Presidential goodbye

IU President Adam Herbert, this year's commencement speaker, doesn't remember who spoke at either his undergraduate or his graduate commencement, much less what they said. \n"To be honest, my memory doesn't go back to 1966, so I can't really remember," he said.\nHerbert said one of the things he's learned during his long career in academics is that his audience might recall two or three ideas from his address Saturday, but the day is primarily one of celebration.\n"I will try to say something that I think is reasonably profound but I don't expect that folks are going to recall what I said 40 years from now," Herbert said. "Although I'll sure try."\nAt least his message to IU graduates will be unique and intimate. \nIU Alumni Association President Ken Beckley suggested that Herbert deliver this year's commencement speech, bypassing the conventional speaker search process. Beckley said he thought Herbert could offer graduates a message and attention that no other speaker could.\n"I made the recommendation that I thought we could not have a better speaker for the commencement than the president himself because he is such a gifted speaker," Beckley said. \nHerbert, who has served on the staffs of four U.S. cabinet officers and as chancellor of the State University System of Florida, believes that the time he has spent working in higher education and public policy gave him insights which will be informative to students.\n"I think that those experiences will be useful in terms of enhancing my ability in making a few observations that might have meaning," he said.\nHerbert said he will begin his speech with a discussion of the intellectual experience which IU offers,\nbut he will spend most of his time talking about how the world is flat. The implication is not that it is physically flat, explains Rudy Professor of Economics George von Furstenberg, but that because of globalization and technological advancements, American college graduates are now competing with the rest of the world for many jobs. Herbert drew the concept from a new book by Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, titled "The World is Flat: a Brief History of the Twenty-First Century." \n"And so I built my comments around that proposition and tried to focus on the significance of living in a flat world," Herbert said. "And I will talk about how we tried to prepare (IU graduates) for the life in that kind of environment."\nHe said the increasingly global community presents a new set of challenges and opportunities which graduates must be prepared to meet. \nHerbert will end his speech with a charge to the class of 2005 which he hopes they will be able to use throughout the course of their lives.\nAnd though the world is a different place than it was when he graduated, that charge, which is based on the core values of IU, still has a great deal of meaning, even in a flat world. \n"I think that the core values are fundamental and they're lasting," Herbert said. "And that's why I will end by talking about core values."\n-- Contact staff writer Michael Zennie at mzennie@indiana.edu.