I continue to think that Richard Brodhead has the potential to emerge from the Duke scandal as one of the truly important figures in American education. His baccalaureate address is eloquent and inspiring…and deals with the rape scandal in an indirect but instructive way.

Here’s a quote:

Last and very quickly, if we have been through some hard things here together, that need not prove the negative it might appear. For building a better world, humans need access to that special form of intelligence called wisdom, and the way to wisdom has never been through school exercises or the formal curriculum. Like it or not, this form of knowledge comes the hard way, through trial, through conflict, through failure and error, and through suffering and loss. I would gladly have spared you every hard thing we have been through since I arrived-last year’s controversy over issues of free speech, our more recent conflicts over the presumption of innocence and the social values that will govern this community, the death of friends and classmates who did not complete your journey. But I know that, just to the extent that you have lived the emotional complexities of these incidents, you leave here with a deepened understanding of the terms of human life. In the measure that you have not protected yourself from difficulties but opened yourself to their sometimes painful human meanings, you have got an education, one that will make you a more thoughtful contributor to your times.

Nice.