Full text of Paul Farmer's Baccalaureate remarks

It’s an unconventional opening gambit, outside of a courtroom and facing a jury, to ask for your sympathy. But, really: was it absolutely necessary to have me compete with Steven Colbert? I was worried that all that students wanted Colbert and I’ve been forced on you by faculty and administration. The year before last, Seamus Heaney had to follow Bill Clinton, but Heaney is a Nobel-prize winning poet, and both have a way with words and the gift of gab. But since this is Princeton, and not the small community-based college at which I’m privileged to teach, I’m not surprised that an academic rather than an entertainer was chosen as commencement speaker. But it makes me nervous, humbled, to be one of the last persons you’ll hear before you walk through the Fitz-Randolph Gate. In other words, I’m taking this privilege seriously—though I’ve no doubt that Harvard’s speaker, who invented quidditch and Hogwarts and is said to have gone from welfare mom to become the richest woman in England, will also have the jitters as she gives the commencement address.

So there you have it: in order to please you all, I’ll have to be as poetic as Heaney, as funny and brave as Colbert, as engaging and smart as Clinton, as creative as J.K. Rowling (who, looking around these parts, may well have based Hogwarts on Princeton), and as concise as a haiku poet.

There are other reasons for you to be nice to me: as Shirley mentioned, I am the proud holder of an honorary degree from Princeton, I’m technically member of this remarkable family since 2006, which is why I’m wondering no one put an orange tie in my room. I am going to make my comments brief, in the hopes that my message is not effaced completely by last night’s and tonight’s revelry: the haggard look today is because Palmer House was shaken for hours by what I assume were fireworks rather than surface-to-air missiles.

Also to honor Princeton, I will make a tribute to the 2006 speaker by quoting one of Heaney’s famous and stirring poems and this is the title of my message to you:

Make hope and history rhyme

History says, Don't hope

on this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed for tidal wave

of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme.

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Since I’m a doctor and an anthropologist, I might be reasonably expected to offer a prescription for this utopian vision. But I can’t do that. What I can do today is to offer a vision of what this country and this world might look like if we work together to make it better, to outline the sort of efforts that will be necessary to make sure that you, the class of 2008, don’t end up ruling a violent world of haves and have-nots. So that you don’t have to wall yourselves off from the hungry and the sick, who are, along with students, my constituency. So that you don’t have the hear terms like “pre-emptive war” or “collateral damage” or “terrorism” when you turn on a television. That’s where we’re heading, and we need to change course.

Improbably, I got this idea, this vision thing, from John McCain, surely the only idea I’ve ever copped from him. I was recently holed up in a hotel room, staring at a blank computer screen with only the word “Princeton” on it, and watching CNN. This is not, in principle, a smart approach to writing a speech, but inspiration comes in strange forms. The venerable presidential candidate was giving a speech, in Ohio I think, and offered a vision of what our country might look like after his first term in office (As an aside, there are medical terms for these “visions,” and there are medicines to treat them, but I know it’s against the rules to be partisan in a commencement address so I changed the theme).

So imagine you are coming back to Princeton for your twentieth-year reunion. What would the world look like if hope and history were to rhyme?

Don’t worry: Princeton will still be named the nation’s best university every year and so the U.S. News and World Report rankings, in 2028, will simply be assessing “colleges and universities other than Princeton.” President Tilghman will be begging to go back to her lab, having raised $15 trillion dollars so that the ratio of endowment to the student body will be, oh, $100 million per student and staff, but no one will let her get back to her test tubes. Tuition at Princeton will have gone the way of early admissions. The faculty-student ratio will still look the same at first glance, but will in fact be flipped: each student will have his or her own little personal faculty of a dozen senior professors, available at all times, only to them. Most undergraduates will have published extensively by the time they’re juniors; 45% will hold patents for discoveries made here and then made these discoveries available to all those who need them. Even teaching fellows will need at least two PhDs in order to address undergraduates in a classroom. Nixon’s nose will still be Nixon’s nose and will remain, according to my crystal ball, hole number 16 in Princeton’s storied ultimate Frisbee competition. The eating clubs will still be here, of course, but more open, and will have tasting menus prepared by French chefs called biqueurs (I do my research, don’t I? Give me some credit here).

But what about the world beyond this blessed oasis? If hope and history start to rhyme, if that longed for tidal wave of justice has washed over us, said Seamus Heaney the world will be a different and better place. What might it look like?

