[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 66 (Tuesday, May 24, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 24, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                     ADDRESS BY DR. WENDELL RAYBURN

                                 ______


                            HON. IKE SKELTON

                              of missouri

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, May 24, 1994

  Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Speaker, on May 14, 1994, Lincoln University held 
its graduation ceremonies in Jefferson City, MO. The principal speaker 
was the university president, Dr. Wendell Rayburn, who spoke to the 
graduates preparing for a changing world. This excellent address is 
placed in the Record as it is a lesson for the entire country:

       Anyone who has ever given a commencement speech knows that 
     he or she is up against a major obstacle: no one in the 
     audience has come to this event specifically to listen to the 
     speaker. The students have come for one reason alone: to 
     participate in the ceremony which officially formalizes their 
     status as college graduates. Their parents and families have 
     come to celebrate and to mark this significant milestone in 
     all of their lives. The administration and faculty have come 
     as envoys of the university.
       But tradition dictates that there be a speaker, regardless 
     of the fact that no one has come to hear him or her speak. So 
     every person ever asked to give a commencement address has 
     begun to think about the speech with the same question: What 
     can I say that they will want to hear and that they might 
     remember when they look back on their graduation?
       Once, when I was invited to speak at a church, I asked the 
     minister how much time I had. ``Take all the time you want,'' 
     he said. ``But we leave at 1:30.'' Although you won't be 
     physically leaving at any time soon, your minds and attention 
     may check out on me if I protract this speech, which is the 
     point the minister was making.
       This point is well taken by all speakers. Keep the message 
     brief, to the point, and memorable. Only by doing so will you 
     reach your audience.
       And so I must ask myself: What message can I bring to this 
     audience? To whom does the commencement speaker address his 
     remarks? Obviously, the graduates are the main audience. I am 
     therefore led to consider who are our graduates at Lincoln 
     University.
       Our data reveal that approximately 90 percent of you are 
     Missourians. Others come from such places as East St. Louis, 
     Chicago, Detroit, Dayton, the Oakland/San Francisco area, and 
     from such faraway places as Nigeria and Malawi. About 28 
     percent of you entered college after graduating from high 
     school; the large majority of you are what we call 
     nontraditional students: you were in your twenties, thirties, 
     forties, even fifties and sixties when you started college or 
     when you returned for a master's degree. But the most 
     important point is that all of you have succeeded in reaching 
     your goal.
       And what are your goals? I know that a full 25 percent of 
     you have chosen majors in the business fields; 18 percent of 
     you are now nurses and 11 percent of you are teachers. Your 
     selection of majors indicates that you have some insight into 
     the direction of the future of our country and its needs. You 
     understand that the world of business offers unique 
     opportunities. You are answering the call for qualified 
     educators, and you appreciate that health care will be a 
     major arena of activity well into the next century. You have 
     made your plans to assume critical positions in our society. 
     If I can imprint one lasting thought upon you today, it is 
     this: Do not suppose that your education is over. Graduation 
     is not the end; it is only the beginning. You must prepare 
     yourselves, educate yourselves, for a world of constant 
     change.
       The knowledge and skills you have acquired at Lincoln 
     University will serve you well. But you must view it as the 
     foundation upon which you must build. Hubert Humphrey once 
     said that he learned more about economic from one South 
     Dakota dust storm than he did in all his years in college. 
     This is not to say that one does not need a college 
     education. College prepares you, gives you the background, to 
     cope with whatever twists and turns your life will take. And 
     make no mistake: there will be twists and turns. No matter 
     the profession you have chosen, the one thing you can count 
     on is that it will change and evolve.
       I remember well my own graduation. With my teaching 
     certificate in hand, I felt confident that I was prepared as 
     a classroom instructor. That was 1952. Although the 
