Jody Lewen's Keynote Address from the UC Berkeley December Graduation Ceremony

What an incredible opportunity, and a tremendous honor, to address all of you here today. First of all I’d like to say welcome and congratulations, both to the graduates, and to all the friends and family members, the faculty, and the university staff and administrators who are here. What a phenomenal accomplishment for each of you. I’d like to propose that you let this day be a rare and much-deserved moment, when you think only about what you have accomplished, and completely let go, just for a while, of whatever work lies ahead.

I’ve thought a lot over the past several weeks about what I wanted to say to all of you on this special occasion of yours. To be honest, I was both amazed and a bit intimidated by the invitation. (It did occur to me at least once while I was working on this talk that it might in fact be some sort of cosmic “pay back” for all the challenging writing and public speaking assignments I handed out while I was a graduate student instructor here at Cal: “Speak for 15 minutes on a topic of your choice in front of two thousand people…”)

To cope with the challenge, I began asking almost everyone I knew what they thought I should talk to you all about -- I just started interviewing everyone. Students, teachers, people of all ages, prisoners, free people – everybody I ran into.

I actually wish I had taped some those discussions – some of them were really interesting. But what struck me the most in the responses I got – perhaps not surprisingly – was that almost everyone mentioned the theme of inspiration. I thought a lot about what a cliché that concept is in certain respects, and yet how vital and meaningful it is at the same time – to inspire and to feel inspired. I also ended up thinking a great deal about the role of inspiration, both in the context of education and within the political sphere.

What I find particularly fascinating is what one might call the relational dimension of inspiration – in other words, inspiration as something that occurs between human beings. It seems to me that on the one hand, inspiration describes a sense of energy and excitement produced by intellectual or aesthetic stimulation, or sometimes by the observation of great efforts, the results of which we value and respect deeply. It’s a kind of rush of creative feeling, sort of a low-grade euphoria.

But inspiration also seems to refer to the way in which certain such encounters with the world awe us in such a way that they make us want to emulate, or participate in what we see. We want to join in, to actually get up out of our chairs and get involved. (And of course for the activist, this is the gold standard, right? It’s the thing that all of us who are trying to change something about the world are constantly trying to achieve trying: we’re trying to make people want to get up.)

But this mobilizing dimension of inspiration also seems to entail a sense of empowerment – an elated feeling that the thing that we’re witnessing is proving itself to be not only profoundly meaningful but within the realm of the possible. We’re motivated to make a serious effort at the same moment we realize that something monumental and ambitious can be accomplished – that we would not be foolish to imagine, or to strive for it, as we might otherwise fear. So you might say that in a nutshell, inspiration is essentially about feeling flooded, or flooding others, with a sense of imagination, drive, and optimism, all at the same time.

So if I can, I’d like to take you from this extremely abstract level, to a much more concrete one, by telling you about a very small but I think significant detail from my work life.

I’m going to backtrack for a moment and start by saying that many of the students I meet in the College Program at San Quentin have lived long stretches of their lives – including both childhood and adulthood – without a great deal of sustained contact with anyone who not only cared deeply about them, but was also in a position to effectively address their particular needs. It often seems like virtually everyone I meet there and have a chance to really get to know, has experienced the sense of being utterly unprotected, in a very unsafe environment or situation. Many have also, in some sense or another, been very badly hurt.

There are a number of ways in which these facts manifest themselves when these individuals arrive as students in the classroom. Initially, many students react with considerable caution or skepticism to basically everything. They find it hard to trust either the teacher or their classmates – or even just to believe that the teacher is simply there to help them learn. This mostly shows up in their seeming quite timid or reserved in the classroom – they play their cards very close to their chests.

And yet once they wrap their minds around the fact that their teachers do not mean them any harm and really are there just to help them, most people do begin to relax, and to really soak up all of what it means to be in school. They learn, they grow, they mature, and they revel in their own progress and in that of their peers. A lot of people in this environment also go on to develop an extremely strong desire to help other people. It’s almost as if this were a reaction to the evolution they’d been through themselves, and perhaps also to details of their individual histories, or their individual crimes, or some combination.

The situation in which I witness these issues most intensely is at the very beginning – at the New Student Orientation, which we run at the start of each semester. This is essentially a presentation that mostly covers the logistics of participating in the College Program – things like paperwork, and so forth. We also go over various program rules and regulations, as well as some of the most common obstacles to students’ completing courses, and ultimately their degrees.

We talk, for example, about how hard it can be to study when you’re in prison, where people are almost always tired. (All these students work full-time during the day and go to class at night.) There’s no privacy or quiet, but there is plenty of often very extreme distraction and disruption. On top of that there are always a few folks who make fun of you for being a “square,” and push you to abandon your studies and come hang out with them on the yard like in the old days.

Then there are the material challenges: not having a desk or a chair of one’s own, or access to a computer. There are the lockdowns, the cancellations, and the communication difficulties, because there is no email or regular phone access.

We also talk at the orientation about how intimidated people sometimes are in the beginning of their studies. Once students at San Quentin get into the swing of things, wild horses generally can’t drag them away from school. But in the beginning, as highly motivated as they are, many students have lots of doubts about themselves intellectually. Many have had terrible experiences in school before they got to prison, and as they sit in the classroom those memories come back. They start to feel full of dread, and they start thinking: no way am I going to be able to do this.

So one of the main goals of the New Student Orientation is to talk people through the various steps and stages – not only of intimidation and self-doubt, but through the points at which things will begin to get much easier. We also talk about why it’s worth hanging on – how being in school and getting a degree can change a person’s life, both while in prison and after they’re released.

