UC Santa Cruz Stevenson College Commencement Remarks

By Assemblymember John Laird

June 17, 2007

Thank you for inviting me to speak today.  It is an honor to share one of the great days in the lives of you, your friends and your family.

Until recently, it appeared there might be a picket line around events today.  The union representing UCSC custodians, food service workers and gardeners has been in a two-year long struggle to secure a contract with good wages and benefits.  An agreement was reached, and I congratulate everyone involved and thank them for their work so that today’s events will go ahead as planned.

I could not be more pleased or prouder to be the speaker at the commencement of my own college.  It is hard to believe it’s been thirty-five years since my Stevenson graduation.  There was a traditional Stevenson event for graduates, at which professor Carlos Norena toasted “everything the faculty didn’t know.”  The commuter lounge, called the “Jolly Room,” became the “Stevenson Coffee House” in time for the end of classes.

At the graduation ceremony, which was held in Stevenson’s lower quad just up the hill, we all wore street clothes and the one rebellious protester wore a cap and gown.  As my name was called to walk across for my certificate, a dog emerged from the crowd, and accompanied me across.  Somewhere my mom has a great picture of that dog staring up while my certificate was handed to me.  It seemed to encapsulate that unique UC Santa Cruz combination of academic achievement and casual surroundings.

Academically, I got off to a rocky start. When I turned in my first paper in the Stevenson core course, it came back with a note from the professor: “If there was a point here, I missed it.”  I remember the core course fondly, but—true to our generation—we protested its generic content.  It was even discontinued for a year after our rebellion for retooling.

I was an elected member of the campus-wide student government, and we probably were the only one to ever vote ourselves out of existence.  As members of the Stevenson Student Council, we would begin meetings with a vote to end the Vietnam War that night by 7:45.  There was a Stevenson newspaper titled the “Stevenson Libre” and it was self-published by anyone who thought they had an issue that justified the paper coming out.

Just as an unpopular war hangs over the country now, it was the same then.  We were engaged.  We discovered that draft boards were legally required to respond to any letter they received, so we took over the Stevenson dining hall and sent out thousands of letters with information requests, thinking we’d grind the process to a halt through legal means.

When Cambodia was invaded and that war expanded, seventy-five of us spent two weeks in Washington DC lobbying to change things.  My trip was assisted by the Provost of Stevenson College.  It was a time of great ferment.  It was also a time of great personal and academic growth.  I made great friendships.  Stevenson College will always have a special place in my heart.

I had two specific things I wanted to do today.  The first is to briefly offer some of the advice I wish someone had offered me on that day here at Stevenson when I graduated, but were things that I had to learn for myself.

When we graduated, no one ever told us to take care of ourselves as we embarked on a career, a career for each of you that will likely span thirty-five or forty years.  I spent the first five or six years after graduation working around the clock in two high-powered, challenging jobs.  It was great for my career advancement and professional growth—but I worked many evenings and weekends.  Then I took a year off, cleaned up my Spanish, and took a six-month adventure trip through Central and South America.  From that point forward, I made sure to integrate time off with hard work.  In such a long career, you’ll have plenty of time to be successful.  Make sure you mix in time to take care of yourself as you move along.

I wish someone had told me during my college years to do a complete oral history with my parents and grandparents.  My grandparents passed away during my time in college or in the years just afterward.  As you get older, you will grow to appreciate your heritage and your family’s history.  Right now, you can ask, and there will be people who in your families who have interesting stories and will happily tell them.  My grandmothers overlapped twenty years with their grandmothers—one of whom, as a young girl, traveled hundreds of miles in a wagon to a new frontier.  Others came over from Denmark and Norway in long ship rides with what they could carry. You should ask those who know while you have the chance.  I wish I had.

In that first two years after graduation, I signed on as a congressional assistant and opted out of the retirement program to make some extra money.  Many friends did similar things.  Retirement was three or four decades into the future.  Well, that was a really dumb thing to do.  I have the sad duty to inform you that you will, in fact, get older. You’ll be facing those decisions in the coming weeks and months.  Think about and plan for your future.

Take risks.  Some of the most successful moments in my life have come because I was willing to take a risk.  Being elected mayor of Santa Cruz at a young age.  Taking that six-month trip through the jungles of Central America, and the Andes in South America.  Leading an AIDS service agency in one of the worse times of the epidemic.  Running for the legislature.  Serving as chair of the Assembly Budget Committee.  They all have been stretches; they all presented a ready opportunity to fail, which, at times I did.  But if I hadn’t even tried, I would never have been successful.

