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NCAA President Myles Brand Speaks about Morality at Oglethorpe
Commencement
Myles Brand, president of NCAA, spoke at Oglethorpe University's
2003 commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 10, 2003, on the
Academic Quadrangle. Approximately 300 students received degrees.
Brand delivered the commencement address, "Making a Moral
Difference," and was presented with an honorary Doctor of Letters
degree.
The first university president to be named president of the NCAA,
Myles Brand began his presidency of the National Collegiate Athletic
Association on January 1, 2003, after serving as president of
Indiana University for eight years. While at Indiana he became a
prominent figure in the press when he terminated the contract of
Bobby Knight as the basketball coach. He also oversaw the largest
single privatization effort in Indiana history, the consolidation of
the IU Medical Center Hospitals and Methodist Hospital to form
Clarian Health.
Brand holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of
Rochester and has held teaching and leadership positions at
University of Pittsburgh, University of Illinois-Chicago, University
of Arizona, and Ohio State University. Brand also served as
president of University of Oregon from 1989 to 1994.
Oglethorpe University Commencement
May 10, 2003
"Making a Moral Difference"
Thank you President Large, and thank you for the invitation to be
with you today at Oglethorpe University for this commencement.
My sincere congratulations to each of you, graduates of the 2003
class of Oglethorpe. You have worked hard and diligently to arrive
at this moment, and you deserve to feel a genuine sense of
accomplishment. So too should your parents, relatives and friends.
For their support and encouragement have helped make this day
possible for you. This is a good day for all, one you will long
remember.
As a former university president, I am always eager to visit with
students and to share the experience of the academy. In the
presence of faculty, administrators and students, I am invariably
invigorated by the learning process that takes place on campus. And
each spring, it is encouraging to see students in institutions of
higher education across the country commence the next stage of their
lives.
So too, do you today.
My own education is in philosophy, and I have been a professor of
philosophy for almost four decades. So, those of you who have taken
philosophy courses here at Oglethorpe will know that as a
philosopher, I am also always eager to expound upon nearly any
topic…and with as much obscurity as possible. A philosopher, you
know, is someone who talks about something he does not understand,
and makes you think it is your fault. Or as the Roman philosopher
and statesman Cicero noted, "There is no opinion so absurd that some
philosopher will not express it."
Well, today I will try to be neither obscure nor absurd as I talk
about your new role…citizen of the world. As you begin this new
role, I have a message for you that is vital to your future
happiness, and even more importantly, the happiness of those with
whom you will meet, work and love throughout your life.
The message is simple but powerful: treat others with respect and
compassion, as you yourself would like to be treated. It is
old-fashioned, but it could not be more relevant.
You have been well prepared for your new role, both here at
Oglethorpe and by your families. You have a world-class education
that empowers you for the future. You are equipped with the tools
to extract knowledge from a geometrically growing database of
information and the skills to use the knowledge in an increasingly
large variety of ways. You are the most technologically
sophisticated generation to walk onto the world stage in the history
of man, with the potential for developing cutting-edge information
extraction that will regenerate itself many times over in your
lifetime. But you are entering a different world than I entered when
I graduated. The world you enter is the world of Enron, Tyco and
WorldCom. It is a world where tensions erupt between cultures in
ways that threatens regional and even world peace. It is a world in
which the technology that delivers knowledge to the doorstep of the
most remote also provides the tools to manipulate the truth.
The challenge for you, then, is to discern among what you have
been taught, what the world presents to you as instruments of change
and what thought and logic you apply to ensure that civilization is
advanced, rather than neglected or retarded. The challenge for you
is not to sit by in solipsistic silence but to make a difference…a
moral difference.
Jane Addams, the great American agent of social change in the
early 20th century put it this way. She said, "To attain individual
morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on
the results of personal effort when the time demands social
adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation."
I have spent my entire professional life – until a few months ago
– in the world of academia…as a student, a teacher, an academic
dean, and for the past 15 years as president of two major
universities. More than a few associates, reporters and even friends
have asked me over the last four-and-a-half months why I was
interested in assuming the presidency of the NCAA. The answer is
really quite simple. I like what college sports – and sports at all
levels – stand for. The concepts of teamwork, fair play, personal
discipline, learning how to lose – and to win – with grace, and a
steadfast commitment to excellence lie at the care of amateur
athletics, from recreational sports to the highly visible basketball
and football championship games.
I offer to you college athletics as a model social change agent
for making a moral difference – where the inherent values of sports
serve as a catalyst for improvement of the human condition. There is
significant evidence that sports has played a vital role in
developing leaders for the nation and world, in undertaking vital
projects of social responsibility and in fostering civic
accountability.
