War Comes to Rockford
The graduation was a major national story, but you’d never have known it from reading the Sun-Times and Tribune, which kissed off the event in briefs published days later, or from Hedges’s own New York Times, which ignored it until last Sunday, when its national survey of commencement speeches mentioned in passing that “perhaps the least-civilized expression of ideas in the [Iraqi war] debate came at Rockford College in northern Illinois.”
Yet because his speech was such a debacle, Hedges’s message eventually reached multitudes. On its Web site, www.rrstar.com, the Rockford Register Star posted a transcript of the speech–or at least as much of it as Hedges was able to deliver–as well as an audiotape and a videotape. As of Monday night there’d been more than 81,000 hits on the transcript, 73,000 on the audiotape, 16,000 on the videotape.
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A bit later a young graduate student in a black cap and gown made his way up to Hedges and quietly asked, “Can I say a few words here?” Hedges replied, “When I finish, yeah.” He’d now reached a critical theme from his book, but someone unplugged his microphone and it had to be plugged in again before he could begin to develop this idea. It was about the friendship of peace that is “a deepening of our sense of self” and the comradeship of war, in which we lose our identities “for the collective rush of a common cause.” When war ends, comradeship ends, and “this is why after war we fall into despair.”
The attention Rockford College is paying Jane Addams is a very recent thing. Pribbenow, who’s 46, studied Addams at the University of Chicago, where ten years ago he got a PhD in social ethics. Arriving in Rockford last July with a reputation as a fund-raiser, he launched a marketing campaign–“Think. Act. Give a damn”–that both Howard and Addams might have applauded but that invoked only Addams. A letter of welcome from Pribbenow that can be read on the college’s Web site (www.rockford.edu) asserts that “what we stand for as Rockford College is grounded in our vision to be Jane Addams’ college in the 21st century.” Pribbenow promises a school that will honor her legacy “by seeking to live out her commitments to liberal arts education, to civic engagement, and to being an agile and accountable institution.”
Transcribing the audiotape could have been a nightmare, says on-line editor Alex Gary: “He had so many Greek mythological and theological references that were beyond my comprehension.” Fortunately, Ben Taylor, a senior at Rockford Guilford High who works part-time nights in the sports department, stepped in. “He only got a 35 on his ACT. He picked Dartmouth over Harvard. That’s a little bit over where I was in school,” says Gary, a product of Northern Illinois University. “He was sitting there and he says, ‘Oh, that’s Thucydides’ history.’ Otherwise we’d have spent another two or three hours trying to figure it out.”