Be serious of purpose, but don’t take yourself too seriously.  When I campaigned for the legislature, I often said it was time to send someone to Sacramento who was intentionally funny.  Having a sense of humor will be the best armor for getting through difficult times. Working in the partisan divide of the legislature, I find that it bonds me to some of the people that I otherwise would only have significant differences.  It will make you a real person and respected.   And it will make fun what are some otherwise tedious and dreary situations.

But my other message for today is not a surprise to anyone.  You are moving into a very uncertain world. You are going to have that career of thirty or forty years—and you can’t predict what you will face, but the skills you learned here and your personal values are the best preparation.  I could not have anticipated when I graduated that I would be running an AIDS service agency. We didn’t have any idea AIDS was coming when I graduated.  I didn’t know I would be doing legislation on sea level rise, green buildings or greenhouse gases. 
Climate change wasn’t understood when I graduated.  While I learned
Spanish, and it has served me well, I didn’t know that learning
Chinese or Arabic would be valuable as well.  And I hate to even tell you about what passed for the “computer center” when I attended
Stevenson. I was at a Silicon Valley conference recently where they said that in a few years we will be able to carry a small box next to us that will contain virtually all information known to human kind during all known history.  Imagine what you will face that you can’t understand now.

But there are challenges we do know.  The amount of civic engagement in this state and country has fallen to dangerous levels.  During American history, so many events—whether the Civil War, the second world war, or the struggle for civil rights—were things that most in the country followed and were moved by one way or another.  That isn’t the case today—whether it’s the role of money and negative campaigns in politics, cynicism about national leadership, the complexity of life in this technological age, or the struggle just to survive economically—the level of participation in public life has dropped precipitously. 
This, in a democracy based on your chance to participate and play a role in guiding your future.

Many of the people I attended college with right here are playing significant public roles across the state and country.  My next door neighbor in the Stevenson dorms is a member of Congress.  Diane Griffiths was a great college friend, and broke the glass ceiling for women in the State Capitol as the chief of staff to former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, and just recently became the chief officer for the UC Board of Regents.  Mike Woo and I studied and lived together, and he was elected to the Los Angeles City Council when I was elected to a similar position in Santa Cruz.  And there are countless others working in transportation, child care, teaching, journalism—each making a difference, each drawing on what they learned here.

The challenges we face in California seem intractable. We have the most diverse population in the fifty states—yet our electorate does not reflect who is here, and won’t be close for a number of decades.  As the planet’s climate is threatened in ways that will not be easy to reverse, 65% of Californians get their water from the Sierra snowpack, which is projected to drop by half over the next century.

In California, we will have ten million more people in the next twenty-five years.  The number of seniors will double in that time.  We are spending less per capita on public education than most states—and we are starting to have a shortage of people with college educations.  And many of those who do get college educations have such large amounts of personal debt that it challenges their ability to take a public service job such as teaching—or even consider in their lifetime that they could enter the housing market.  For the first time in recent memory, there’s a worry across society that our standard of living could decline in the next generation.

As daunting as these challenges seem, we have the capability of meeting them. You must use the skills you will be lucky enough to take from Santa Cruz to help others.  You probably complained about having to write so many papers.  You probably were not happy about some of your professors who truly challenged you to look at a new situation or set of problems and analyze your way through it.  But that was the best training for what you are about to face.

I wrote my UCSC undergraduate thesis on the history of water development in California—not understanding I was making a career choice.  I worked for a member of congress who was a leader at the time on delta water issues, I was the lead water policy person on the Santa Cruz City Council, after that I headed up an environmental water committee locally, and now I have successfully authored major state water policy legislation and last session carried the governor’s levee bill.  And I thought I was just trying to find an interesting thesis topic.

You have a similar gift.  Not just that you attended one of the finest research institutions and centers for undergraduate education in the world—but that you get to take the skills and your education into a democracy.  When it comes to leadership, it is easy to think that it’s someone else’s job.  Well, I’m here to tell you it’s yours.

When you look back on your life and career decades from now, you will ask yourself the question about whether you have made this world a better place.  Tomorrow, you will begin to take the steps that will lead to the answer to that question.  Whether it’s mentoring a student, working at a non-profit, galvanizing a community to action, writing a book, protecting your piece of the environment, respecting other’s civil rights—or leading and working cooperatively with others to better the world around you, in fact to save the planet’s climate—you can and must use the gift of a UCSC education to make a difference.

This is your post-graduate assignment and obligation.  And by taking care of yourself, planning for your future, having a good sense of humor, and seeing the world and understanding your own, you’ll be in a good position to spend that extra energy to make this world a better place.  That door is about to open.  And your UCSC door hasn’t quite yet closed.  So today—celebrate your friendships and that spirit of achievement that got you to this ceremony.

On behalf of the people of the state of California: congratulations on your good, hard work and best of luck in your future endeavors.  We’re counting on you.