You will all surely know how special it is for me to receive an honorary degree from this University.  As I grew up, UE was not simply the hometown center of higher education.  At various times in my life I have lived across the street from this University, taken exams in its classrooms, and taught in them, served on its committees, written a few checks, and admired its faculty and its leadership.  I take great honor in becoming a bona fide member of the club, joining with the Class of 2009.

Deciding what to say about commencement is more difficult.  There are things that most college graduates will always remember about graduation day, like where the ceremony occurred, outfitting in academic garb, and which members of the family were present to celebrate.  One thing people do not usually remember is who spoke and what he said.  For a few graduations, though a different detail sometimes sticks in our minds.  People often remember commencement when graduation coincides with some great historic moment in the life of the nation, like graduating amidst the breadlines of the 1930’s, or just after Pearl Harbor, or during the student turmoil of the Sixties.  At junctures like that, the national backdrop becomes an indelible part of the memory about the commencement.  For the Class of 2009, graduation will always mean Graduating into the Great Recession.

Depressing as the unemployment rate and the economic contraction may be, graduating in 2009 means something more disconcerting:  venturing forth into a world where people wonder whether certain things they always took for granted might not really be true after all.  A leading example of conventional wisdom that has taken a beating is the perennial advice about saving for retirement.  You know that rule.  Put every extra dollar you can spare into a 401(K) account, invest the account in the most promising of American companies or in market index funds, and then hold on through thick and thin.  Be not a trader, has been the motto, but rather a long-term investor.  Financial advisers and pundits alike have had a simple name for this advice:  “Buy and Hold.”

In 2009, however, many Americans have had reason to question this rule.  “How can ‘buy and hold’ be sound advice,” they plausibly ask, “when half the money I had in my account just a year ago seems to have disappeared?”  Why should one invest in American businesses when the words Chrysler and General Motors and “bankruptcy” are so often part of the same sentence?  How can I put money in the bank until I know how my bank did on the stress test?

In short, if one is fortunate enough to have savings, hasn’t the long-standing advice about where to put it been proven wrong?

Likewise, there has been some temptation to raise similar doubts about the value of the higher education.  For all of your lives, and for all of mine, family and counselors and loan officers have told us that graduating is the ticket to a better life.  Graduating high school is the ticket to something other than hourly work.  Graduating college is the passport to making one’s way in the professional class.  Expensive as higher education may be, those advisers have always said, it pays a handsome economic dividend in the long run.

But how savvy can that advice seem when the day to celebrate triumphant accomplishment arrives and it is harder to find employment than at any time in two generations?  Even more implausible, some say, is the standard solution to the problem of graduating during hard times:  sign up for more schooling.  If some education is not the gold-plated investment we’ve always believed, how can more of it be better?  To be sure, options like an expanded AmeriCorps will keep the wolf from the door for some people, but does it really bolster our belief in the advice of the ages?

I have a straightforward answer to these twin doubts, one you can choose to believe or not to believe.  My claim is that these two great anxieties will prove to be less potent than they seem, both for the nation and for the Class of 2009.  I contend there are solid and reassuring grounds on which such a claim may rest.

Let me first describe why one might want to bet on the American economic engine.  The easiest answer has to be:  compared to what?  Where else might one turn?

If American manufacturers and commercial and financial firms are not producing at the rate we expect, we have to ask, “Compared to what?”  What’s the argument that there is somewhere else on the planet offering more promise for greater success than the nation we inhabit?  One can acknowledge that what George Washington called the American experiment has confronted a good many challenges, that it has labored under serious disadvantages (like slavery and race relations) and still assert that this nation has created more opportunity, more freedom, and more economic security for more people from more walks of life than any other society in the whole history of humankind.  And one can confront the sad fact that there may be no more Pontiacs, just as there are no more Polaroid cameras, and still bet on the success of American enterprise and enterprises, many of which thrive here in this city.

In the midst of daily bombardments of news about America’s foreign debt, there is abundant evidence that smart people with deep pockets have decided to throw in their own lot with ours.  The disadvantage of our adverse balance of trade does not discount as serious fact the remarkable decisions by investors and governments from Canada to Canton to double down on America by placing their money with us.  And Americans themselves are making those same commitments, registering the highest savings rate in decades, and putting their savings into American institutions.

And so it is with education.  The ritual of today’s academic procession represents an endorsement of your academic achievement by faculty and trustees in a form and tradition that stretches back six hundred years in the Western tradition.  Just as the general value of that achievement warranted congratulations when universities were lesser enterprises (as James Garfield once said, “Education is Mark Hopkins on one end of a bench and a student on the other.”), the value of education as earned in 2009 at substantial universities like this one is more tangible than ever.

The connection between the economic health of the nation and higher education has never been clearer, though not everyone has made the right choice on this score.  My college classmate Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School has recently said that this generation of Americans is the first to be less well education than the one before it, a notion that’s both hard to believe and shocking at the same time.  To the extent Mike Porter’s assessment may have validity, it renders all the more solid the choice you and your families have made to persevere in education as the best launching path for successful careers.

But higher education is hardly just an economic pit stop in the journey of life.  It is instead a time when one focuses on life’s big picture.  As Albert Einstein said, “Education is what you have left when you’ve forgotten everything that was in the course.”  A center of higher education of the caliber of this University, imbued as it is with the values of the liberal arts living right alongside disciplines like business administration and engineering, puts its graduates in a position to do well for others as well as for themselves.  The university postures its graduates to appreciate the beauty of the simple robin or the complexity of a Bartok symphony, to step forward for public leadership or volunteer to rescue the human equivalents of the starfish stranded on the beach.  It is for this that your UE education prepares you and at the same time enriches the nation as beneficiary of the lives you are capable of living.  We cheer you on for this remarkable accomplishment and welcome you into the ranks of those to whom much has been given, who commit their lives to building a prosperous, safe, and decent society.