Elizabeth Cousens '87 gave this year's commencement address. A Rhodes Scholar and Vice President of the International Peace Academy, her speech was reprinted in full in Sunday's News Tribune. An excerpt:
"Let me start with a confession. When I was sitting where you are, at that time planning to head to Oxford University for graduate school, I didn’t begin to know what I wanted to do with my life.
I knew what I was interested in – politics, negotiation, the interplay between values and interests. I knew what grabbed me – anything international. And I knew a few things that made me angry – willful ignorance, hypocrisy, cruelty. I also knew that I had been fortunate enough to receive an exceptional education, and that it would somehow inform the choices I would make, but I wasn’t at all sure how.
Twenty years ago, we were also at what would soon become clear were the dwindling days of the Cold War, though we didn’t know it at the time. (Remember the Cold War?) People are now rather distressingly nostalgic about its stability, but it was an era with its own contradictions, its own uneasy reconciliation between principle and power, its own demonstrations of courage alongside bad faith, its own perils, its own possibilities."
Read the whole text here.
