Thursday, May 27, 1999 Remarks by
William R. Brody, President
The Johns Hopkins University Good morning. To our honorary degree recipients and our new members of
the Society of Scholars, to our Trustees and alumni, our
faculty and staff, to our parents, family members and
friends, but most of all, to our brand new graduates, I
offer greetings on behalf of all of Johns Hopkins
University. I had an interesting conversation recently with the
president of a prestigious and well-known northeastern
university. It seems at the last minute this president was
notified that his commencement speaker would have to
cancel. There was literally no time to find a replacement,
so with some fear and trepidation, he stood before the
graduating class and announced, "I regret today we shall
have no commencement speaker." He received a spontaneous standing ovation. "And it went on for five minutes," he said to me. Oh, I said, but at my university I am the commencement
speaker. Oh, he said. Good luck. With that thought in mind I will stay close to the kindly
advice once offered to me by the president of my own alma
mater: Be upbeat if you can, profound if you must, but
above all be brief. First of all, let me convey my congratulations to the
students who have worked so hard to arrive at this day; to
their parents, families and friends who have supported them
on their long journey; to the faculty who have taught and
mentored them, and to the Trustees who have shepherded the
resources and provided the stewardship that enabled our
students to learn and discover new knowledge at Johns
Hopkins. This is a glorious day for us all. My brief message today is based upon some homespun advice I
heard recently. Advice that I think has universal appeal. Jerry Schnydman is the former director of the Hopkins
Alumni Association and now secretary to the Board of
Trustees. A Hopkins graduate himself, Jerry first became a
presence on this campus as an undergraduate in the 1960s,
when he twice earned All-America honors on the lacrosse
field and helped lead the Blue Jays to a national
championship in 1967. Since then, he has continued to be a
friend, guide, mentor and role model to succeeding
generations of students. Recently Jerry talked about the five rules of life he had
been raised with. These rules came from Florence Schnydman,
and as such they might have been known as Flo's Rules. But
being as Flo Schnydman was Jerry Schnydman's mother, they
were known instead to Jerry as Flo's Five Commandments. They're a simple list, really. The first says, "Good
manners never go out of style." The second, "Never go to
someone's house empty-handed." Number three: "You can't buy
a good name, you earn it." Four, "Give respect — get
respect." And finally, number five, "Bring home a winner." It's a common sense guide to courteous behavior, a handy
packet of ready-made rules to win friends, gain respect and
achieve success. In short, it is just the sort of sage
advice any mother would want to offer her children. And like most advice we get from our parents — especially
common sense advice — Flo's Five Commandments are
wonderful to recite, and all too easy to ignore. After all,
in our mothers' words, common sense is the thing that most
often "goes in one ear and out the other." They can be ignored, I should say, until one day we have
children of our own. Then the clear need and compelling
logic of Flo's Commandments suddenly shine forth. Common sense has a way of doing that. It's the most
fundamental learning we do, the simple things we get at our
parent's knee. Maybe that's why we're so quick to dismiss
it. It is after all, simple stuff, and it often seems
commonplace, drab and ordinary against the alluring glitter
of the ambiguous and complex. Common sense is common; you don't need to be a rocket
scientist to have it, or use it, or offer it to others. In
fact, there is a long-standing suspicion in our society
that our rocket scientists, literary theorists, medical
doctors, Ph.D. recipients and advanced learners of every
stripe actually have less common sense than their friends
and neighbors who lack such high-powered credentials. Said
one 19th century American after an encounter with an Oxford
don: "From such as I could see, he'd had the common sense
educated clean out of 'em." Perhaps this was so. We've all heard stories of the famous
mathematician who arrived at work in mismatched shoes, or
the absent-minded professor who found his ham sandwich on
the dissecting board and wondered what became of that frog.
