It’s not surprising that the Class of 2016 picked popular Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Winston Crisp to deliver the class’s Last Lecture. But the talk’s outdoor setting provided an ironic twist to Crisp’s remarks Thursday evening.
For years, Crisp said, he has been telling pre-college students that his greatest motivation in college was central air and heat. After a series of outdoor jobs in the winter’s cold and summer’s heat, “that absolutely drove me,” he said.
“I didn’t want to be hot when I’m 50, like I am right now,” he told about 250 students seated in folding chairs on the grass in front of the Morehead building.
The Last Lecture is an informal, outdoor talk where a selected faculty member shares reflections from life’s journey, from the premise, “If you knew this was the last lecture you would ever give, what would you say?”
The talk had long been a tradition at Carnegie Mellon University, usually for professors nearing retirement. But the Last Lecture got national attention in 2007, when computer science professor Randy Pausch, dying from pancreatic cancer at age 46, gave a funny, upbeat message that got millions of viewers online.
Crisp’s last lecture was, by turns, inspirational and instructive and delivered in the straightforward style the vice chancellor is known for. His three bits of wisdom: “Life doesn’t owe you squat. You cannot be afraid to fail. Don’t sweat the small stuff – and almost everything is the small stuff.”
He emphasized the “power of perspective,” the importance of being able to see the world not just through your own particular view. He urged students to pay forward what they could never pay back and to go out and meet life.
“I hope you choose to dance,” Crisp said, urging students not to be wallflowers in life. “Everything you choose not to do, you lose a piece of yourself. I hope you dance your butt off.”
The death of rock icon Prince, announced just hours before, clearly affected Crisp, who told the students that Prince’s music had been “the soundtrack of my youth.” He almost changed his speech to be all Prince quotes and songs, he said, but decided to stick with his original talk, inspired largely by wisdom shared by his father.
He read two poems that his father gave him before he went to college, “The Man in the Glass,” written by Peter Wimbrow in 1934, is about being true to yourself and the importance of integrity. “The Bridge Builder,” written by Will Allen Dromgoole and published in 1931, tells the story of an elder who crosses a dangerous chasm then builds a bridge once he gets to the other side for those who will follow.
“You didn’t get here by yourself,” Crisp said sternly. “If you are one of those bootstrap people who thinks they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, I am calling you a fool.”
But Crisp ended his talk on a lighter note, with a quote from Christopher Robin in “Winnie the Pooh,” a beloved book that was also a childhood nickname for Crisp: “You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we’re apart… I’ll always be with you.”
Under the darkening sky, with a gentle breeze stirring the white and blue “Class of 2016” balloons behind him, Crisp spread his arms wide to encompass the campus. “This is your home,” he told the seniors, “and you can always come back.”
By Susan Hudson, University Gazette
Published April 22, 2016