‘Poised between memory and possibility’: McInnis urges grads to celebrate ‘glorious’ memories — and the forgettable ones

This year’s Yale College seniors surely have memories so indelible that they feel like the “defining” events of their college years, President Maurie McInnis told graduating seniors Sunday.

After all, she noted in her Baccalaureate address on Old Campus, the Class of 2026 has done many notable things: They’ve researched quantum error correction, paleobotany, and Mesoamerican pseudo-glyphs. They’ve created health technology companies, musical technologies, and new technologies to help manage all the other technologies.

They’ve staged productions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” and written original theatrical works about Nietzsche and a beauty parlor (“To be clear,” she quipped, “those are two different productions.”) 

And the class was the first since the Class of 1908 to cheer the football team to wins over Harvard for four consecutive seasons.

“I’m sure you can recall these events with precision, because they’re some of the defining events in your class’s history, and they’re the material with which you’ve already begun forming a community of memory,” she said.

“But I promise you this. The way you remember your college years, and the way you remember yourselves and each other, is going to change. Because you can’t anticipate right now how both these glorious events that I’ve just enumerated, and your perhaps more forgettable undertakings, will assume new meaning in some future moment.”

To illustrate her point, she shared examples from the lives of notable Yale alumni.

“One took a mediocre essay he wrote for an economics class,” she said, “and turned its thesis into the largest express transportation company in the world.” (Fred Smith, a member of the Class of ’66, started Federal Express just a few years after graduating from Yale College.)

“Another took what he had learned writing what he later deemed ‘banal and imitative’ poetry for the Yale Literary Magazine and became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature,” she said. (This was Sinclair Lewis, a member, as it happens, of the Class of 1908. His papers are now held at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.)

On their graduation days, neither man could have predicted what those early attempts would presage, McInnis said.

And as an example of how graduates’ memories can solidify, deepen, and become worthy of commemoration, she said, this year’s class needed only to glance back at the bronze statue of Theodore Dwight Woolsey, Yale’s 10th president, sitting cross-legged behind them outside Dwight Hall. 

The statue of Woolsey (whose shiny toe is famously rubbed by students for good luck) was placed there as an alumni gift in 1896, about seven years after his death. By that time, McInnis said, the direction of his students’ postgraduate years had confirmed what they had already suspected: “This professor had changed their lives.”

“You’ve all had teachers here whose instruction has offered you fundamental knowledge, knowledge that’s propelled you to discover your own ideals, ideals that you’ll spend the rest of your life seeking,” McInnis went on. “These teachers have helped you recognize yourself in the mirror of your future. 

“But the monuments you’ll build to them won’t be in massive bronze,” she added. “Their monuments will be the possibilities that you’ll fulfill, the possibilities that they first opened for you here.” 

There is also a way in which memories are shaped collectively, McInnis told her audience of imminent college graduates. Her own thinking on this subject was shaped by a book, “On Collective Memory,” which she read as a Yale graduate student. In that book, the author, Maurice Halbwachs, a French sociologist, posited that memory is subjective, shaped by relationships and interactions.

“Your memories, like your emotions today, are a collage,” she said. “A collage of bright and disparate and sometimes even clashing recollections, glued together by your interactions with each other, and the stories you tell and the stories you hear from each other.” 

That shared remembrance, she said, is a binding force that will keep the class connected to each other and to Yale. 

As she closed her address, McInnis returned to the question of how the graduates will use their memories of Yale to shape the future. And she offered a recommendation: 

“Hold onto both the glorious and the forgettable,” she said. “Because you don’t know what’s going to happen. You can’t know right now how some minor or grand story from Yale, how some concept you encountered in a class, how some remembered agreement or disagreement, will influence the decisions you’ll make, and the work you’ll do, that will change your life, and the lives of others.”

While the stories you tell will change, she told the graduates, “may your hearts turn ever toward each other, in gratitude that you could spend these years together. And may your hearts turn ever toward humanity, as you take what you’ve learned here, and shape the future that will reshape the past.”