Graduation 2008

Graduation Welcome Remarks
Thomas B. Coburn
President, Naropa University
May 10, 2008

The greatest honor that comes to me each year as president of Naropa University is to extend this welcome to our graduation ceremony. It is an honor because I know what a tremendous, collaborative effort it has required to get each of you, today's graduates, to this point in your lives. You have done wonderful, transformative work with us, and just as you have grown over the years, so you have helped us grow, as individual faculty and staff members, and as an institution. So my first words of welcome are intertwined with words of thanks for all that you-today's graduates-have done and been during your years with us. Let me be the first-along with the others assembled here today who are not students-to salute you and offer our collective congratulations.

My second words of welcome go to the parents, spouses, partners, children, other family members, and friends of today's graduates. One of the fundamental principles of Naropa's signature activity of contemplative education is the interdependence of all beings, and nowhere is the truth of that principle more apparent than in the collaboration that has been involved in getting today's graduates to this point in their lives. You parents, partners, friends and others have shaped today's graduates with your nurturance and care for years, often long before they arrived at our doors. During their years with us you have continued that nurturance in ways best known to each of you-emotionally, spiritually, financially. So I'd like us to pause now to appreciate how you, too, share in the accomplishments of today's graduates, sometimes vicariously, and sometimes much more directly. And, graduates, please join me in thanking your collaborators in your great accomplishment.

Finally, a welcome to Naropa's faculty and staff. You are the agents of the growth that has become so apparent in today's graduates. You are the ones that today's graduates will remember in the weeks and years ahead. Sometimes those memories will occur in obvious ways, as students recollect particular episodes in their learning: specific classes, particular transforming assignments, a sudden break-through conversation. But often those memories will emerge more gradually, occasioned by the ripening of seeds you faculty have planted, often without your students knowing it themselves, seeds that will take 15 or 20 years to come to fruition. Some will then blossom, often in a sudden eruption, as that mysterious link that forever binds student and teacher comes freshly into view. When you, today's graduates, have such memories, please smile and drop your teacher a note or an e-mail or a flower. It's a precious way of reanimating the explicit and implicit bonds that already exist between you. These communications from former students mean far more to those of us who teach than you can ever imagine. And right now, graduates, please join me in thanking this remarkable faculty and staff.

Beyond these words of welcome, I will say only one further thing. It is a brief reflection on the implications of what has happened to you graduates during your years at Naropa-and what it implies for the life you will live in the years ahead. The most obvious quality of that education, of course, is its contemplative nature, the disciplined cultivation of inner space that each of you knows so well. But I think something else has been going on here as well. I would call it "leadership," except for the inadequacy of our inherited and stereotyped ways of thinking about leaders and leadership. Conventionally, I think, we envision a leader as some extravert individualist hero, who charismatically rallies his, or her, passive followers into accomplishing some challenging, even herculean task. But just as Naropa University urges us on to a larger, more wholistic understanding of education, so, too, a Naropa education is inviting us into a more visionary kind of leadership, a more fluid and agile way of being in the world, a way that is participatory and collaborative and more organic rather than traditional, hierarchical notions of leadership. As you, today's graduates, continue to embody the way of being in the world that you have learned at Naropa, I would urge you to remain open to the prospect that some day you will find yourself leading something, even if right now that is the furthest thing from your mind. You may find yourself cast in the role of leader in spite of yourself.

My reason for making this is claim is, first, a function of having attended last week's first student leadership dinner, organized by Naropa's Student Affairs office. It was a characteristically Naropa occasion in that the dozens of students who were present said-"Please, no speeches from faculty and staff. We simply want to tell our own stories to each other"-thus manifesting Naropa's characteristic skepticism about all external sources of authority! And what stories the students then told-wide-ranging, filled with wisdom and compassion. If anyone ever thought that "contemplative" means passive or reclusive or acquiescent, the testimony at that dinner provided a dramatic corrective. These stories brought new life to what we learned a couple of years ago in a mapping project of student volunteerism, namely, that Naropa students give a total of 41 thousand hours annually to the local community in volunteerism, internships, and community service projects. In surveys of young people nationwide, Naropa students are far in excess of the national average on these matters.

But is this actually what we would call "leadership?" This is a question I had the opportunity to explore with others recently in a retreat convened by the Fetzer Institute, a non-profit organization devoted to "fostering awareness of the power of love and forgiveness in the emerging global community." The retreat brought together scholars of leadership and a dozen individuals who had done a great range of transformative work in South Africa, Hawaii, and throughout North America. The emerging consensus was that "stewardship" was a better word to describe what these individuals had accomplished than "leadership," because it captured a more dialectical relationship between these individuals and their human, socio-cultural, and natural environment. It was often inspired by or produced poetry. There was also a ready appreciation of the larger than semantic connection between being "responsive" and being "responsible." There was recognition that an awareness of this sense of obligation often emerged locally and quite circumstantially, sometimes even accidentally, when someone became aware of the gap between what is and what might be-and, when no one else stepped forward, that someone felt impelled or drawn to step into the gap, into that in-between space.

Naropa graduates, of course, know a great deal about inhabiting in-between spaces, between East and West, between head and heart, intellect and intuition, between teacher and student, cognition and emotion, outer world and inner world, in-breath and out-breath. You are, I suggest, predisposed to be aware of these gaps between the world as you find it and the promise that lies within it, to be realized in the world you can imagine. You are uncommonly alert to the potential for transformation that lies all around us. It is not accidental that in his famous study of what makes for successful leadership in the world of business and elsewhere, Good to Great, Jim Collins wrote: "We were surprised, shocked really, to discover the type of leadership required for turning a good organization into a great one. Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders appear to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy-these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar."

I do not want to suggest, of course, that all Naropa graduates are shy and self-effacing, quiet and reserved! (But, in marveling at our students I sometimes loving wonder about an occasional Martian origin.) But I would suggest that you all are inclined to be alert to the places where the world and our fellow inhabitants cry out for help-often very, very faintly-such as in Myanmar today-or in the earth's own cry for kinder treatment at our human hands. I suggest that you are predisposed to step forward to lend that aid, whether we call that an inclination to stewardship or to leadership.

Let me close with a wonderful image of how I think you graduates have gotten to this point and what it portends for your future lives. I borrow it from a fellow scholar of religion, Kathleen Erndl, who concludes her wonderful study of an illiterate charismatic healer in rural India by addressing the age-old question of nature and nurture. Did this remarkable figure get her skills from a genetic predisposition toward healing, from her DNA? Or was this a function of the social forces that played on her throughout her life? Both solutions, Erndl suggests, are too simple. Rather she suggests that brilliant, transforming leadership comes about the same way a lump of coal is transformed by geological processes into something as rare and wonderful as a diamond. It is the complex interplay of an individual's latent gifts with the forces that play upon him or her that produce diamond-like brilliance. Coal, responding to pressure, becomes diamond. Those of you who graduate today have, I suggest, been subjected to similar transformative forces in the course of your education, which is why you sparkle here today-diamonds, no longer in the rough. May you take that radiance and, as stewards and leaders, bring it to the pressure-points of a world that has never needed you more. My own hope for the human future is a little bit brighter today by virtue of knowing you and knowing you are part of that future.

Congratulations, and Godspeed!