September 07, 2005

The Fletcher School Academic Convocation Remarks on Behalf of the Students - Nirmalaguhan Wigneswaran, Class of 2006

Dean Bosworth, The Honorable Shijuro Ogata, distinguished guests, faculty, staff and my dear fellow students! A very warm welcome on behalf of the student community.

I was honored, albeit curious, when Dean Sheehan invited me to speak today. A puzzle not entirely solved until yesterday, when I was informed that a welcoming speech is generally bland and perfunctory. Even many of the first years, who have had occasion to have been interviewed and later spoken to by me at open house and then at orientation last week, would agree then, that I am eminently qualified to discharge this onerous duty.

However, I have decided to stray into unchartered waters. I have taken the advice of a past speaker at convocation and have decided to be honest; now honesty as you know is seldom bland and never perfunctory. You must understand that this requires some effort, since being a lawyer and a student at a school of law and diplomacy one tends to be economical with the truth.

Speakers at these events tend to wax eloquently about Fletcher’s strengths. I believe that there are many other facets of Fletcher which require mention. Pardon me then, if I depart from custom and reflect on three of what I feel are more important. To be fair, I think it is apposite that the students at Fletcher be charged first. We as students at Fletcher, I must confess, are not the most competitive. Second, the institution itself does not promote tolerance. Finally, it is abundantly clear that Fletcher does not support or believe in independence. Permit me to substantiate my allegations.

What Fletcher students are most is “cooperative” – not “competitive”. Competition is secondary to community. The competition is of course of the highest standard as far as competition goes - for students strive to better themselves. Maslow, perhaps, would have placed them at the very apex of his hierarchy – as the needs are more to do with self actualization rather than ego. Having said that, it is not some purely altruistic reason that shapes this behavior – the diversity of the student population compels it. Competition tends to lose its significance when in a class of 175 students, you have more than 40 countries represented, more than 80 students from outside the US and students’ ages range from 21 – 56. Add to that more than a hundred diverse courses and people from completely different backgrounds intent on pursuing different careers and the permutations are astronomical.

The exploits of my friends both before Fletcher and during the summer when I was riveted to their descriptive emails, blog entries and other missives, never ceases to amaze me. Imagine my surprise when I came to Fletcher to find a student who had not only been in Sri Lanka but had been part of the Norwegian peace mission there and who had not only held discussions with the Sri Lankan President but with the Head of the Tamil Tigers. It did tend to steal my thunder though as my only claim to fame was that I hailed from Sri Lanka.

Vividly descriptive reports from those in Khartoum and Darfour during a very tense period kept us all glued for more information and fearful of the safety of our dear friends. Cheerful postcards from Nepal after interviews with the Maoist rebels, blogs from Beijing and Beirut, mails from Mumbai and Malawi and stories from Syria and Sri Lanka and scores of other places continued to reinforce the breadth and depth of the Fletcher mafia. The cliched term comes as no surprise then, given the commitment to community and cooperation, over competition. This sense of community is not restricted to the students. The sense of community and camaraderie extends to the faculty and staff as well. So much so that some of them have even attempted the seemingly incomprehensible game of cricket. (to those outside the Commonwealth that is!)

When I said that Fletcher does not promote tolerance, I meant that it promotes “acceptance” rather than “tolerance”. To me the word tolerence indicates a sense of superiority. It is defined as “the disposition to be patient with or indulgent to the opinions or practices of others” thus the term is inherently bigotted. Its primary meaning after all is “The action or practice of enduring or sustaining pain or hardship.” At Fletcher, principally due to the diverse community referred to earlier, the tendency is to accept others’ views – not necessarily as being correct but as being plausible. Not merely “tolerating” others’ opinions.

In fact quantum physics surprisingly helps us understand the inherent subjective nature of our views even better. Take for example the famous thought experiment termed Schroedinger’s Cat, where a cat is locked in a box where there is 50% chance of the release of a poisonous gas and the question is at what stage do we move from the realm of possibilities or mixture of states of the cat being dead or alive, to the certainity one state or the other. Let me add a caveat here for the benefit of Prof Kahn and strong Fletcher environmental lobby that this is only a thought experiment and there is no record of Schroedinger or any other physicist actually poisoning cats! Those familiar with this thought experiment would realise that even in macroscopic systems the event is thought to be never independent of the observer. In the subatomic level of course it has been long established that the act of observation itself shapes the event. Fletcher thus reinforces that objectivity is a myth and that we should be ever willing to accept the possibility of alternate viewpoints.

This brings us to my final point. Fletcher in numerous ways reinforces dependency. To attempt to be independent in an intrinsically interconnected world is impossible. We at Fletcher understand this. The very interdisciplinary nature of the courses reinforces the dependency of the international order on diverse disciplines. One need not have recourse to the Butterfly Effect or wave-particle duality (no more physics – I promise!) to explain the interconnectedness of the world we live in or the tremendous effects one small act can have in a completely different area. In the Fletcher microcosm the social list serve and the reactions it spawns is evidence enough!

In conclusion, my dear friends, particularly those of you who are recent additions, I hope you will bear with these “shortcomings”. Nay, in fact I hope you would add to them and foster them. For these attributes are what define Fletcher, what make us ambassadors rather than mere alumnae of Fletcher one day and what makes us truly global in our perspective.

Thank you.

Posted by jessica at September 7, 2005 10:09 AM