Since 1967, the NCAA has annually honored men and women who are
former student-athletes and who have made important contributions to
their profession and society. This group includes former United
States Presidents, members of Congress, world-renowned doctors,
international business leaders, entertainers, judges, statesmen and
educators. What is it about athletics participation that helped
inspire these individuals to greatness and life-long achievement?
If you ask them, they will likely respond with a variety of answers,
but all based on the values I mentioned earlier. Author Rita Mae
Brown may have summed it up best in her 1983 book Sudden Death. She
said, "Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of
character shine through."
Allow me to cite just a couple of examples of how sports have
been an agent for change. Race relations within the United States
have been addressed in a number of ways, but none more powerfully
than through sports. Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color
barrier in professional baseball was a significant moment and had
great impact on how America viewed people of color. That moment was
made part of the American fabric on a localized basis through
intercollegiate athletics as teams became integrated – particularly
in regions of the country where Black men and women struggled to
even be admitted to the university, much less have the opportunity
to participate in athletics with other student-athletes. Clearly,
intercollegiate athletics was a catalyst for social change as
African-American men and women gained access to higher education
through the agency of college sports.
Another example of how college sports has been an agent for
change is the story of Title IX, the 1972 Civil Rights legislation
mandating equal opportunity for men and women in higher education.
This is the REAL field-of-dreams story. If you build it, they will
come. If you provide athletics participation opportunities, the
interest in women to participate will grow. Thirty years ago, there
were fewer than 30,000 young women playing in college sports.
Today, that number has grown by five-fold to nearly 150,000.
But the genuinely important contribution Title IX has made
through college sports is the change athletics participation has
made in the lives of the young women who have benefited from its
values. When we look back now at the days before Title IX, when
conventional wisdom led us to believe that girls and women simply
were not as interested or capable in sports as boys and men, we
wonder what they must have been thinking. If we thought sports
could bring value to the lives of young boys, how could we not have
thought it would do the same for young girls? Where did we think
they were going to gain the self-confidence, the discipline to
purpose, the sense of team, and the appreciation for personal best
that comes with athletic competition?
These are just two examples of how intercollegiate athletics and
those involved in the enterprise have used the values they learned
to make a moral difference.
The socialist and supporter of women's suffrage, Mary Heaton
Vorse, characterized it this way in her book "A Footnote to Folly."
She said, "When a new idea assaults the power of established
authority, authority always screams out that morality has been
affronted. It makes no difference if this idea is that the world is
round or that women should vote or that the workers should control
industry."
What are the moral rules that should dominate your behavior in
whatever field of endeavor you choose? The most cynical would argue
that do whatever you need to do to succeed. This is bad pragmatic
advice, as those involved in Enron and similar recent business
scandals have proven. But worst, this conduct undercuts the moral
stance, which is to promote the ability of spiritually healthy and
intellectually vital people to work together in harmonious
relationships.
The 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant's categorical
imperative, which commands us to treat other people as ends, rather
than as means, is the best bedrock ethic for how we ought to conduct
our lives. It is remarkably like the golden role. I find it
fascinating that nearly every culture and religion has a similar
version. For a Taoist, the ultimate ethos for relationships sounds
like this: "View your neighbor's grain as your own grain, and your
neighbor's loss as your own loss." For a Muslim, it sounds like
this: "Let none of you treat his brother in a way he himself should
not like to be treated. No one of you is a believer until he loves
for his brother what he loves for himself.
All of these formulations have the same effect. They help us
cultivate a moral imagination; they help us reflect on the
consequences of our actions. In the worlds of the great blues man
Brownie McGhee, "if there is one thing/that I know for sure/it is
that you're going to reap/just what it is that you sow." Each of you
has unbounded potential, more opportunities than you ever dreamed
about. You are the next doctors and lawyers, statesmen and business
executives. You are the next generation of community and national
leaders. Perhaps some of you will be philosophers. If so, you will
join that curious group of individuals of whom the Canadian poet and
author Robert Zend wrote, "Being a philosopher, I have a problem for
every solution."
Finally, I wish you well as you commence your new role as
citizens of the world. As you reflect on this most special day, I
ask but one thing of you – that you remember this simple message:
threat others with respect and compassion, as you yourself would
like to be treated. In doing so, you will make a moral difference.
You are an inspiring group of individuals. Now, inspire others.
Good luck to each and every member of the 2003 graduating class
of Oglethorpe University.
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