A Few Spoken Words

I had the honor of being the student speaker for my program's "Pre Commencement" Ceremony on Saturday. Though I didn't choose to read from prepared remarks, I took some time this morning and transcribed what I said from the video my mother took during the speech (thanks Mom). The video quality isn't great, so I'm going to see if I can track down a better video to post. In the meantime, for your reading pleasure (it was really hard figuring out how to punctuate some of it), here it is:

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There was considerable debate as to what my time limit was. It actually changed many times throughout the course of the past few months. I do have a reputation for being a bit long-winded, so if I begin to prattle on too long we decided that the best remedy was that Sophie and Dottie were going to charge on stage and tackle me and drag me off. So hopefully my incentives are in place to actually be brief.

It’s a great honor to be able to speak with you all here today: my new colleagues and our friends and families. But in a way we all have a connection in that we are all students of Public Policy. If you can’t define what exactly Public Policy is that’s perfectly fine. I assure you I can’t really do a very good job of it either.

But Policy is the business of the public; it’s how we take those little bits of ourselves—good, bad and ambivalent—and turn them into a larger community. As I was thinking about what I wanted to say to you all here today, I thought very hard about how I would distill and make concise and break down the two years of experience that I had here; turn it into some useful nugget: something you can take with you, you can carry around in your pocket and pull out as a means to make decisions, to investigate your world and try to figure out how to make it a little better tomorrow.

I stumbled upon what I think is a pretty apt, little, three-word nugget; a bit of advice you can carry with you, something to use to assess your world. Despite the political excitement of the past year it is not “Yes We Can,” it is not “Put America First.” It’s a little, underutilized bit of knowledge that we gain very early in our lives and seem to forget soon after. I haven’t used it enough and hopefully I’ll get more chances.

The three words of which I’m speaking are: I, don’t, know.

It seems a little foolhardy to stand up here after two years of hard study and say that the best that I have to offer you is that I just don’t know, but I find it very applicable in the types of questions that I get to answer. Friends and family come up to me and say: “Brett, do you think the bank bailout’s gonna work?” “Do you think the economic stimulus is correctly put together?” “Do you think that we’re on the right course to make things better in our world—overseas and here at home?”

The honest answer to all of those questions is that I don’t know, and there are a lot of other people out there that don’t know either. And the first step, on the journey of knowledge is to admit that. Those words are not admissions of defeat they are recognitions of opportunity; they are the key that unlocks the door to the next step of our lives.

Great people in our world have dared to say that they didn’t know. In 1962, John Kennedy—standing in a room much like this, except filled with our most brilliant scientists—said to them that as we increase our knowledge, so increases the breadth of our ignorance. Seven years later we landed on the moon, and only because we dared to admit that our ignorance existed. And that’s because “I don’t know” is powerful, but it’s only part of the story.

The entire motto—what I want you to carry with you as you leave here today—is “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.” What’s going to happen to our country? What’s going to happen to us as a people? I don’t know, and few people can claim to, but I will find out.

I know that these types of speeches usually leave people with some type of a “charge” and this might be a tough one to swallow, especially for my more recent B.A. graduates. When I graduated from GW I assure you there was very little in the world that I didn’t know. I had to get married and come back to graduate school in order to figure out exactly how wrong I was. So if you need any less than that, you’re doing better than I was, I assure you.

And I realize that this bottom line—this frame of reference—can apply far beyond the walls of policy and the discussion of things we do in the classroom, but to your entire life. How can you be a good citizen? Or a good friend? Or a good brother, or sister, or spouse? How can you be a good person? How can you apply to your life the values that you want to see in yourself and others?

I don’t know, but I’ll find out.

So if I leave you with anything, I want to leave you with this charge—my colleagues and all our friends in here: find something in your lives everyday—whether it be in your office, or in your home, with your friends, or enemies, or neighbors, or strangers on the street—find something every day about which you can honestly say that you don’t know. What you do next is up to you. But those of us who choose to say that “we don’t know, but we’ll find out” will be those who write the next chapter of our story as a people, as a community, as a nation and as a world.

That’s what I’ve left William and Mary with, and I hope that you walk out of these doors with a little bit of that for yourselves: that we all charge out and find millions of things—because they’re out there—about which to say that we don’t know.

I don’t know if I’m to my limit. I might stand a round for a while.

Thank you very much for having me. To my friends and colleagues: thank you and good luck.