New York University held its 183rd annual all-university commencement in Yankee Stadium on Wed., May 20. Nearly 30,000 graduates, family members, faculty and guests attended.
Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, was the keynote speaker.
It was the final graduation ceremony for both President John Sexton and Martin Lipton, chairperson of the university’s board of trustees, who are both stepping down from their positions.
Lipton praised Sexton as “the outstanding university educator and leader of this generation.”
Ifill, an ’87 graduate of N.Y.U. Law School, who studied under Sexton there, spoke about the police-involved deaths of unarmed black men that have dominated the news over the past year, from Ferguson to Staten Island and Baltimore, as well as the execution-style killing of Police Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in Brooklyn.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” she said, quoting Thomas Paine. “These in fact are the times that try men’s and women’s souls. The past nine months have challenged the very soul of our nation, such that we cannot pretend — even as we are here filled with the excitement of this day — that there are not deep challenges awaiting us.”
Other challenges, she said, include crushing student debt, finding employment, police profiling and aging parents with little savings.
Ifill told the graduates it’s up to them to wrestle with these hard issues, and help try to solve them.
“That is the essence of good citizenship,” she stressed, “that bone-deep sense of obligation that you must work to improve our democracy, and to improve it especially for those who are most marginalized and most in need.”
Ifill noted that she was on the Amtrak train that had crashed in Philadelphia a week earlier. The harrowing accident, from which she walked away unharmed, taught her to value even more deeply the people to whom she is close, she said. She encouraged the graduates to do the same with their own loved ones.
Each N.Y.U. school also holds its own graduation. Robert De Niro was the speaker at the Tisch School of the Arts commencement. Bluntly and humorously, the great actor started off by telling the grads, “You’re f—-d!” If you’re a doctor or lawyer or go into other more traditional professional fields, you know you’ll always have a good-paying job, he explained. A career in the arts, on the other hand, with writers, painters and actors always scrambling for work and money, will inevitably be a struggle, he told them — inevitably, because if you are an artist, you have no choice but to follow your passion.
— Lincoln Anderson
