Brokaw Anchors Class Day Speech

By Andrea Early

Special to the Gazette

It took nearly four decades, but NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw finally made it into Harvard last Wednesday -- at the invitation of the Class of '96.

Thirty-eight years after his application for admission was declined, Brokaw faced a filled-to-capacity Tercentenary Theatre last week and delivered the Class Day address to a joyful pre-Commencement crowd.

Brokaw opened his remarks on a humorous note with the story of his Harvard rejection and an overly dramatized, presumably fictitious account of the 40 years following that fateful moment.

"I wandered that cold, hard place reserved for those who have no Harvard degree," said Brokaw. Then he told the audience that he'd met Bill Gates along the way. "He was empathetic," said Brokaw. "He told me he'd been admitted to Harvard but he dropped out his sophomore year. If he had earned a Harvard degree who knows how much he'd be worth now," Brokaw said.

As he warmed up his audience, Brokaw took a moment to barb The Harvard Crimson, which had referred to him in one of its stories as a "quasi-intellectual." "That's something the people at the Crimson would know about," he said.

Moments later, the newsman got down to more serious business.

In his deep NBC News voice, Brokaw recapped the astounding things he'd seen in the 20th century: Vietnam, Elvis, the Beatles, the assassination of one president, the resignation of another, the fall of communism, women's rights.

Then he prepared the graduates for things to come.

"The sound you hear is a new century coming fast with changes and challenges not yet imagined," said Brokaw. "It's yours to shape and master," he told the graduates.

In a speech that Dean Archie C. Epps gave high marks, Brokaw warned the graduates to use technology carefully and cautioned against substituting virtual experiences for the real thing. He also urged the graduates to maintain the framework of American society, and to consider a legacy based on "leading the nation out of its racial quagmire."

"We're doing better," said Brokaw, who said he'd grown up in Apartheid America. "We now have the laws of the land, the richer tapestry of ethnic achievement and prominence, and people on all sides of the racial dynamic," he said.

But Brokaw pushed the students not to allow racism -- "either in the form of bigotry or excessive ethnic pride" -- to continue at its current rate. "It requires that most basic and yet most elusive human condition: an open heart and mind," he said.

Brokaw acknowledged that to solve racism everyone would have to work together. He offered that if tolerance and working toward common welfare are not encouraged, it will lead society to its lowest common denominators.

In a point some might have found ironic, one of the low points Brokaw warned against was television -- and "America's fascination with celebrity. We seem to be caught in a cycle of easy and cheap distractions," he said. "A moment in the spotlight of television is life itself for dysfunctional families willing to share their sordid secrets on daytime television," he said. Brokaw also warned that producers and editors themselves should not be tempted by "titillation over intellectual provocation."

Brokaw offered up other troubled American institutions to the graduates as well. "Family, faith, community, responsibility, and accountability are the traditional framework of our society, and they are in desperate need of repair," he said. Then he urged the students to be mindful of the next presidential election and not to take the free choice it represents lightly. "There is no greater symbol of what has been achieved over the last 50 years," he said. "We cannot abandon this process to the manipulators of media and image," he said.

In a more personal display than his television persona often permits, Brokaw spoke of gender issues. "There will be no richer life than the one that you lead together with common values and common respect for each gender's special qualities," he said as he encouraged the male graduates to look at the women beside them. "You should come to know their world," he said. Then he spoke of the daily and lifetime commitments that both men and women must make to becoming a mother or a father.

In closing his comments, Brokaw gave the Class of '96 something to aspire to. As the audience sat soaking up the sun, he shared with them the achievements of the triumphant Americans who came home from the war in 1946 to pick up their lives where they'd left off. "They saved their world. They came home and they built the America we know today," he said. "They kept the peace. They went to college in historic proportions and married and had families," he said. Then Brokaw listed universities, and highway systems, integration, and the discovery of new cures as the legacies the postwar Americans left to the next generation.

"Fifty years from now let another Class Day speaker stand here and say of your generation: 'They saved their world. I am in awe of them,' " he said.

Although Brokaw's commitment to the Nightly News required him to leave before the ceremony's closing rendition of "Fair Harvard," Brokaw seemed to enjoy delivering his address.

Dean Epps, Brokaw's escort for the opening procession, was equally happy with the speech. "It was an excellent speech, it was of a very high standard," said Epps. "I think he's right on with the challenge of the race issue," he said.

The students, too, seemed impressed. "It was extremely moving, I finally feel like I'm graduating after that," said Natalee Campbell '96, a chemistry concentrator.

In the midst of the dispersing crowd of graduates, one had to wonder. If Dean Epps and the Class of '96 had been running the admissions office 38 years ago, who knows how much Tom Brokow would be worth now.