MDC Commencement

Spring 2009 commencement speech at Miami Dade College, by Alberto Ibargüen, May 2, 2009

Thank you, Dr. Vicente.

Good morning everyone.  Good morning to parents and friends, teachers and especially to the graduates.

It is an honor to share this day – your day – and a very special privilege to be asked to speak to such an excited, hopeful, multicultural and very large group.  It’s also a little daunting. 

The irony of every academic commencement is that, while it marks the end of an intellectual course the sense of the day is pure emotion. 

It is a day of hope about your future – and a day when we actively practice that very American idea that the future is yours – that your future is not determined by race or gender or ethnicity but by your skill, talent and willingness to work – about the future you want and the one for which you’ve prepared.  It is a day of joy, so let’s begin there and let me say, congratulations! 

Parents, teachers, family and friends: congratulations to you, too, for your important part in getting to today.  In fact, pretty much everyone here has reason to turn to the person on your left and the person on your right and tell them, congratulations! 

Graduation speeches typically include some life lessons and stories with a purpose. I won’t pretend to tell you how to be happy…for that, you’ll need your family, friends and faith. I do have some thoughts on success and I want to tell you tell you two stories from my own background that had, and continue to have, profound impact on me.

The guidelines are simple:

1. work hard,
2. embrace change,
3. do something you love,
4. act like you own your life.

My two stories are about lessons I learned as a young man, when I spent nearly two years in the Amazon jungle and when I had great good fortune to meet Dr. Martin Luther King. Those events and lessons mattered then – and they matter to me now. Every day of your life is the real world and it is connected to your future.

Each one of you knows what it took to get here, how hard you worked and what it means to you and to your family.  There was an interesting column in yesterday’s newspaper about two new books that look at talent and genius in calculating success. Both apparently conclude that, while there’s no denying extraordinary ability, the key differentiator between Mozart and other musicians or Tiger Woods and other golfers was focus and practice. So, here is your first of four suggestions: work hard. If Tiger can’t be Tiger without practice, how do you expect to be a successful doctor or a dental hygienist or a banker or a real estate developer without putting in the time and effort?

Of course, I can’t summarize your individual lives but I can observe that, as a group, you are Miami – and you are going to be Miami. 

Becoming part of Miami Dade College made you part of the biggest and most successful community college in the country.  It made you part of the fabric of this city of exiles and immigrants and builders.  For years now, the College has published daily on page two of the Miami Herald’s Metro section the photograph of one after another Miami Dade graduate who has succeeded in his or her profession. 

Those graduates reflect who we are and where we live, a place where ¾ of us were born some place else and where half were born in another country.  They reflect our determination to make something of ourselves and of this community. You are likely to stay here in South Florida – and that makes you, as a group, very powerful.

Think about it: the biggest school around and graduates who stay in the area. That equals enormous potential political power.  Hold that thought for a few moments because I want to come back to what you can do for your community.

The sum of you all is that, together, you’re big, you’re diverse and you’re builders.  And together, you are our community. We love family and friends, we love our warm Florida sun, we have connections with all sorts of other places and we, most of us, are related to someone who thought there was a better life here than where we came from. 

Knight Foundation, where I’m privileged to work, focuses on journalism and the betterment of 26 communities in the United States where the Knight brothers had newspapers. Miami was one of them and they chose it as their headquarters.

Our work with the Gallup polling organization and with sociologist Richard Florida suggests that what connects people to place turns out to be less about civics, like voting or attending town council meetings, and more about connections. People develop loyalty to place because of their connections to other people and opportunities to interact socially and culturally with others.

As a community, we are classic connectors and our importance as a community is not because we are in the United States but because we are in the United States and have the best connections to the rest of the Hemisphere.

This puts you at the center of a city with a future. And, since you’re the future of this town, you might begin, today, to act like you own it. More about that, too, in a moment.

Suggestion number two is to be open to change. If you live in Miami, you live and breathe change. We’ve changed our sky line, filled up every inch of land between Biscayne Bay and the Everglades and are constantly changing our community’s demographic composition – and fast. We know the change of exile, of migration and of immigration.

Truth is, if you’re uncomfortable with change, this may be a really bad place for you to live!

My own life has been full of change. I was eight when my Cuban father and Puerto Rican mother decided we’d move to the United States. That’s when I started to learn English and began on a path that would include half a dozen countries, many cities and careers in law, publishing and, now, philanthropy. The only constant is change – that, and the fact that I’ve only had one wife and we just celebrated our 40^th!

