Ye Olde Almost Mater

Color me nervous. If I have seemed distracted for the past couple weeks it is because for the past couple weeks I have been distracted. It is Friday morning as this is being written, and early Saturday I will travel the few blocks from my motel room to the Cal Poly campus and deliver a commencement speech--twice--to separate crowds of 3,500 apiece.

Now don’t ask why they are holding a graduation ceremony in December. It baffles me too. Perhaps some sort of year-end, tax-break angle is at work. More likely, it has to do with the growing popularity--and graduate count--of what I like to call my almost mater.

That phrase--”almost mater”--is, of course, a feeble attempt to joke around the fact that, technically, I am a drop-out. I left Cal Poly 20 years ago in my senior year to take a job covering night meetings for the Fresno Bee. Not that I consider myself a drop-out, per se. I prefer to see myself as an active student still, someone who just sort of got distracted for a while. Any year now, I keep promising myself, I’m going back to finish.

They probably will put it on my tombstone:

Here Lies King

He Only Had 40 Units Left To Go . . .

*

Part of my nervousness involves plain old stage fright, which I carry around in bulk. And part of it stems from the fact that I plan to stand up in that packed gymnasium and confess my academic predicament to these shining graduates and their families. The campus public relations department kindly left the matter vague in the press releases, saying only that the commencement speaker “attended” Cal Poly.

In the speech, however, (and I have been writing it almost constantly in my head--and finally on paper--for the last two weeks) I intend to go right at it. Now, fortunately, I won’t need to tarry long on the many downsides of my wayward academic course. After all, these are graduates: No need to tell them not to do what I did, because they already have done what I didn’t do.

Instead, after softening them up with a few barnyard jokes--Cal Poly remains, in its heart, an ag school--I plan to linger a bit on the one upside-down advantage I have tried to salvage from my state of suspended education. One thing about leaving college early: It has made me forever insecure about those missing 40 units, made me in spirit as well as in fact a perpetual student. I have felt constantly a hand against the small of my back, pushing me to read more, listen more, learn more, to catch up--and, yes, maybe, to cover up.

So I’ll tell them to be proud of that sheepskin, but also suggest it should not mark the end of their education. Rather, it should signify the beginning. They will be amazed how fast all the facts stuffed into their brains over the past four years fall out, disappear, become irrelevant. Hopefully, what they have learned is how to learn, and also, I suppose, to love the learning.

After that, a quick cut back to the animal jokes.

Moo.

*

The final point I intend to leave with the Class of ’97 (December Batch) is that, contrary to the grumbling masses, California is not dead. I don’t mean California the geographic entity, but rather the idea of California, the promise of California--a pact that is perhaps best exemplified by the extraordinary Cal State system.

Yes, goes my text, California is changing, but change is something quite apart from decline. Put another way, the dream isn’t dead, it just comes in more colors, and sometimes speaks with an accent. I will argue that the pioneers and the boom builders in fact pulled the easier assignments. For these young Californians a far more difficult task awaits: The challenge of learning how to get by with what we’ve got.

How to further stretch out the water, now that 4,000 dams have been built, and every river but one tamed? Where to build shelter for 20 million additional Californians? How to ensure that every child who has earned it can attend a public college as good as Cal Poly? In short, how do we squeeze together so many people from so many places and still keep it, well, California?

Those are the questions to be answered on their watch, and I trust they will come up with something better than building border fences and burying good farmland under cheap sprawl. They are young and bright and well educated. And, after Saturday, they--unlike certain parties we know--will hold the sheepskins to prove it.