Colbert College
Some quotes by Stephen Colbert giving the commencement address at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. on Saturday:
But I guess the question is, why have a two-time commencement loser like me speak to you today? Well, one of the reasons they already mentioned…I recovered from that slow start. And I was recently named by Time magazine one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World! Yeah! Give it up for me! Basic cable…THE WORLD! I guess I have more fans in Sub-Saharan Africa than I thought. I’m right here on the cover between Katie Couric and Bono. That’s my little picture—a sexy little sandwich between those two.But if you do the math, there are 100 Most Influential People in the World. There are 6.5 billion people in the world. That means that today I am here representing 65 million people. That’s as big as some countries. What country has about 65 million people? Iran? Iran has 65 million people. So, for all intents and purposes, I’m here representing Iran today. Don’t shoot. …
Also globalization, e-mail, cell phones interconnect our nations like never before. It is possible for even the most insulated American to have friends from all over the world. For instance, I recently received an e-mail asking me to help a deposed Nigerian prince who is looking for a business partner to recuperate his fortune. Thanks to the flexibility of global banking, a Swiss bank account is ready and waiting for my share of his money. I know, because I just e-mailed him my Social Security number. …
And when you enter the workforce, you will find competition from those crossing our all-too-poorest borders. Now I know you’re all going to say, “Stephen, Stephen, immigrants built America.” Yes, but here’s the thing—it’s built now. I think it was finished in the mid-70s sometime. At this point it’s a touch-up and repair job. But thankfully Congress is acting and soon English will be the official language of America. Because if we surrender the national anthem to Spanish, the next thing you know, they’ll be translating the Bible. God wrote it in English for a reason! So it could be taught in our public schools.
So we must build walls. A wall obviously across the entire southern border. That’s the answer. That may not be enough—maybe a moat in front of it, or a fire-pit. Maybe a flaming moat, filled with fire-proof crocodiles. And we should probably wall off the northern border as well. Keep those Canadians with their socialized medicine and their skunky beer out. And because immigrants can swim, we’ll probably want to wall off the coasts as well. And while we’re at it, we need to put up a dome, in case they have catapults. And we’ll punch some holes in it so we can breathe. Breathe free. It’s time for illegal immigrants to go—right after they finish building those walls. Yes, yes, I agree with me. …
I have two last pieces of advice. First, being pre-approved for a credit card does not mean you have to apply for it. And lastly, the best career advice I can give you is to get your own TV show. It pays well, the hours are good, and you are famous. And eventually some very nice people will give you a doctorate in fine arts for doing jack squat.
Videos of Colbert are available on YouTube.
I attended Knox College my freshmen year. It was both one of the most rigerous and demanding, yet intellectually rewarding experiences of my life.
Knox has three trimesters a year (roughly two months long). They also have a program called “Freshman Preceptorial”. Preceptorial is an intellectual boot camp along the lines of liberal arts education. They attempt to combine all normal freshman introductory topics in English composition and philosophy and other related topics into a seminar format. The best Professors along with one teacher’s assistant (usually a masters student) would teach a section, where there were no more than 17 students in a section.
When I was at Knox, fully one third of the Freshman year was Preceptorial (one class each semester). The first class was “Being Human” – basically a class on what it meant to be human. We read, then discussed, then wrote papers on everything from Freud, to Shakespeare, to Barash, to Tillich, to Marx, and so on. The second class was “History of an Idea” in our term the idea we studied was “Opportunity in America, from the closing of the American Fronteer in 1890 to the start of World War II.” We read Dos Possos, Emma Goldman, Marx, Richard Wright, Louis K. Brandies, the original “what’s the matter with Kansas” and so on. The final class was “Ways of Knowing.” This was the class, ironically I remember the least, but it was also the one which was conceptually the most difficult to grasp. How does one know? What is knowledge? What is art? What is Science? What is creativity? What is Invention? and What is discovery? In many ways this is important to the information revolution that we are still in.
During that first year I wrote 50 papers (some for other classes, but most for Preceptorial). I can’t say that I did very well – I was (and am) young for my age, my analytical thinking and reading comprehension were good, but I really didn’t understand how to write a good paper – but it did teach me how to think, and to a certain extent, never left that class. I am always trying to figure everthing out. I rarely got a grade above a B on my papers. But because of that, in my own head I kept taking the class, I lived the class, out of frustration for not having done better. As a result when I went to law school some 18 years later, I almost always got an “A” on my papers. Ironaccly, its multiple choice that gave me problems in law school – amazing how a complete revolution of change had occurred to me over the years.
I left Knox after the first year to attend University of Arizona. I decided to major in Geography, and that meant going to a state school and Arizona had some innovation going on at the time. Beside, Knox was a small college in a small town and was perhaps the coldest and snowiest year of my life. The tempature did not rise above 45% until well into March, and there was several feet of snow on the ground. The combination of the small town, small college and rough weather made me feel like I was boxed in – I had to leave. On top of that I had learned that they had this technique of reducing scholarship amounts each year you were there, which I thought was a little bit of the old ‘bate and switch’ game.
After all this time, I feel like the education I got during that first year, in just Preceptorial, was perhaps the most potent and inportant learning experience I have had in my life. I really think all college students should be forced to go through it. It was brutal. If forced you to learn how to think and they forced you to go to some truly frightening places where the world no longer made any sense to you at all, and you had to find your way back.
Knox is one of the few institutions that I have given any money to. In law school I met a recent Knox graduate. She said that Precept was only one trimester now. Too brutal to sustain, I suppose. Students want choice, they can go elsewhere. I am glad to see that they made the news. It is a small college in a small corner of Illinois, but it has robust academics.