     intervening forty years might seem like a lifetime to you, I 
     assure you they won't seem so when you're looking back after 
     forty years at your own graduation! What will astound you 
     then is what astounds me now, and that is the changes that 
     will take place. When I first began teaching science to grade 
     school children at Marcy Elementary School in Detroit, it was 
     with no realization that science as we knew it then would 
     soon explode in a hundred directions.
       The way we viewed heredity changed dramatically in 1953 
     when James Watson and Francis Crick deciphered the genetic 
     code of DNA, leading to an understanding of how information 
     is passed from one generation to another. Polio, the dreaded 
     childhood crippler and killer, was conquered in 1954 with the 
     introduction of a vaccine developed by Jonas Salk. The first 
     venture beyond our own world was accomplished in 1961 when a 
     Russian cosmonaut became the first human to orbit the earth 
     in a spaceship, and in 1969, two Americans became the first 
     men to set foot on the moon.
       But in this same time span, we also received the first 
     warnings that an unbridled application of scientific 
     discoveries and principles could lead to disaster. Silent 
     Spring, written by Rachel Carson and published in 1962, 
     chronicled the damage that our environment was sustaining 
     from the chemicals and pesticides that filtered through our 
     air and earth. With the advent of this book came the birth of 
     the environmental movement. It would gather momentum from the 
     ecological disaster at Love Canal and the near catastrophe of 
     Three Mile Island. All of these developments, both positive 
     and negative, were but forerunners of even more remarkable 
     developments to come.
       And science is not the only arena where we have seen 
     change. Every aspect of society has been transformed. As I 
     sat where you sit today and listened to a commencement 
     speaker, I could not even begin to speculate on what was to 
     come. We had not yet heard of Martin Luther King, Jr., and 
     the Civil Rights movement, John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, 
     the Cuban Missile Crisis, Woodstock, Watergate, birth control 
     pills, or the women's movement, to name a few of the 
     significant names and events of the last thirty to forty 
     years.
       So I say to you again: prepare and educate yourselves for 
     constant change. You need not go back forty years to 
     determine the need to do so. We have only to look back at the 
     early 70s, a period during which many of you were born, and 
     to recapture what has transpired since then. During the 70s, 
     we witnessed the hook-up of the Apollo and Soyuz space 
     crafts, a major scientific as well as diplomatic coup for 
     that time. Jimmy Carter pardoned the Vietnam draft evaders; 
     Louise Brown, the first test tube baby, was born; the Shah of 
     Iran was ousted and replaced by the Ayatollah Khoumeini and 
     Americans were taken hostage; and the accident at the nuclear 
     plant at Three Mile Island brought us to the brink of nuclear 
     disaster.
       The pace did not slacken in the 1980s. It was, in fact, an 
     era of ``firsts.'' During that decade, we toasted Sandra Day 
     O'Conner, the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court. The 
     first permanent artificial heart was implanted. The first 
     female, Sally Ride, journeyed into space. The first deaths 
     due to AIDS were publicized, and all the horrors and 
     ramifications of that disease erupted on both the national 
     and international consciousness. The Challenger space craft 
     exploded on live TV; home camcorders and satellite dishes 
     became commonplace; we watched in horror as democracy was 
     crushed in Tiananmen Square, and in awe as the Berlin Wall 
     fell.
       The 1990s show no sign of a slowing of pace. Iraq invaded 
     Kuwait and the United States swept victoriously through the 
     desert. East and West Germany once again became a single 
     country; Rodney King became a household name and South L.A. 
     erupted in violence; communism fell in the Soviet Union; 
     Anita Hill forced the volatile issue of sexual harassment 
     onto the national consciousness; Hurricane Andrew and the 
     great Midwest flood proved that man is still no match for 
     nature; and, in several emotion-filled days this April, black 
     South Africans went to the polls for the first time in that 
     country's history and elected Nelson Mandela president.
       There is no way to recount the cataclysmic changes that 
     have occurred in the world thus far in our lifetimes without 
     a profound sense of wonder and anticipation concerning what 
     is to come. How do you prepare or plan? You do so by 
     continuing your education, not necessarily formally unless 
