This Just In

Chafee offers something rare: a memorable graduation address

Go waste

By IAN DONNIS | May 23, 2007

Lincoln Chafee

Is there a more unnerving task than being asked to be a graduation speaker, to incorporate a bit of humor and putative wisdom while trying to avoid being trite, longwinded, or otherwise out-of-touch?

Former US Senator Lincoln Chafee was more than game when he spoke to University of Rhode Island graduates on Sunday. “Go waste, young man,” he said poetically, suggesting, as the ProJo’s Bruce Landis put it, “that the graduates consider something he found meaningful in his own life, his decision to swerve off the beaten track” by shoeing horses for seven years, in Montana and Canada, after college.

To some, particularly WPRO AM talk-show host Dan Yorke — who is no fan of the former senator — this advice was classic Chafee: a recommendation to goof off when young graduates should be getting to work and building a foundation for their adult lives.

Join the military, the Peace Corps, or take part in some other such organized experience, Yorke said during his show on Monday, but don’t just drift or wander without a plan. Chafee’s advice was consistent for a man, the talk host said, who lacked the hunger and decisiveness to win his Senate battle last year with Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse.

Trying to find one’s way as a young adult can be a slightly bewildering process at times, and even the best or most well-intentioned recommendations upon graduation are subject to interpretation and execution.

Chafee, though, deserves credit for distilling something thoughtful, universal, and wise from his own personal experience.

As Landis wrote, the “Go waste, young man” quip was a play on words – “Go West, young man” — usually misattributed to the mid 19th-century editor Horace Greeley, “which encouraged the young and ambitious to join in the nation’s expansion.” And, “Chafee wasn’t encouraging the graduates to waste time, but rather to ‘give themselves some space,’ the chance to have ‘experiences that might not immediately relate to a career path, but that nonetheless [might] be important in building a personal foundation.’ ”

Chafee explained to the graduates that his horse-shoeing experience remains with him, in how he learned the importance of diligence and gained an enhanced appreciation for the world beyond his native Rhode Island. “West is a state of mind,” he said, “that I urge you all to find in the coming months, before you accumulate too much in the way of real responsibility — career, family, mortgage, credit-card bills.”

There was an echo in the former senator’s words of Henry David Thoreau: “If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music in which he hears, however measured, or far away.”

Chafee, who is now teaching at Brown University, his alma mater, manifested this outlook during his Senate career — most notably by being the only Republican to vote against the war in Iraq. He was notable in Washington, too, for speaking like a real person, not a plastic and overly calculating political creature.

Most college graduates, one suspects, can’t remember the messages uttered by the accomplished men and women who spoke during their graduation ceremonies. Considering that, this year’s URI graduates got something special.

Topics: This Just In , Henry David Thoreau, Brown University, Sheldon Whitehouse, More

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