The word justice is used in varied and often contradictory ways. Some of us see two broad and potentially complementary justice movements that are growing every day: the environmental movement and the social-justice movement concern with the wellbeing of the bottom billion in the world. Although they count tens of millions of adherents, they too often pay no attention to each other. Should they become truly complementary, should they take root and grow in our country and in others, then the world will be, I’m convinced, changed for the better. It could be transformed not in a haphazard way—for change is coming, dear seniors—but change in the just ways desired by many of those graduating today.

What about environmental justice? What about science and technology? I can only imagine what new technological advances will have come to pass by 2028. Medicine, certainly, will be transformed and improved, but that’s just the beginning. Our economy will be green, in this utopian vision, our carbon footprint tiny compared to the bad old days when oil hit, in 2010, $250 a barrel, provoking, at long last, a serious commitment to alternative, clean fuels that are truly clean as opposed to advertised as such. So too for India and China, which by 2020 became the world’s largest economies. The planet’s population will have grown, of course, but at nothing like the rates we’re seeing now: the human herd will no longer be culled by epidemic disease or by war. For the first time in a century, the Amazon rain forest will be growing, not shrinking. Ivory-billed woodpeckers will be commonly sighted across the southeastern United States, and several other species feared extinct will re-emerge. Peace will have settled in the Congo, sparing hundreds of thousands of lives, and thousands of mountain gorillas will munch bamboo contentedly on that side of the border, as they do today in peaceful Rwanda. Haiti will have pioneered green technologies and half of the country will be, at last, reforested — it is currently completely deforested — as poor people there will no longer be forced to cut down trees to cook meals for their families. There will not have been another coup in Haiti since 2004, because no powerful nation continued to back the anti-democratic elite after 2009; in fact, the well-to-do in Haiti will have come to embrace the notion of one-person, one-vote that their forebears laid the groundwork for defeating slavery in 1804. Food security will blossom in Haiti as erosion is slowed and as U.S. and European agricultural subsidies are abandoned as unfair and counterproductive. The farm bill will be stored in a museum. There will still be snow and ice on the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, just as Greenland will still be white with glaciers and Iceland will remain green. Neither Florida nor Bangladesh will be underwater. I’m from Florida so I’m hoping that will be the case.

What about the justice system? Our own nation will have acknowledged that justice is not and never was blind and taken steps to shrinking our prison population, which is in 2008 the largest, per capita, in the world. In 20 years, we’ll have found alternatives to prison and fought racism within the justice system. All those companies now making a killing on the privatization of the prison system will have gone out of business or switched to green-collar jobs. Many of the erstwhile inhabitants of our prisons will have jobs not in today’s version of the fast-food industry, itself reformed as migrant farmworkers gradually took over more management positions, but good green-collar jobs as our country transforms its economy.

The death penalty will have been abolished, not just here but in China and elsewhere, and our country will have joined the ICC just as we signed on to the Kyoto Accords. Harold and Kumar, having gone to White Castle via Princeton, will no longer be able to go to Guantanamo except as tourists, since the U.S. base there will have been shuttered and transformed into a botanical garden. There will be no travel restrictions to that island.

Across the globe, torture will be well and truly outlawed. “Waterboarding” will be a term used to refer to a beachside amusement indulged in by happy kids who are not obese and diabetic, as so many were by 2010 and through no fault of their own. There will still be a show called “24,” but it will be on the sci-fi channel, along with “Battlestar Galactica,” in it’s 25th season.

New Orleans, when you come back in 2028, will be a thriving metropolis with nary a FEMA trailer in sight. The city will boast not only a few good charter schools, but also one of the best public-school systems in the country. The levees, rebuilt with local labor, will be solid, and the region surrounded by the cypress forests and ground cover that once protected, at least in part, the delta from catastrophic storms.

Speaking of New Orleans, which by the way is where I wrote this, leads to the next question: What about social justice writ large? What does history suggest is necessary? What does the famous Princeton honor code suggest might be honorable as you leave this haven? Don’t we need an honor code that would honor this planet and all those living on it?

Of course we do, and here’s another look at a utopian future.