     advanced degrees are in your plans, but by never missing an 
     opportunity to tackle new projects and search out new ideas 
     and experiences.
       That famous son of Missouri, Mark Twain, provides us with a 
     unique way of looking at life-long learning. In his book, 
     Life on the Mississippi, he writes: ``Two things seemed 
     pretty apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a 
     Mississippi River pilot a man has got to learn more than any 
     one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was, that 
     he must learn it all over again in a different way every 
     twenty-four hours.''
       We can apply that logic to almost any field today. You must 
     not only be proficient in your area, but your level of 
     proficiency must change with each new innovation. Can you 
     imagine how long someone would last in the health field if 
     they did not keep current with developments? The nurse or 
     physician who retired ten years ago would barely recognize 
     the intensive care unit in today's hospital. Treatment of all 
     the major diseases has changed dramatically as new findings 
     come to light or new drugs are developed. For instance, until 
     very recently, bypass surgery was considered to be the best 
     chance for a patient in the late stages of heart disease. But 
     a new study shows that angioplasty, a procedure involving 
     threading a balloon-tipped catheter through blocked arteries, 
     is producing better long-term results than surgery does in 
     the majority of patients. And in another new development, the 
     announcement of the discovery of a gene responsible for 
     certain kinds of cancer made it likely that treatment of that 
     dread disease will be revolutionized in the very near future.
       The same is true of other professions, as well. In my own 
     field of education, I can cite numerous examples of changes 
     in the way we do business. At the top of the list would have 
     to be the computer. Student records are now computerized. You 
     may have had one or more classes in a computer lab, and you 
     probably used a computer to generate papers and assignments. 
     On a number of campuses, distance learning is now possible 
     via the computer. No doubt you took much of this for granted, 
     but if you have an older brother or sister who was perhaps 
     five years ahead of you in school, chances are they were not 
     able to take advantage of all the opportunities that 
     computers now afford.
       So I remind you once again: prepare yourself for constant 
     change. How will you do this? I can give you four trustworthy 
     methods for keeping current. You will no doubt discover 
     others on your own. My first recommendation is to be a 
     reader. It may sound trite, it may sound simple, but it 
     cannot be improved upon for effectiveness. What should you 
     read? Many different things: The journals of your own 
     profession, as one way of keeping current in your field; 
     newspapers and news magazines, in order to learn about and 
     understand events taking place in your community and around 
     the world; and fiction, for relaxation and enjoyment and 
     insight into human nature. This is a short list, and you will 
     certainly find many other worthwhile texts. I encourage you 
     to do so.
       My second suggestion is to join professional organizations. 
     No matter what field you have entered, you will find that 
     there are groups which promote the profession. Become a 
     member of at least one. Membership will provide you with 
     tools and activities that will enhance your further growth 
     and development in your field.
       Thirdly, practice networking. Don't isolate yourself from 
     colleagues, both close at hand and afar, who share your 
     interests. Professional meetings and conferences are 
     excellent occasions for networking.
       My last suggestion to you is to utilize technology, which 
     can put at your fingertips the means of accomplishing all of 
     my other recommendations.
       When you think about it, your education is only just 
     beginning. You are entering a new phase in your life, and it 
     should be one of exploration and discovery. There will be no 
     finish, because this exploration is ongoing. But there will 
     be excitement, there will be highs and lows, and there will 
     be change. If you are prepared, you will guarantee yourself a 
     lifetime of success.
       As you take your initial step into this new and exciting 
     world, feel confident because your knowledge and skills rest 
     upon the legacy of a rich heritage and time-honored tradition 
     handed down by the founding fathers of Lincoln University--
     the soldiers of the 62nd and 65th colored infantries.
       Graduates, I congratulate you and I wish you the very best!

                          ____________________