In the popular imagination the brain is an either/or
receptacle: as it fills with advanced and esoteric
learning, common sense seems to slip between the
convolutions of the cerebrum and disappear forever. Of course we all know that a lack of common sense is hardly
unique to the educated classes. Said Voltaire: "Common
sense is not so common." Rare it may be. It is, nevertheless, essential in a self-
governing society such as ours. We rely on the common sense
of the people as a breakwater against the riptides of
hysteria that periodically surge across our newspapers and
out our television screens. Events of recent times offer
ample evidence of the modern media's tendency toward
hysteria. The fact we have come through them all relatively
unscathed tells us something about the reservoir of good
common sense that continues to reside within the populace
as a whole. For all that, common sense is a characteristic more often
bemoaned for its absence than celebrated for its abundance.
Call it the paradox of diminishing common sense returns. We
can observe that the amount of common sense perceived is
directly inverse to the distance between the parties
involved. Ask any and all about common sense and they will admit it
is a virtue they themselves possess. But, they will
candidly tell you, common sense is something their family
members and neighbors often fail to employ; something that
society in general seems to have lost; and something
judges, juries and the political class as a whole never had
to begin with. "Nothing astonishes men so much as common
sense," wrote Emerson, by which, presumably, he meant the
discovery of common sense in others. Yet undeniably, common sense serves its owner well. I am
reminded of the many anecdotes of the Nobel laureate
Richard Feynmann. Though he is best known for his
contributions to theoretical physics, it is his practical
side that serves to point out the power of common sense. Once Feynmann accompanied his wife on a tour of Incan ruins
in Mexico. When he inquired about the basis on which the
hieroglyphics on the wall were translated, he received an
erudite, but very complicated explanation. Everyone in the
tour group nodded in agreement — everyone, that is, except
Feynmann, who believed that such a complex explanation
offended common sense. Feynmann went home to Caltech and worked out a new theory
for the translation of the hieroglyphics — a theory that is
universally accepted and used today. It turns out that the
complex explanation was just that — complex — but
wrong! This morning it is my privilege to stand before the largest
and most accomplished group of graduates Johns Hopkins has
ever produced. Any university in the world would be proud
to claim you as its own. That you have done this much
already in your lives promises that even greater things are
yet to come. But today as we celebrate advanced academic achievement,
let us take just a moment to tip our hats to the enduring
power of those lessons learned not in classrooms and
textbooks, but in our families, among our friends, and
sometimes through hard painful experience. "Science is a
first-rate piece of furniture for your upper chamber," said
the eminently practical Oliver Wendell Holmes, "so long as
you have common sense on the ground floor." Flo, you see, was right: good manners never do go out of
style. And if you show up at someone's house, no one will
think you anything but worldly-wise if there are flowers,
or a box of chocolates in your hands. Your good name was
your parents' gift, and you have to earn it anew every day.
No team of lawyers or pot of money will ever do it for you.
The tragedy of our day exemplified by recent events in
Colorado and Georgia schools is young men mistaking fear
for respect and thinking it is something that can be
produced at the end of a gun barrel. Flo would tell them
that the people who win respect are ones who start by
respecting other people. To that rule I would add the sage advice of the famous
physicist and former president of MIT, Dr. Karl Taylor
Compton, who advised students to "leave each campsite in
better condition than when they encountered it." And then we get to Flo's Fifth Commandment, "Bring home a
winner." That one had me a little puzzled, because it
sounds like Florence was telling her son to marry well. So
I asked Jerry if that's what it meant. Jerry said, "I did marry well! What mother would tell her
child to do anything else?" But what it means, he
explained, is to come home a winner — that is, bring
yourself home as a winner. It means that you should work as
hard as you can and be successful at whatever you are
doing. Parents and families and friends of our graduates: today I
am addressing a group of people who have done just that.
They have devoted their hearts and souls and minds to this
task. It wasn't easy, they had no guarantee of success. But
they had faith, and determination, and grit, and — thanks
to you — good common sense. Today they're coming home
winners. And what a happy day this is for us all! Congratulations graduates. May you all fare well on the
journey ahead. Thank you, and godspeed. | 
