David Baltimore's Commencement Speech to the Caltech Class of 2006

"Commencement, 2006"

Nine years ago, I came to Caltech as a Freshman. Not being as well prepared as the high school graduates we accept, it has taken me nine years to graduate. But I have finally made it as a member of the class of 2006. For me it has been as much of an education as you have received. I was naïve when I arrived: having spent most of 30 years at That Other Institute of Technology (that's MIT for those of you who don't know the code words). I thought that I would easily understand Caltech. Not so. This place is different. First there is the beauty here highlighted by the jacaranda trees, those clouds of falling lavender that appear each year, just in time for graduation. Then there is the intensity, symbolized by the paucity of students wandering the campus-everyone always seems to have something important to do. And there is the all-consuming house culture, the small size of the faculty and student body, a chemistry division in which 10% are Nobel Laureates, and so much more. What a learning experience for a 60-year old student!

And I have been lucky to have wonderful techers as teachers. In fact, everyone on the campus has offered to provide me with his or her particular perspective on this place. So I have seen it from the students' eyes, from the parents' eyes, from the faculty's eyes, from the Trustees eyes, from the eyes of the vice presidents, the division chairs and even my wife's eyes. So many schools to learn about, all wrapped into a tidy package. It has been a glorious education and I thank you all for it. Having learned my lessons, I can now take a place among the educated, as a member of that most wonderful group on campus, the faculty.

Alice and I want to thank all of you for inviting us into this community, for welcoming us and for initiating us. For nine years we have worked together and built together. And together we have done enormous tasks, developing faculty strength and financial strength, increasing the fraction of women in a faculty of unchanging size, building structures to house research, notably the Broad building, and rebuilding student housing, starting projects that will continue for years.

But as your commencement speaker, I need to do more than reminisce. I have a larger responsibility, to be wise and to be quick about it. Because you have been holed up in your room wrestling with problem sets or in your labs wrestling with the recalcitrance of nature, you will be forgiven if you lost sight of the larger perspective of education and I want to reflect on it. But before I deliver my message I want to make an acknowledgement.

NUMB3RS
I never thought I would find myself praising a television program but Pasadena has brought to America a program that embodies the virtues of mathematically-based thinking. In the program, called Numb3rs, the writers have created a world in which a mathematician solves mysteries. It is a not a flash of insight as in so many programs but a flash of logic that brings order to the chaotic observations presented by a real life situation. That logic is based in mathematics, sometimes complex or arcane, sometimes simple and direct. Numb3rs is the brainchild of two Pasadena residents, Cheryl Heuton and Nicolas Falacci. It stars a wonderful actor, David Krumholtz, who plays a Caltech mathematician, except that for the program we are known as CalSci. They are with us today and I would appreciate their standing and receiving the acknowledgement of this gathering.

The world of Numb3rs contrasts to so much of the political world where rigorous thinking and analysis have not been in fashion. Rather, an ideology of American hegemony and executive infallibility has ruled, leaving no place for calculating the consequences of actions, for thinking out strategies that respond to likely circumstances, for being prepared for the challenges of the natural world. I thank Cheryl and Nick for reminding us weekly that there is a different way, dare I say that it is the Caltech way.

Turning from television to movies, I am taken by the title of the Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth, because it compactly puts into perspective what so many avoid, Inconvenient Truths. With little science advice available to Congress or the President, the Inconvenient Truths being uncovered by scientists get little hearing. Inconvenience is truly what truth generates, all scientists know this. You are sailing along with a good idea and then do one too many experiments, and you uncover an inconvenient truth that then forces you to rethink your ideas. With luck, you find a better idea that is more explanatory and that holds up to experiment. But the last thing a scientist would do is to shield him-or herself from the truth. Inconvenient or supportive, the truth is what we seek and what we want the world to know so that it can make decisions in a framework of knowledge, not fiction.

The HOURGLASS
The tradition of a commencement speaker is to provide the exercise with the perspective of the outside world, to send the class out from these sanctified precincts into the rest of their lives. This is not the end of your journey of self-discovery, it only a way-station. But it is perhaps a key moment, the moment when you leave the neck of the hourglass and start spreading your wings. Let me parse this mixed metaphor.

We start life with an insatiable and unfocused curiosity. We investigate our sandboxes, our bodies and our toys. We go to elementary school and learn about language and history and mathematics. We continue to high school, absorbing literature and chemistry and more mathematics. Then in college we start to specialize and in graduate school we may spend 4 years investigating something so particular that only a few in the world care about the results. But when you leave school, you begin to become reacquainted with the issues of the world, you become a voter, perhaps a reader of literature or history, a watcher of the Discovery Channel. I have often thought that this progression of life is like passing through an hourglass, starting wide at the top as a youth, flowing down through a tight neck of specialization and then spreading widely again.

