LEWISTON – NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams told 517 Bates College graduates Monday morning that they should “listen only to the voices you have learned to trust.”
He said, “You will be forever known, in a way, as the Class of 9/11. The world has changed so much since you arrived within these walls. Your government will try its hardest to protect you, but the fact is, the rules have changed.”
Recalling another transformed world at the time of his parents’ graduation in the late 1930s, Williams said, “many of them strapped on rifles and headed to Europe and the Pacific.”
He told the graduates, “Your equipment will be your minds, your smarts, your talents, your love of country. You are the products of greatness. Things will be asked of you, and lives may depend upon you, and you are ready.”
He urged them to “step up and say so if and when we go astray. In our culture, which is so badly broken, remember there are real heroes for you to worship who will never break your heart.”
Bates College’s 139th commencement ceremonies took place indoors for the first time since 1991. Rain dictated a move from the historic quad in front of Coram Library to nearby Merrill Gymnasium.
The Class of 2005, the largest since Bates was founded 150 years ago, has students representing 40 states and 40 nationalities. Sixty-two are from Maine.
In addition to conferring an honorary doctor of humane letters degree to Williams, honorary degrees went to Lynn Margulis, who was introduced as one of the most distinguished scientific thinkers of today; composer Thomas Jefferson Anderson Jr.; and to philanthropists Paul and Daisy M. Soros.
Margulis, who is credited with changing the understanding of the evolution of cells, told the graduates, “Science is the search for truth, whether we like that truth or not.”
She said, “Science demands criticism of authority and argument from evidence against authority.”
Anderson, best known for orchestrating Scott Joplin’s opera, “Treemonisha,” has spent five decades blending European modernism, world music and expressions of the African American experience.
Paul and Daisy Soros fled Communist Hungary in 1948. He founded a successful engineering firm and in 1997 established a $50 million charitable foundation.
In her commencement remarks, Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen said the founders of Bates College would recognize the values of today’s graduates “as familiar and dear to them – intellectual achievement, social responsibility, self-discipline, creativity, good work, warm hearts.”
In an interview after his address, Williams called his Bates visit “a sentimental homecoming.” He paid tribute to his parents and a brother, all of whom were Bates graduates. His parents, Gordon L. Williams, class of 1938, and the late Dorothy Pampel Williams, class of 1940, met at Bates. Williams’ late brother, David, graduated from Bates in 1966.
Williams attended George Washington University and Catholic University of America, both in Washington, D.C., but left 18 credits short of a degree to accept an internship in the Carter White House.
Since joining NBC in 1993, Williams has covered virtually every major breaking news event. He has been the network’s chief White House correspondent. In 1996, MSNBC, the NBC News cable network, was launched with “The News with Brian Williams” as its flagship show.
He succeeded Tom Brokaw as the NBC anchor in December.
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