After college in Connecticut, I entered the Peace Corps and was assigned to a program in Venezuela. Since I spoke Spanish, I was told I’d work in an office in Caracas as liason between the Peace Corps office and the Ministry of Development. When the assignment sheet was handed out to our group, I saw my name next to the words “Territorio Federal Amazonas,” Amazon Federal Territory. So I took my urban self and degree in modern European history and for the better part of the next two years, I lived on the Orinoco, Atabapo and Rio Negro rivers.

My mode of transportation was a 13-meter dugout canoe, powered by a 33-horsepower Johnson outboard motor. Distance was measured in time and I spent weeks getting from village to village, carrying only would fit in a burlap sack, sleeping in a hammock that I hung in whatever jungle village I was working in.

When that kind of change happens, to survive and succeed,

• You learn to ask questions and listen closely for answers.
• You learn to act on that information.
• You learn to respect your environment.
• You learn about the difference between solitude and loneliness, and how to treasure the former and get over the latter.
• You learn about who you are.

Those were lessons I learned forever.

I didn’t seek it, but I embraced that change … and it was among the most important experience of my life.

I tell you all this because you are living your version of those formative experiences. Think of me as a sort of emissary from the future, here to remind you that what you do today matters – and that the cumulative weight of what you choose now will define your lives in important ways you cannot know today.

And if what you choose now really matters, and I believe it does, it is important that you choose what you want, what you love. My hope for you is that you’ll find a way to follow suggestion number three: Do something you love.

I became a lawyer because I believed in logic and the rule law and had a passion going back to high school for free speech and free press. Your own love can be for a subject – nursing, teaching, computers or technology, law or design – or it can be geography-based, a country, this city, or the mountains. But make sure it leads you to work that matters to you.

With love comes dedication and dedication precedes achievement, and that was a point driven home for me the day I met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the spring of 1964, Dr. King visited Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where I was a student. I was editor of the college newspaper and was invited to participate in a small press conference one morning in one of the administration conference rooms.

Dr. King sat at a round table, surrounded by reporters, with Coretta Scott King behind him, dressed in a scarlet red dress and matching hat; a striking figure.

He had had a hectic week and spoken publicly the night before. He looked tired and spoke in quiet tones, answering questions he had surely answered a thousand times before. That early morning, he didn’t seem like the man who could move millions. That early morning, he was just a man.

A few hours later, on a cloudy day, from the marble podium on the terraced hill above the great lawn on campus, he delivered a commencement speech of such power and determination that it stirs my heart even today, more than 40 years later. He said the arc of history bent toward justice and that our cause was just and as surely as night followed day, there would be justice and equality in America.

As he spoke, and I promise you this is true, the clouds parted and a ray of sunlight broke through.

That was Dr. King! His force came from his beliefs and his message. But the personal, private lesson for me that day, as I watched a tired man in the morning, and an electrifying speaker in the afternoon, was that even Dr. King, a man of exceptional talent and ability, was human too.

He put his pants on one leg at a time each morning, just like you. He muscled through the rough patches, just like you can. He had dreams and disappointments like the rest of us, and still went on to do extraordinary things, inspired by the rightness of a cause and of work he loved.

Each of us has that potential. You have that power, that power to take charge and own your own life – and to benefit the common good.

I asked you earlier to hold a thought: that thought was how powerful a combination it is to be the biggest school around and graduate people who actually live and work and vote and pay taxes right here in Miami. You’ll raise your families here and your lives will all be better for having learned and prepared at Miami Dade College.

Use that power. Influence State and local policy. Think about priorities. Is funding the College a priority? Does anyone think Miami Dade College gets sufficient funding for scholarship, for more courses, for more and better paid teachers, to accommodate more students or even? I don’t think so.

The College that gave you your start is the College you can improve. I don’t know whether you should form action groups on Facebook or send a weekly letter or email to Governor Crist or Mayor Alvarez or tweet on Twitter about our state representatives and senators, letting everyone know who supports the College and who has other priorities.

I believe our elected leaders are good people who make good faith decisions based on the information available…and if the information available is that you, thousands of you, graduates, parents, teachers and friends, really care about The College and want it better funded, you can make it happen.

My hope is that you’ll use your energy and power, as people who have benefited from being here and who intend to stay in this community, to help shape Miami. Don’t be passive. Miami and South Florida are still being made and that should mean nothing but opportunity for you.

My friend and former Knight Foundation president, Hodding Carter, often talks about what his father, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from Greenville, South Carolina. His father wrote that, “(t)here is not much any of us can do to change the course of affairs in Washington, in the nation or in the world at large. But there is much each of us can do to change the course of events in Greenville, and it is what happens in all the Greenvilles that determines the course and shape of the nation and the world.”

Think about that as you apply what you’ve learned at the College. What you do will shape Miami. And what happens here in Miami – our Greenville – can determine the shape of our nation and the world.

Good luck and congratulations.