Today many of you are leaving the neck of the hourglass. The graduate students, for sure, but those of you undergraduates who are going out into the working world will experience a broadening of your interests. For those just going to graduate school, you will pass the neck in a few years and then these remarks will be relevant. One of the changes for you may be that words will matter more than they have at Caltech where we try to express as much as we can in numbers. In fact, it is to prepare you for this that I have helped to bring programs to Caltech under the rubric "Words Matter". You may become consultants or managers or artists, all areas where your skill with words will complement your quantitative skills and even may supplant them. Should you become an entrepreneur or a university president, your ability to talk people out of their money may be paramount. As we interact in the world of work and leisure, our ability to express ourselves often determines our effectiveness. And if you remember nothing else, remember to think before opening your mouth.

HALE
Many of the people I admire most passed through the neck of the hourglass and emerged to become broad individuals . None more so than the man who oversees this proceeding. Back behind you, forever gazing at Mount Wilson, is a statue of George Ellery Hale, Caltech's true father. Yes Millikan built the school with the help of Noyes and others and DuBridge then adapted Caltech to the changed circumstances of the post-World War II era, but it was that man of vision and deep understanding who set us on our path. He was a great man of science who focused intently on solar astronomy but he was also a great man of public affairs, institutions, culture and aesthetics who convinced Henry Huntington to leave his library to posterity, who convinced the city of Pasadena to build its magnificent City Hall, who started the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, who chose Bertram Goodhue to design the magnificent National Academy Building in Washington and who, of course, build the Yerkes observatory, the Mount Wilson Observatory and the Palomar telescope, named the Hale telescope. He lived up to a line attributed to him, "Never do a small thing when you can carry out a big one." As an example, he imagined into existence the Atheneum and chose Gordon Kaufmann as its architect.

At my inauguration, Maxine Singer, then President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, made Hale the centerpiece of her remarks. She memorably said, "The universe itself was insufficient challenge for Hale's tumultuous brain." Hale personally envisaged Caltech and wrote the prescription for its creation. He believed that technical work was not sufficient to make a great engineer, it required imagination. He said, "we must not forget that the greatest engineer is not the man who is trained merely to understand machines and to apply formulae, but is the man, who, while knowing these things, has not failed to develop his breadth of view and the highest qualities of his imagination." Hale only thought about men, never women, in planning Caltech; but if we forgive him that failing of his time, he is saying that until one passes through the neck of the hourglass and grows broader and wiser, education for rare accomplishment is incomplete.

It is worth reflecting for a moment on what education is really for. Is it to teach skills or material? Sure, it does that and it must. But it has a deeper purpose, to release the inner self, the person you could be. Yes, this is deterministic thinking but we all have our genetically determined strengths and weaknesses and unless we find our optimum path in life we are likely to be frustrated. We now send you out from Caltech, but how sure are you that you have found the path? It is a question to keep asking as you broaden your knowledge of life. It is never too late for a course correction.

Education used to prepare individuals to cope with the complicated world they inherit. But today we provide you tools to do more than cope-you are a potential agent of change in the world. You know how to make things, how to discover things, how to create the future. That is a great responsibility because the world you create is one in which everyone else will also live.

So far, I have only discussed the role Caltech played in the education of you, the members of the Class of 2006. However, there is another group here today who played arguably a more important role in shaping you. I want to recognize the parents of the class of 2006. You are a special group of people. You have successfully transmitted to your children the ability to excel. You did it with your genes, for that we can only be thankful but not give you any particular credit. But you also did it with your perseverance. You convinced, cajoled, argued with and maybe even disciplined your children to get them to recognize the importance of learning and scholarship. You gave of your wisdom, your time and your resources to transmit to your children the values of your heritage. Your children are heroes today but their accomplishments are a credit to you. You can be proud of them but also you are entitled to be proud of yourself. You showed the world what great parenting can produce. I would like the parents of the Class of 2006 to stand and receive the applause of this gathering, particularly of their children.

Let me remind you at this last moment of possible concentration that you, the graduates, are the inheritors of a great tradition. It is the tradition of Hale but it is also the tradition of America. Hale, with his vision of excellence and breadth of training was an exemplar of the tradition of American experimentation and entrepreneurship. The idea of Caltech in America in 1907 when Hale first imagined us, was something brand new for California and even for America. Today we accept the idea that a small school of great excellence is important but without Hale's vision, it would never have been created. The same can be said of our modern entrepreneurs, our Bill Gates and Google boys and, of course, Caltech's two entrepreneurial geniuses and benefactors, Gordon Moore and Arnold Beckman. Entrepreneurship is all about risk and I leave you with one piece of advice. Do not be afraid to take risks. Risky things are often the only ones worth our attention. For me, coming to Caltech was a risk and I will always be grateful that I overcame the instinct to stay in my comfort zone and challenged myself. There will be moments in your life when you will see an opportunity to take a leap. You should take a few of those opportunities but remember that they will be life-changing, will require the same intensity and total devotion that it required to meet the challenge of Caltech. Not only will grasping such opportunities make your life richer and more meaningful, it will also be renewing because only total devotion is totally satisfying.

Thank you.