I should also explain that no matter what we do, there are always some students who come to this orientation whom we will never see again – and we don’t always get to find out why. This always really frustrates me. (The first week of the semester I end up running around like a mother hen, marching over to the cellblock to get the officer at the desk to let me page the guys who are missing over the PA system – basically acting like a lunatic. Picture a truancy officer inside a prison.) And you know, I may sound like a drag but I also once had a guy almost burst into tears because he was so moved that I had noticed that he hadn’t shown up for class, and that I had taken the time to come track him down.

During the first week of this current fall semester at San Quentin, I ran into a new, rather shy man whom I’d just met a few weeks earlier at the New Student Orientation. He’d been excited about school, but also quite nervous, and so I was especially glad to see him there, looking all happy and relaxed, the way students often look at the end of their first night of classes. He’d made it through the first hurdle.

So when I saw him outside the building at the end of the night, I said, “Hey! Nice to see you here!” He looked a little startled and then said to me, well, after that inspiring speech you gave at the orientation, how could we not show up?

This will certainly not seem like a very momentous exchange, but in a sense this is precisely my point.

I had been doing my job – orienting new students. But for this particular student, perhaps in the psychological economy of his life, the whole situation was such an unusual one that for him it was an exceptional event – and so for him, the thing that in my mind was just talk, became a speech.

I was obviously very glad to hear I’d had a positive impact on him, but at the same time it actually made me really sad, and a bit confused, that in my mind the interaction had seemed so ordinary. When I think about it now, I realize that the confusion was not about the simplicity itself of the thing that had proved helpful, but about the broader implication of how startlingly little it had taken to help him so greatly.

How can it be that something so relatively plentiful and ordinary in the life of one person, can be so scarce and precious in the life of another?

I realize, again, that there are probably no novel observations here – each of us has been stunned at one time or another by the unequal distribution in the world of pretty much everything that is precious, and also by the realization that for such terribly little effort, or with such incredibly minimal resources, we can have such a huge impact.

And yet it strikes me that while we may know all this on a rational level, I’m not so sure that we have fully absorbed it on a deeper, personal level. In other words, I’m not sure we fully understand just how powerful we are, and just how effective we can be. And even more to the point, I think we may often fail to recognize that our greatest strengths lie in the ways in which we are capable of interacting with other individual human beings. I would suggest to you that so much that we think of as utterly inconsequential, or that we are even completely oblivious to, is actually at the heart of where we are most powerful.

Look not only at the situation I was just describing, but look at its complexity. On the one hand, I apparently inspired this individual student. But on the other hand, look at the impact he had on me. Someone offered me 15 minutes to talk to 2000 people and I’m talking about him. I walked away from that exchange outside the education building, like I have from any number of other exchanges with students (and with teachers) at San Quentin, feeling so small, so humbled, and so deeply grateful to have the job I have.

Early on in my work at San Quentin I had a student say to me as he walked out of class, if I’d had English teachers like these when I was a kid, my whole life would have been different.

I can’t tell you how often I learn about terrible things that happened because some thing or another that every human being on earth should be able to take for granted – everything from food and shelter, to encouragement, to a good English teacher – was not available.

People don’t do the best, they can, they do the best they think they can, based on how they see themselves, and the world. They act based on the options they think they have, not the ones anyone else believes are open to them. This is why teaching and listening, in their broadest, most compassionate senses, are what will eventually change the world: individual moments of genuine caring and connection can transform a person’s entire life.

And yet in the meantime: it seems to me that this society is basically drowning in six inches of water. We imagine that our problems are so vast and complex and intractable – which in some senses they surely are – but we imagine this to such a degree that we really, if you think about it, essentially lose sight of what we can do to help each other and ourselves. We are, as a society, overwhelmed, intimidated, and full of self-doubt.

Even more, our responses to the distress of other human beings are, I think, actually determined by the depth of our aversion to feeling powerless to help. Think about it: we almost always more or less glaze over in the face of the simplest suffering, unless we have strong reason to believe (or even compelling proof) that we can be effective in changing the situation. We are the new students in the classroom, playing our cards close to our chests, all but paralyzed with a fear of failure.

I believe we are so deeply thrilled when we see others having any sort of impact, no matter how modest, because it alleviates, at least temporarily, that deeper worry that there is, in a sense, no hope for us – that there is no way for us to go back for all the people we know perfectly well have been left behind.

I think this may go a great way towards explaining the hostility we so often experience towards people who are in distress – the collective determination with which we seek out ways to repudiate past, present, or future responsibility, even when doing so flies in the face of our own self-interest.

I would suggest that this is perhaps the greatest dilemma that we face today – it is not that the solutions to our problems don’t exist – either in the world or within our own minds. It is rather that we lack the confidence and sense of security that would allow us to express, or even to insist upon, the pursuit of those ideas.

And because we don’t do this, others don’t hear those ideas expressed. And that means they also don’t get the chance to participate in shaping and cultivating those ideas, or to experience the joy of eventually implementing them. And as a result, the vital details of a vibrant and just society remain in our minds, as remote and underdeveloped abstractions.

The way I see it, our greatest hope lies with all of you – going out on a limb, challenging and trusting each other, risking yourselves. In the coming weeks, months, and years, you will have moments of tremendous confusion and self-doubt, but trust me, and most importantly, trust yourself: there is no one on earth more powerful, or more capable of being effective, than you are. Thank you very much, and congratulations.