By 2028, the war in Iraq will be long over, our troops and bases back home; most vets will have gone to college and those who went with green cards will be citizens with access to health care just like everyone else. Our democracy will be more robust, which is to say, different from today. One of our nation’s leaders, who, in keeping with the non-partisan speech clause, will remain unnamed but who, hint, always looks grumpy and is not the best hunting companion, recently replied to the observation that most Americans opposed the war with a single word: “So?” But the administration following his will have found Americans’ views more relevant to the shaping of our foreign and domestic policy and will have engaged in regional negotiations, under the aegis, heaven forfend, of the UN, to end the conflict in Iraq. The top twenty floors of the UN will still be there, and Halliburton stock, having slumped after the end of the war, will rise in value in 2020 because its primary activities will be to provide support to women’s cooperatives throughout newly thriving African economies. The CEO of Halliburton will then be a Princeton-educated Rwandan woman shuttling between Kigali, Beijing, and the United States, to which the company will have returned under new leadership. When in Texas, she will speak fluent English with a bit of a Kenya-Rwandan accent.

The country of Rwanda will not only have left poverty behind, eliminating malaria, cholera, and AIDS within its borders, but will have helped to broker peace in Sudan and offer development assistance to other countries in the region and, in two instances, in Europe: Rwandan businesswomen will have helped reconfigure a number of European businesses in order to keep them green, competitive, and focused not just on product but on those who produce. A new Darfur will host the summer Olympic games, having stopped, with the help of peacekeeping troops, the world’s last genocide in 2009. China will have cut off support to the bad guys, just as we Americans acknowledged a disturbing similarity to our unstinting support of medieval autocracies in the Middle East, also for access to oil and markets. Women in Saudi Arabia will have drivers’ licenses and, at the same time, find it hard to retain a retinue of servants from the Philippines or Jordan, since those countries will be stable and affluent. In these regions, the men will actually help with the chores.

Nuclear proliferation will have stopped. Einstein may or may not have believed in the afterlife, but, somewhere, maybe in the ether over Palmer Hall, he was smiling when in 2015 every country, including those on the by-then-defunct security council, began dismantling, really dismantling, their nuclear arsenals. The terms “cluster bomb” and “landmine” became dated, but sometimes colorful, metaphors by the close of the second decade of the century.

A broad-based movement to acknowledge historical truths will have led not only to the abolition of war but to the forgiveness of “odious debt” in many countries. By 2028, the decades-long trend of increasing social inequalities will have been reversed, and four of the world’s five fastest-growing economies will be in Africa. One of them will be Rwanda, with a GDP far bigger than Singapore’s. Fair-trade coffee and tea, and also tourism, will have given way to IT as Rwanda became, by 2020, the continent’s high-tech leader.

Medicine and health will have flourished during the first quarter of the 21st century. The United States will have a world-class national health system, introduced in 2009, with universal coverage implemented by 2012. Healthcare costs will have fallen even as the average citizen lives longer, better lives. “Social safety net” will no longer be a dirty word. In 2024, Shirley Tilghman will complete the Boston marathon, in the senior division and wearing bizarre orange spandex, becoming the first Ivy League president to do so in less than three hours. Harvard’s longest-serving president, Drew Faust, will be right behind her, and that year, with all doping banned, cyclist and former Duke president Nan Keohane will win the Tour de France, senior division. This Gang of Three, as they’ll be called, will have pushed the modern research university further along the path towards engagement with the world’s poor, including those in this country.

There’s the vision, class of 2008, and I would ask that the physicians present not pull out prescription pads to offer me anti-psychotic medications. But how on earth could these wonderful things come to pass? Not through wishful thinking. But is it crazy to wish for these kinds of improvements? Is it crazy for the class of 2008 to wish for something better than what has gone before? Is it crazy for you to wish for hope and history to rhyme? Imagine a commencement speaker in the early nineteenth century, exhorting young Americans or Britons to abolish slavery as the affront to God that it surely was and is. Imagine an address in the early 20th century in which the speaker pushed universal suffrage, arguing that an adult is an adult, regardless of race or gender. Imagine a speaker in 1993—not so long ago—arguing that apartheid in South Africa was an insult not just to the notion of human rights but to modernity itself. Imagine a country like ours looking back from 2028 and thinking it quaint that not that long ago a woman or a black would not likely be elected as head of our country. Imagine a world in which a global safety net makes work like mine easier, because we don’t have to beg, borrow, and steal medicines and supplies after a natural disaster or after unfair trade wipes out food security in poor countries. A world in which every child has the right to go to school. A world in which clean water is not a privatized commodity to be sipped from bottles but rather part of the earth’s bounty, for all its inhabitants?

