2025 Commencement Address
On May 10, 2025, as winner of the annual Chad Oliver Teaching Award, I gave invited remarks at the commencement ceremony for the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin. My remarks began with a few words acknowledging Plan II Director Alexandra Wettlaufer, on the eve of her retirement. Thereafter, I continued:
Those of you in the class of 2025 who were my students would have taken one of my junior seminars. Recently, I’ve also had the honor and privilege of teaching first-year students in World Literature and in a signature course on essay writing.
Take a moment to think back to your first year in Plan II. I bet a lot of you formed friendships in World Literature that will last well beyond graduation.
One of the interesting things about teaching World Lit is that prospective students—high school juniors and seniors—sometimes sit-in and observe these classes when they visit the UT campus, so they can get a glimpse of Plan II and try to figure out what the heck it is. A few weeks ago, my World Literature class was discussing The Tin Drum, a 1959 novel by German author Günter Grass. It’s a beautiful book by a controversial writer who (on the one hand) won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but (on the other hand) fought on the wrong side during World War II. (He was drafted near the end of the war, when he was 17.) It’s an undeniably significant book—one of the first literary masterpieces in the genre of magical realism. But it’s also a strange story whose protagonist is a mischievous demigod trapped in the body of a toddler. It’s set in Danzig during the 1930s and 40s—which was a dark time for Germany. There’s violence and depravity and gluttony and one scene involving eels that is so grotesque that one of my students—who had been a pescatarian—gave up eating fish for a few weeks and retreated to the comfort of simple vegetarianism.
To be clear, my students loved this book, even though it disturbed them. Some of them told me it had become their favorite novel. But we had visitors. Were we really going to resume our discussion of this crazy book—my 19-year-old students wondered—with children present?
Taking our guests under her wing, one of my students from north Texas gently explained to them, “we get to talk about a lot of questionable things in here.”
I love that: We get to talk about a lot of questionable things in here. Somehow, she was simultaneously grateful for the scope of our discussions (“get to”), but also implicitly disapproving (“questionable”).
This seemed an appropriate moment to step back and ask my students why we were discussing Günter Grass. Why, indeed, were we discussing world literature? Why is it that the Plan II Program requires freshmen to spend a year reading stories and poems from around the globe? My students planned to be physicians, engineers, computer scientists, C-suite executives—what use have they for made-up stories from unfamiliar cultures or from the distant past? Isn’t college supposed to be preparing them for the careers of the future?
That’s certainly what some people expect from a college education. When our university recently discontinued the Skills and Experience Flag requirements, our interim leadership wrote to faculty specifically in the Colleges of Fine Arts and Liberal Arts, acknowledging that this change would disproportionately affect our schools. We were told that the university had “connected with employers about which skills and experiences will be pivotal for students moving forward.” Evidently that would not include cultural diversity (eliminated), global cultures (eliminated), or ethics (eliminated). We would be moving toward a new program that would help students “articulate what they can do as they enter the workforce.”
I understand that, to many people, the primary purpose of college education is career readiness. That’s reasonable. But that’s explicitly not what Plan II was supposed to be about. In 1937, two years after he founded Plan II, H.T. Parlin wrote in the Daily Texan that “the [Plan II] course of study precludes all professional courses as such, and finds its chief purpose in a knowledge of science, a study of society, and finally an appreciation of culture and the arts.” Parlin famously said that Plan II was an education “for a life, not a living.”
I bet some of you haven’t heard that before, and I bet there are some students—and some parents—who don’t like the sound of it. When Dr. Michael Stoff was Plan II director, he would often paraphrase Parlin: an education for a life, not just a living. Plan II has evolved over the past 90 years, as H.T. Parlin predicted it might. Turns out we do want you to have remunerative careers, and we want to prepare you for them. But that’s not all we want you to get out of your Plan II education.
In my World Literature class, we read books about horrific things happening to people who are themselves deeply flawed individuals. And we talk about it. We talk about what it would be like to be Ishmael, stuck on Ahab’s whaling vessel during his monomaniacal quest. That could be useful perspective during your job search. Maybe you’ll realize the boss is a real Ahab and decide to cast your fortunes elsewhere.
More often, though, the lessons we learn from literature are applicable to those parts of life spent outside the office. Through the proxy of literature, we sample heartbreak, struggle, betrayal, injustice, grief, and regret—but also survival, reconciliation, hope, and acceptance. World literature allows us to share the experiences of people unlike ourselves and cultures unlike our own—there’s a word for that, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Around the year 19 BCE, the Roman poet Horace explained the purpose of literature in his Epistle to the Pistos, commonly called the Ars Poetica. He said the purpose of literature was “to delight and to instruct.” So I hope that you’ve encountered some delight in your education here in Plan II. And I hope that the books you’ve read and the discussions around them will prove instructive beyond the 40 acres—that they will prepare you for life, not just a living. I hope that when you are living through a dark historical moment, or when you see an injustice, or when you yourself feel angry and betrayed, you can make better choices than the tragic heroes of our canon. And I hope that, in the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas, we will always “get to talk about a lot of questionable things.”