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The wise listen
Guest speakers impart life lessons
By David J. Craig and Meghan Dorney
Following are highlights from speeches by some of the scholars, artists, and community leaders who offered their insights to graduates at Convocation ceremonies and at the University’s Baccalaureate service on May 16.
Upromise founder and chairman Michael Bronner,
GSM Convocation
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Michael Bronner Photo by Patrice Flesch |
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Michael Bronner has been a natural entrepreneur for as long as he can remember — among his earliest childhood memories are selling baseball cards and bottle caps to fellow second-graders.
During his first two years as a CAS undergraduate, however, Bronner (SMG’82) studied biochemistry with the goal of becoming a doctor. He transferred to the School of Management for his junior year when he learned to trust his instincts. “My heart told me not to become a doctor, but to follow a path of business,” he said. “I’ve always listened to my heart.”
Doing so has brought Bronner success in business, he said, as well as the ability to help others. While still a student at BU, he started his first company, which grew to become the billion-dollar marketing services firm Digitas. And in 2001, after selling Digitas, Bronner founded Upromise, a company that helps families save for college through an electronic rebate system by which corporations contribute a few dollars or cents to a special savings account every time a family member purchases their products.
“My heart told me to do something to make a college education more affordable,” Bronner said, “and in a few short years, Upromise has become the largest platform for helping families save for college.”
Today’s young business leaders must remember, he said, that “business managed from the heart has the power to create profits” while also helping solve social and environmental problems. “Listening to your heart means being in touch with your inner voice, and your real and genuine instincts about what is right,” he said. “It directs you to be the best that you can be. And with self-fulfillment comes the greatest reward in life: helping others.”
Archbishop Anastasios of Albania,
Baccalaureate address
It was made painfully clear to Americans on 9/11 that a rekindling of religious fervor around the world in recent years has been accompanied by a perversion of spiritual righteousness that can lead to violence.
Still, the most effective way for Westerners to confront the wrath of those who would commit acts of terror, said Archbishop Anastasios in his Baccalaureate address in March Chapel on May 16, is to cultivate our own faith. “An active faith and love for God,” he said, enables us to retain “a genuine respect for the freedom” of other people, while protecting our own.
“The Western world must realize that injustice and poverty, for which it must bear the brunt of responsibility, facilitate the exploitation of religious sentiment,” he said. “It is essential, then, that we rediscover the core of our own faith in God, which in the past led the Western world to extraordinary achievement in all spheres.”
Secular liberalism often leads us to “fight passionately for freedom where our needs are concerned, but resist or remain indifferent to a parallel freedom — that is, the rights and interests of other human beings or nations,” Anastasios said. “It is not uncommon for liberty to become a means of vindicating certain kinds of behavior, often at the expense of others.
“Freedom, in order to prevail, necessitates responsibility,” he continued. “Egocentrism undermines responsibility and distorts the nature of freedom, causing us to believe that everything revolves around the idol of our own making, and driving us to become self-centered, arrogant, and in constant pursuit of self-gratification. . . . Much vigilance is needed to cultivate an inner freedom from the base desires that exist deep within all of us, and to develop an awareness of the rights of our neighbor, our colleague, and more broadly, of every human being.”
Dateline NBC correspondent and author John Hockenberry,
SAR Convocation
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John Hockenberry Photo by Patrice Flesch |
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Although his remarkable career as a journalist, radio host, and author may not attest to it, John Hockenberry, paralyzed and wheelchair-bound from an accident in his teens, knows firsthand how difficult it is to be disabled. Rehabilitation professionals are heroes, he said at Sargent College’s Convocation on May 16, for helping the disabled regain their independence and dignity.
For generations, health-care professionals have improved the quality of life of people with physical disabilities by refusing to accept outdated and inadequate treatments, Hockenberry told the graduates. Rehabilitation professionals have worked as “collaborators” with those who suffered from polio and with disabled Vietnam veterans, for example, to transform “the notions of institutionalized care, the notions of home independence.”
Those who work in the health-care professions have also increased patients’ independence by developing new methods of rehabilitation, said Hockenberry, as well as helping them adapt to and overcome the obstacles they face in their everyday lives. However, more advances need to be made because many of the troops currently fighting overseas will “return to this country as disabled individuals,” he said, “having been told, as we were told, that what they are and were fighting for was freedom,” only to begin their own struggle for independence.
They “are going to rely on you to begin the fight for their freedom,” Hockenberry told the graduating seniors, and that fight “will last the rest of their lives.” He charged them with assisting today’s veterans to lead fulfilling lives despite their disabilities.
Rehabilitation professionals should be held up “as the real heroes, as having the supreme mission,” he continued, “because in your professional lives, whether you are dealing with military personnel or civilians, you will perhaps have the most chance of anyone graduating on this day in this city, of changing the world.”
28
May 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations