tom and Ray Magliozzi told one graduating class, “You will never have more energy or enthusiasm, hair or brain cells than you have today.”  So, make the most of it!  

I am so honored to be with you all today and with two outstanding public servants—Frieda Garcia and Representative Byron Cushing—as honorary degree recipients.

When President Meservey described for me your graduating class, an image appeared in my mind of what you represent—a beautiful tableau of our great American nation.

Together, you come from the United States and thirty-one other countries.  Thirty five percent of the students at Salem State are first generation college students.  Some of you are immigrants yourselves.  Others are the very first in your families to ever earn a graduate degree.

You comprise the most diverse group of students of any public university in the Commonwealth.

Together, you give us a true picture of America today.  We are a country that has embraced all ethnicities, all faiths, all linguistic groups and every color under the rainbow.

Our national motto on the Great Seal of the United States says it all—E Pluribus Unum—out of many peoples come one people, the American people.

That is what the Statue of Liberty proclaims in New York Harbor.  It is what the Golden Stairs in East Boston promised to my Irish grand-parents who arrived here as teenagers looking for work and a new home.

In fact, if we asked each person here in O’Keefe today this question—where do you and your ancestors come from—we would hear the story of America.  Each of us would describe a family that came from a faraway shore to make a new life. We are indeed a land and a nation of immigrants.

That story is not, of course, without its tragedies.  African-Americans were brought here against their will as slaves.  And they had to wait for centuries to be given the full rights they deserved all along.  Many immigrant groups faced discrimination in the past.  Many still do today.

But it is our diversity that makes America a truly exceptional nation in the world. 

Now, I know my place here today.  As I am talking, I understand what every commencement speaker in the history of commencements knows all too well—I am the person standing in the way of you and your diplomas!  So, I am going to be brief and leave you with two messages this afternoon.

The first is that we must never forget who we really are as a people—that immigrant nation I was talking about.

We are at our best when we honor and celebrate our diversity. 

And we are at our worst when we deny it.  When we spread fear of the other, when we denigrate and dismiss both immigrants and refugees. 

When protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia proclaimed their belief in a white, nationalist America last week, we were at our worst.  When counter-protesters mobilized in the same city against bigotry and intolerance, we saw the best of America. 

We must resist the pernicious idea that is back in our national debate you have to be a certain color and faith to be truly American. 

That is one reason why we must keep our doors open to immigrants.  They enrich our society, they build our businesses, they work hard for themselves and they work hard for our country.  You know the line in the hit musical—about an immigrant Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton: “Immigrants, we get the job done!”

And it is in the American tradition to be generous in accepting refugees.  Albert Einstein was a refugee.  Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright were refugees. There are 65 million displaced people in the world today—the greatest number since the end of World War Two.  At this time of great moral crisis, America must do its part to help them and to give some of them refuge and a home here in America.

And yet the Trump Administration’s immigration and refugee Executive Order would freeze for four months the acceptance of any refugees, reduce the number of immigrants we take in and be, in effect, a ban on Moslems.  Such a policy is, simply, unworthy of a great multi-ethnic, multi-religious nation like the United States of America.

We must not succumb to those who seek to divide us from each other and spread fear about the differences among us.

Our greatest leaders—Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—knew that was wrong.  They were uniters, rather than dividers.  They urged us to summon, as Lincoln said so memorably and so beautifully, “the better angels of our natures”, and to unite as one people.

My second and final message is equally urgent.  We need the generation of the graduates here today to raise us up and build a better and stronger and more hopeful America.

Many of you have trained here for the giving careers—as teachers, social workers, nurses, occupational therapists.  Three quarters of you are women.  You understand the power of one individual to heal the world around us.

Many of you will be public servants.  You will serve in government at all levels, as well as in our schools and hospitals and in the community and civic organizations that knit our society together.

At the start of my own career in the State Department in Washington more than thirty-five years ago, President Ronald Reagan campaigned against government. 

He insisted government was the problem.  It has since become fashionable to denigrate government and those who serve the public good.

I never agreed with that line of thinking.  Sure, government can sometimes be too big or overbearing or costly.  We can never stop reforming government at all levels.

But, government holds out the safety net for those who have fallen through the cracks of our society, especially the poor, the disabled, those who have fallen prey to addictions and the elderly.

Through government, we’ve accomplished extraordinary things in just the last half century—the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts that liberated African-Americans, the Space Program that brought us to the Moon, the expansion of the National Park System, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency to keep our air and water and natural environment safe for us all.

Government represents our highest ideals—that we are all created equal, that we all deserve a chance and helping hand and that we all want to build something—together-that is bigger than any of us—a world of greater security, greater justice, greater peace.

So, as you graduate today, please make sure that at least part of your life is about giving, serving, contributing, joining, assembling, advocating, protesting—together—to make America the country we all want it to be.

President John F. Kennedy, a native son of Massachusetts, whose centennial is next week—100 years since his birth on May 29, 1917—had this to say about the nobility of public service, about what all of you can do for your country: 

“…there is a higher purpose, and that is the hope that you will turn to the service of the State….that you will render on the community level, or on the state level, or on the national level, or the international level a contribution to the maintenance of freedom and peace and the security of our country.”

Today is indeed a day of hope.  You graduates give us hope.

In who you are.  In what you have chosen to do.  In how you will lead us forward to help our great country be the best expression of our ideals and of our dreams for the future.

Thank you for the great honor of speaking today.

Congratulations and best wishes to the Salem State graduates of 2017!