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A sense of deja vu at governor's commencement address

E-mail|Link|Comments () June 5, 2009 04:27 PM

(David L. Ryan/Globe Staff)

An impressive setting, but the governor's words gave some a sense of deja vu.

By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff

CAMBRIDGE – It's a commonplace suspicion to think that all commencement speeches are alike.

Leave it to a bunch of MIT students to make a science out of it.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, in his address today, asked more than 2,200 MIT graduates today to "use all your creativity in service of change."

"Make a new economy that expands opportunity out to the marginalized and not just up to the well-connected," he told a sea of people gathered in a courtyard by the Charles River.

But most of the nuggets the governor would impart in the speech -- his personal story and the economic gulf his family crossed in just one generation, his account of a White House dinner with his old friend Barack Obama, his call for graduates to embrace change -- had already been said. By the governor himself.

This was, after all, Patrick's sixth -- and final -- commencement speech of the season. And MIT students being, well, MIT students, they took advantage of the occasion for some good-natured, geeky fun, writing up a clever two-page worksheet drawing comparisons between Patrick's speech today and his previous speeches.

"They've been nearly identical," said a footnote at the bottom. "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 key 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 predictable," Ku said of the speech, "but I still liked it." Still, as he browsed through the commencement program and saw the list of previous speakers, he said he couldn't help but feel a twinge of jealousy for previous classes who drew the likes of Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton and Al Gore.