Familiar words from governor
CAMBRIDGE - The economy is in turmoil. Middle-class families everywhere are just one paycheck, one illness away from poverty. But out of crisis comes opportunity for change.
With those words, Governor Deval Patrick yesterday sent more than 2,200 MIT graduates out into the world.
"I ask you, from out of this crisis, to use all your creativity in service of change," Patrick told the robed students, their mortarboards spread in a sea of black beneath overcast skies in the university's Killian Court. "Make a new economy that expands opportunity out to the marginalized and not just up to the well-connected."
Inspiring words, for sure. But also familiar.
Most of the nuggets Patrick had already imparted at five previous commencements: his personal story and the economic gulf his family crossed in just one generation, his accounting of a White House dinner with his old friend Barack Obama, his charge for graduates to embrace change.
That repetition did not go unnoticed yesterday by the graduates, who took advantage of the occasion for some good-natured fun and wrote up a two-page worksheet drawing comparisons with previous talks.
"They've been nearly identical," said a footnote at the bottom of the worksheet, titled "19.COM: Problem Set 1, Commencement Dynamics." "Deval went to the inauguration. Barack is awesome. Deval's daughter loves the Four Seasons Hotel. That's the American Dream. Oh, but the economy sucks. Perhaps you should be a 'pragmatic idealist.' "
Jason S. Ku, a 22-year-old graduate in mechanical engineering, spent much of Patrick's speech filling out a bingo game on the front of the worksheet, marking in black pen each time Patrick uttered words like "welfare" and "economy in crisis."
"I got bingo a number of times," Ku said. He then moved onto the Mad Libs portion of the worksheet, which asked graduates to read passages lifted from Patrick's previous speeches and fill in the blank with appropriate words.
"It was basically word for word what he was saying," said fellow graduate Dan Rodgers, who received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and was peering at another student's worksheet during Patrick's speech. "It was kind of creepy as it started happening."
Patrick kicked off the commencement season with a speech at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge on May 14, the only time during his spring lineup that he deviated from the script, peppering his speech with messages about faith and God. Then came Wheaton College and Bridgewater State on the same day. Tufts University was next, then North Shore Community College. MIT was his sixth and final stop.
"A consistent message is important, and this graduation season the governor told all graduates, whether from North Shore Community College or MIT, that the economic crisis is a platform for change and they will be the ones to pull the country and state through to better days," said Kimberly Haberlin, Patrick's deputy press secretary.
"MIT students are world-renowned for their inventiveness and wit," she said. "They did not disappoint today."
In February, when MIT announced its selection of Patrick to headline the commencement, the press release focused on his interest in improving statewide energy efficiency, infrastructure, and transportation. MIT president Susan Hockfield touted him as "a champion of biotechnology, alternative energy, and educational rigor." The head of MIT's department of electrical engineering and computer science department, who is also chairman of the commencement committee, said Patrick's life sciences and clean energy initiatives, key topics of MIT research, were "great examples of cooperation between government and academia."
But Patrick - who, as governor, automatically has a seat on the MIT Corporation, the university's governing body - made no mention yesterday of clean energy or biotechnology during the MIT ceremony, which took place in a courtyard with blossoming rhododendruns.
Nonetheless, many students still appreciated his words. Some called his talk uplifting, relished the personal anecdotes, and commended his references to MIT's contributions to science and technology.
Patrick did acknowledge that graduates "have been trained to value originality in the service of the common good and to see advancements in science and technology as vital forces in the world." He also sprinkled in plenty of quasi-scientific historical references.
"It was predictable," Ku said, "but I still liked it."
But as he flipped through the commencement program and saw the list of previous speakers, he said he could not help but feel a twinge of jealousy for previous classes who drew national and international figures such as Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore.
Ku comforted himself with the fact that he will stay on at MIT for a master's degree - "to put off deciding what to do with my life," he said - and will have another shot at hearing an original commencement speech.
Tracy Jan can be reached at tjan@globe.com. 