ORONO (AP) – Returning to his alma mater, innovation guru Doug Hall encouraged University of Maine graduates Saturday to do a better job than the baby boom generation in leading American society to a brighter future.

“It’s clear that my generation – the last wave of the baby boomers – is not a candidate for the greatest generation,” Hall said. “It’s not that we’ve done bad things, it’s just that, in my opinion, we’ve become distracted – distracted from turning the hopes of youth, our dreams for a better world, into reality as we’ve come fact-to-face with the real world.”

Hall, whose Cincinnati-based company Eureka! Ranch works with businesses and individuals to develop new ideas and find creative pathways to growth, urged the 1,860 members of the Class of 2008 to lead a revolution against “the conformity of baby boomer thinking.”

He offered a “new Declaration of Independence” that included advice about ways for graduates to assert their rights to find professional and personal fulfillment.

In Portland, Pulitzer Prize-winner Roger Wilkins told University of Southern Maine graduates that the presidential candidacies of a woman and a black “would have been fodder for a fantasy movie” when he graduated from college 55 years ago.

“Today, whatever our problems are, we have a vastly different and better country than the one we lived in in 1953,” said Wilkins, a former editorial page staff member at the Washington Post and now a history professor at George Mason University.