SpeechOne day late in his long and extraordinary life, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., boarded a train at Union Station in Washington. Settling comfortably into his compartment, the Justice soon nodded off, only to be awakened by one of the train's conductors collecting passengers' tickets.
"Ticket, please, Mr. Justice," asked the conductor, who recognized his famous passenger. Holmes reached into his suit jacket but couldn't find the ticket. He stood up and searched all his pockets and still couldn't find it. He looked through his briefcase, to no avail. "I am sorry," he told the conductor, "I seem to have misplaced my ticket." Looking increasingly disturbed and agitated, Holmes opened up his suitcase and began pouring through its contents, but once again, came up empty-handed.
"Justice Holmes," the conductor said gently," Don't worry, "I'm sure that the management of the Union Pacific Railway Company will not be upset if you can't find your ticket." Holmes, now appearing quite disconsolate, looked up at the conductor and said: "No, you don't understand; it's not the ticket that is bothering me. I don't remember where I am going!" For veterans of convocation and commencement speeches, I offer the assurance that I know where I am going.
Given the occasion, you may have anticipated that I will say something about rites of passage and about how much is expected of all of us -- students, faculty, administrators, and staff -- as we begin Hamilton's 186th academic year; given the title of my remarks, you may expect me to say something about the twin values and tensions that come from trying to achieve both the community and diversity that we embrace here at Hamilton; I will do so. And, given the shared intellectual enterprise in which we are engaged, you might have anticipated my saying something about the College's unqualified belief in the pursuit of academic rigor; this commitment, so ably demonstrated by our faculty, is the primary cornerstone of a Hamilton education. I want every student to experience Hamilton as a bold, intellectually demanding place, a source of rigorous thought, inspiration, and engagement, a transformative college that believes above all in the search for truth.
This past July the United States lost one of the most towering figures in modern American law when retired Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., died at the age of ninety-one. I followed the Justice's career very closely because this Newark, New Jersey-born son of Irish immigrants was one of my father's great heroes. My dad would often send me copies of Justice Brennan's opinions and speeches, particularly those that dealt with the First Amendment's right to freedom of expression and the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection guarantee.
The role of the Constitution, Justice Brennan once said, is the protection of the dignity of every human being. He recognized that every individual has fundamental human rights that government cannot deny. Commentators attributed his success on the Court, particularly in forging unlikely coalitions or in finding compromises to an unusual combination of a forceful intellect and personal magnetism. To the men and women who knew him best, his success stemmed less from his skill as a negotiator and more from his willingness to treat his ideological opponents with honesty, respect, and fairness.
Justice Brennan would have agreed with Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the classic work, Democracy in America, that democracy is not only about rules of law, deliberation, and public accountability, but also about what one scholar calls "everyday life, habits, and dispositions."1 It is these everyday habits that I would like to talk with you about tonight, particularly the democratic dispositions of respect, goodwill, fairness, honesty, trust, civility, and compromise that are the bedrock of campus culture and a civil society.
I suggest that we think of the various components of our campus culture as voices, each the expression of a distinct condition and understanding, and of the culture itself as these voices joined in conversation.2 Conversation is not only the way we convey information; "it defines our social identities, it challenges, inspires, confronts, and ultimately helps us achieve understanding. But conversation is not a neutral medium; it is the means through which we attempt to justify our preferences, ground our values and discover common ground for our interests.3
Conversation is at the heart of t
