David J. Steinberg, President, Long Island University
Commencement Address - May 8, 2005
C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University

William Butler Yeats once wrote that “education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”  The challenge for you and for us has been to inculcate within each of you a passion for learning, a willingness to explore new ideas, in Tennyson’s words, a “yearning in desire to follow knowledge like a sinking star…”

The basic service that this (or any) University “sells” is the academic credit, a discrete unit of knowledge delivered by teacher to student.  Obviously, credits get added together, usually at a rate of three per course, 36 to 48 for a major, 128 to earn a BA, and 24 to 48 for a Master’s degree.  You, our graduating students, have contracted with us to provide you with those credits, usually discounted by scholarship support, occasionally purchased by you at list price.  We, in turn, supply learning environment, including the infrastructure, library, computer networks, and, vitally, we hire the faculty to deliver those credits to you, hopefully communicated with energy and creativity, humor and a passion for learning.

Credits and grades are important, but superficial, measures of something much more profound; an elusive dynamic that is often prosaic called “knowledge transfer.”  The Professor, a master of a specific corpus of knowledge, has the daunting task of communicating and transmitting this material -- known in our trade as the syllabus -- and you, our students, face the equally substantial challenge of growing intellectually as you internalize this knowledge.  If we do our part skillfully, in the process you also expand your general capacity to think and articulate clearly, to be more sensitive to the world around you, and to gain a deepening understanding of yourself.  Each of you, now earning your degree, has individually navigated this collective process.  Today we certify that passage by conferring upon you an appropriately coveted degree.

There is the potential of a profound life experience -- sometimes realized, sometimes lost -- each and every time knowledge is transferred.  This spring I am conferring approximately 2400 degrees across our University system, about half of which are undergraduates.  The sum total of all the credits subsumed in all of these degrees is approximately 183,000.  Now with a number that large you might think that an academic credit is a routinized product like a widget.  But in each case, there is a wondrous explosive energy unleashed as knowledge is transferred from one generation to the next, from one individual to another.

Let me ask each of you to recall for a moment the very best course you took while pursuing your degree.  Has the knowledge you attained changed what you will do with your life?  Has it enriched your ability to think?  To love?  To appreciate that which is beautiful?  Have you learned a new way to see the reality of the human condition?  Did you perfect a skill-set, or find a central serenity or achieve a new self-awareness?  Like an electric current that arcs through space, each of these credits leaves its imprint on your mind and your soul, enhancing the eternal dream that the next generation can and will improve our world, can and will achieve a new dimension of understanding, a new sense of beauty, in sum, a world perfected by reason and humanity.

Over the two decades of my college presidency, I keep coming back to the primal tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, in Christian theology, the source of “original sin.”  What was that sin?  It was obviously Eve’s and then Adam’s disobeying of God’s warning not to “eat from the forbidden fruit.”  But what was that fruit and why was it forbidden?  It was not a Granny Smith of greed or a Delicious of gluttony or a Macintosh of malice or any of the Seven Deadly sins.  It was access to the capacity to think independently, to discern good from evil, to be aware of the contradictions of our imperfect world.  The eating of the forbidden fruit by Adam and Eve was the gaining of the very knowledge and understanding we celebrate by conferring upon you your degrees today.  And that apple is not solely frozen in some 16th century painting.  Remember that Apple Computer’s logo is a bitten apple.  The knowledge you have acquired here at Long Island University is both empowering and humbling, because it also reveals how much you still do not know.  Each of us, at best, can see through a glass darkly.  Thus, as you have gained knowledge and understanding, you have also earned your full lot of uncertainty, anxiety, frustration and doubt.  And that is at the core of the existential dilemma of living.

It is in the very fullness of that complex truth that I am privileged to be the one who now welcomes you into the fellowship of educated men and women.  Let me conclude, as I do every commencement, by sharing with you the wisdom of that post-modernist inter-galactic philosopher, Yoda.  His injunction is one you will need:  “May the force be with you.”