For hope and history to rhyme, we need to build, or continue building, a social movement. To move forward any rights agenda, any plan for true progress, we must be part of a movement, and this has to be a broad-based movement. Bankers and lawyers … this is not about what we do. We all need to get on board.

Getting on-board is a metaphor, of course. On-board what, exactly? Like most of you here, I once lived in a bus. OK, so you didn’t live on a bus, but for many years I lived with the other seven members of my family, not counting the dog, in a bus that had once been used in a tuberculosis-screening program in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. As tuberculosis became less of a threat to the public’s health, the city, and others, sold off its mobile screening units in public bids. My father, ever alert to such events—he once bought a camo-colored car from the U.S. army for exactly $288—put in the winning bid on said bus. He promised us it was only for vacations but before we knew it we were living, all eight of us, in 28 feet of space.

I learned a lot, I now know, from living on the bus. I learned how to get along with my large, diverse family (one of my brothers, if you want to know how diverse, is a pro wrestler. When we travel together in Haiti or Africa, people look at us and ask, “same mother, same father?”). And I learned, eventually, not to be embarrassed by the fact that we, unlike other families, did not live in a house or even a trailer. Yes, the bus taught me a lot.

And so I wind down my address with a quotation about the movement that you, class of 2008, need to support. The bus metaphor is front and center and so too is my plea that you all play some role, however small, in this movement. We may be leaders of this movement but must also be humble participants. Some have not been as quick to see the boundaries and dimensions of this movement. That’s because it’s fluid, as all real social movements are. It’s a chaotic movement, just now coalescing, but with the promise of lessening the hurts and insults of an unequal world. And it demands a little more militancy. I close by citing a new book by Paul Hawken. This book’s called Blessed Unrest:

“It is time for all that is harmful to leave. One million escorts are here to transform the nightmares of empire and the disgrace of war on people and on place. We are the transgressors and we are the forgivers. “We” means all of us, everyone. There can be no green movement unless there is also a black, brown, and copper movement. What is most harmful resides within us, he writes is “the accumulated wounds of the past, the sorrow, shame, deceit, and ignominy shared by every culture, passed down to every person, as surely as DNA, a history of violence and greed. There is no question that the environmental movement is critical to our survival. Our house is literally burning, and it is only logical that environmentalists expect the social justice movement to get on the environmental bus. But it is the other way around; the only way we are going to put out the fire is to get on the social justice bus and heal our wounds, because in the end, there is only one bus.” (p. 190).

Let me close, and send you off to the festivities that await you, your family, and your faculty by violating a rule of graduation speaking. Yes, I will quote, once again, Seamus Heaney, same poem:

Human beings suffer,

they torture one another,

they get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

can fully right a wrong

inflicted or endured.

No poem or play or song or speech can right a wrong inflicted or endured, but a movement can. It is your generation’s job to make hope and history rhyme. It’s a heavy burden, but you can carry it: we know, looking back, what happens to Princeton grads. You’ll become scholars, scientists, physicians, lawyers, and titans of business. You’ll become leaders in politics. Regardless of what it is you do during the next 20 years, you can be part of the movement to make life on this planet safer, more sustainable, and more just.

It’s customary for a graduation speaker to encourage you all to follow your dreams. But I’m not going to do only that. Follow, in addition, a common dream. Make it match your own, which are likely to be realized in any case, and make sure your dreams include healing a wounded world. For more than a century, This university’s motto was “Princeton in the nation's service,” but two decades ago President Hal Shapiro added “and in the service of all nations.”

“All nations” means all people. The inhabitants of our wounded but still wonderful world need you, class of 2008. Make this long hoped-for tidal wave wash away some of the world’s problems, wash clean the wounds, and nourish the planet so that all of its inhabitants have a shot at the sort of marvelous lives that await you. I never thought I’d say this, but here you go: we need to get on the bus. For me, it’s back on the bus, but no matter: it will be a great pleasure to be there with you, sitting in the back as your generation steers through hard but better times. You inspire me more than you know.

Congratulations to all of you and thank you, from the bottom of my orange heart, for including me in the Princeton family and affording me the great privilege of being part of your last days here as students. Thank you all.