PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Office of Communications
Stanhope Hall
Princeton, New Jersey 08544-5264
Telephone 609-258-3601; Fax 609-258-1301Contact: Mary Caffrey 609/258-5748
Date: June 2, 1998
Valedictory
By Andrew M. Neitzke ’98
Thank you. It is a genuine honor to be standing here right now. I think we’re all in for quite a show this morning. As you all probably know, the Class of 1998 is supposed to walk out through the FitzRandolph Gate in a few minutes. And as many of you know, that gate occupies a special place in the folklore of this campus: you can only go out once -- if you ever walk through the gate during your tenure at Princeton, you cannot graduate with your class. But now here’s the ugly secret which apparently President Shapiro does not know: I walked out that gate once. And yet somehow I’ve made it to the day of Commencement. So the only conclusion I can draw, is that sometime between now and 12:00 I am going to be struck by lightning. I hope you all enjoy the show.
I guess I may as well start and see how far I get.
I want to begin by giving thanks -- and I hope that just for a moment you’ll let me be presumptuous enough to speak for the whole class -- I want to give thanks first to our families who have put up with us for twenty-one years, and in many cases have made some tough sacrifices to give us the opportunity to be here today. You are the single most important reason we are here; and none of us could have done it without you. Thank you.
I also want to give thanks to the University. I think we all know that Princeton has given us a lot over these four years. But there is one thing that is important but often gets overlooked, which is that the University has made a substantial investment in us. It’s easy to lose sight of that. When you’re getting this enormous bill every semester, it creates the impression that the University is some kind of corporation and it’s selling you an education. But that’s just not how it works: the University is not making a profit on us. In fact, even if they didn’t give anyone any financial aid at all, the University still couldn’t break even on us. To cover the cost of having us around, they would have to charge every student something like $40,000 a year. Fortunately, they don’t do that -- instead, they work like crazy to raise money from all kinds of other sources just so they can help pay our tab.
The point is, we didn’t really do anything to earn that money. It’s an enormous gift that each one of us has received, and I think we should all remember to thank Princeton for that.
So a lot of people have done a lot of work to get us here today. I’m sure our parents could have done something else with their $100,000. The Trustees are smart people and I’m sure they could think of plenty of ways to spend $4 billion dollars. But somewhere along the way it has been decided that these resources should be set aside, brought to bear on the problem of educating us. Now at last it is our turn to prove that we are worth it. I don’t mean that to sound like some kind of onerous obligation -- personally I have no doubts about whether we are worth it; the Class of 1998 is the finest group of people I’ve ever had the honor to be associated with -- but rather I mean that we have a great opportunity now. For twenty-one years we have basically been living with the training wheels on; everything we’ve done, we’ve done with other people looking out for us, carefully nurturing our potential. They’ve brought us to this critical juncture; and now we are ready finally to put all that preparation to work. Just like the kid on the bike, I think we’ll find that life without the training wheels is more exhilarating than we ever expected; and I’m sure we’ll do our benefactors proud.