< Back to front page Text size – +

Kerry urges UMass Boston grads to harness idealism

E-mail|Link|Comments () May 29, 2009 01:21 PM

(AP photo/Lisa Poole)
UMass Boston Chancellor J. Keith Motley presents a medal to Senator John Kerry today at the college's commencement.

By Peter Schworm, Globe Staff

Exhorting graduates at the University of Massachusetts at Boston to look beyond the current "time of crisis" and work for a better future, Senator John Kerry called on students to put their youthful idealism toward such contemporary priorities as climate change and clean energy.

Speaking at commencement ceremonies this morning at the Columbia Point campus, Kerry urged students not to give in to despair or trammel their ambitions at a moment of economic anxiety. Like their parents before them, they should turn crisis into opportunity, he said.

"Each generation of Americans has attempted the impossible, and they have succeeded," he told an audience of some 10,000. "One generation plants the tree, the next gets the shade.

"We are all called to the legwork of democracy," he added.

Invoking the recent Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, who grew up in public housing in the Bronx, Kerry told the 3,000 graduates, many of them the first in their family to receive a college degree, that such success stories are increasingly common.

"They are now, simply, in a word, American," he said. By graduating from college, the UMass Boston students are already "achieving what some people still don't think is possible."

In a light-hearted speech sprinkled with quips, the former presidential candidate recalled delivering the university's graduation speech in 1988, ruefully noting that some of today's graduates had not yet been born.

"The world we live in is one the class of 1988 would have had a hard time imagining," he said.

Calling climate change as pressing an issue as nuclear proliferation, Kerry said breakthroughs in renewable energy held the potential to "transform the economy" more than the Internet.

As the rain fell steadily on graduates huddled under ponchos and umbrellas, Kerry joked that he had never enjoyed so much power in the US Senate.

"I am all that stands between you and your degrees, and getting dry," he said.

Kerry also praised the accomplishments of Dominique Powell, a former Marine who received the John F. Kennedy Award for Academic Excellence, UMass Boston's top student prize. Noting that Powell is considering a career in politics, Kerry quipped that he hoped it was in the House of Representatives. As a former Navy sailor, he said, he knew better than to "tangle with a Marine from UMass Boston."

In addition to Kerry, the university conferred honorary degrees on Joseph P. Kennedy II, a former congressman and the founder of Citizens Energy; Sister Margaret Leonard, the leader of Project Hope, a Boston anti-poverty group; and track-and-field great Edwin Moses, a philanthropist and chairman of a worldwide sports academy that promotes youth sports to advance social change.