Graduation Address

Encaenial Address by Dr. Thomas O. Enders (May 1987). (UA Case 67, Box 2)

Your Honour, Mr. Premier, Madame Chancellor, Mr. President, distinguished platform party, Class of ’87, ladies and gentlemen:

I can’t tell you how much it means to me to receive your degree, to graduate with your graduates, to become an alumnus of New Brunswick. I am particularly pleased to share this honour with such outstanding men as Mr. Kent and Dr. Trigger. Down at Wall Street people bring you deals. Half the Class of ‘87is interviewing on how to get into investment banking. But frankly honours are rare these days. Yours is particularly precious.

It is lovely to be back in New Brunswick. I spent four marvelous years in Canada. My job was to try to explain Americans to Canadians, and Canadians to Americans – that is, when they wanted me to, which was most but not all of the time. Inevitably I did a lot of talking, but it was the listening that really mattered.

I found out that we have much the same beliefs and values and instincts and problems. We are friends in the true sense that our relationship has never depended on success in solving problems, but the other way around.

Yet the sensibilities and the solutions and the styles are all subtly different. The U.S. is a mass of clusters; Canada runs like a single shot coast to coast. In the U.S. regional power enters national policy through the Senate. Here every national question almost automatically becomes a question for the provinces. Americans are involved in the whole world, whether they like it or not. Canadian values are everywhere present, your interests more centered. Americans are known for their restlessness, their extroversion. Canadians sometimes describe themselves as more self-contained, although the people who say that obviously don’t know Harrison McCain.

To live here as an outsider is to have a fresh vision of the opportunities and problems all of North America confronts. I found it exhilarating. I came away with the sense of having lived very intensely.

When I graduated the first time I made a speech like this one. It tried to look ahead. What I foresaw was a dangerous world marked by clashes between the democracies and the Communist powers.

It wasn’t a bad prediction, and soon a near disastrous confrontation occurred over Cuba. Others followed, including wars involving either the U.S. or Soviet Union. I had my share of them.

Looking ahead now I’m not so sure that rivalry between super powers will be so pervasive an issue for your generation, for all the enormous power of nuclear weapons. Of course it will go on, perhaps with some big crises still. But Communism has lost much of its power to persuade, the Red Army is seeing its economic base weaken, internal reform has begun, and we’ve learned better how to maintain an equilibrium. In the next thirty years the Cold War will wane.

Rather I see the dominant experience as being world-wide competition. I mean by that not only economic competition, although Japan and Korea and Germany and some developing countries will provide plenty of that. But also competition in standards of knowledge, in taste and civilization, in ability to make society work harmoniously.

The United States and Canada have formidable qualities for that competition, not only or not mainly our relative physical security and this vast and beautiful continent. Our federative systems and the values they embody make the diffusion of power in society, the greatest scope for individual initiative, the involvements of a maximum number of persons in creative effort, the most potential for social change. We have cultures that are uniquely conducive to entrepreneurship.

Nor are our rivals without flaws. Europeans work only 1,600 or 1,700 hours a year, against our 2,200. Japan will have the oldest population in the world at this start of the 21^st century. Korea and Taiwan and other developing countries are threatened by political instability.

But both of us also have weaknesses. We are easily improvident, spending much and saving little. In our respect for the individual and our fascination with the personal, we sometime neglect communal values. As fewer of us form enduring families, we are coming to lack what was once the most effective instrument of education. In our worst moments we surpass all others in self-indulgence.

Now my experience is that while a lot of people say they relish competition, few actually do. In my own country most of the talk is about restoring U.S. competitiveness, which usually turns out to be talk about trade barriers.

We tried that before – in the 1930’s – and it gave us a world-wide depression. It won’t work now any more than it did then.

That is why the attempt to negotiate free trade between Canada and the U.S. is so important, no matter how tough the odds that the initiative will go all the way through the gauntlet of negotiations between the executives and debate in the two parliaments, no matter how great the problems and adjustments each country must face up to, for in effect, both countries are saying: There is no alternative to becoming more competitive, and the way to start is by learning how to better compete within the North American market. This is the trial run for what will be a main event of our future.

I now see that what I left out of my speech thirty years ago was probably the most important thing: Character, maybe we took it for granted, but character matters. I say that not only in relation to what has recently happened in my own country in Wall Street, in the executive branch of government, in political campaigning, in churches – although there’s ground enough, su8ddently the country seems awash with con men, chiselers, phonies, and Fifth Amendment patriots.

But there’s a larger point, as both of our societies have tried and then gradually pulled back from ambitious efforts to use government programs, regulations and laws, to right wrongs, protect the weak, build the city upon the hill, the role of the individual has once again grown. We have rejoiced in that, sure of the release of creative energies it would bring.

In one way there has been a comparable release in moral energies. In the United States, at least, perhaps never have so many people been so passionately interested in defining moral standards for others. People who defend to the death the right of entrepreneurs to be free of government regulation, want to use the power of this state to require prayer in schools. Media – of all people – set themselves up as the judges of candidates’ martial fidelity.

By character, I mean not so much what standards we insist on in others, but what we require of ourselves. The self-reliant men and women without whom these enormous, complex societies cannot work, must be able to judge well the effects of their acts on others. Some of my friends say that we should make a major effort at developing ethics programs at schools and universities. That can’t be wrong. But if you find yourself wandering around with a satchel of money, or having to lie about your actions, or breaking trust, most people won’t have had to have been to a course to know what they are up to. The problem for us is to convince a people tempted by cynicism of just how destructive such actions are.

When my grandmother got married, Mark Twain made a motto for her that went “Live, so that when you come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry.” That hardly can serve as a guide for all the difficult choices that crowd in on us. But it puts the focus where it must be.

You cannot have a good society, only with good laws and good governance. You must have good men and women.

Your country and mine share a continent, and many experiences. But Canada has its own, exceptional destiny. As I drove over from Saint John yesterday and looked at the green haze on those rounded hills – a second spring for someone like me who lives south – I couldn’t help thinking that in this country all the promise of the new world is still intact. For all the problems no one has a better chance to build the good society than you.

I congratulate you and I salute you and I wish you the best of lives.