Guest Post: Speaking Freely

Cate School Cum Laude Society Address May 2024

Cate School Sunset Bench, photo by Kate Parker

Kate sent me this beautiful commencement speech she gave, which captured so much of what I believe about free speech and teaching viewpoint diversity. I wanted to share it with you all. Also, I wish I lived there. It looks so beautiful.
—LD

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After 19 years in the library at Cate School, I'm moving on to new adventures. But before my departure, I had the honor of giving the annual Cum Laude Society address to our top senior scholars, their families, and advisors at the start of Commencement Weekend. As an alum and long-time employee, there is definitely a little inside baseball in my speech, but its tenets hold true beyond our small campus.
—KP

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Many congratulations to the deeply impressive Cum Laude Society initiates for the Class of 2024. It’s an honor to speak to you today, not least because this is my first speech at Cate since my junior-year English class with Jim Durham, an incredible teacher whose grammar textbooks lived on for many years here and whose faculty citation still hangs in Schoolhouse One. I always hope current students will pause and reflect on these markers and perhaps stop by the school archives to learn more. Great Cate teachers of the past are not just campus ghost stories; they continue to inspire and weave their magic through the overlapped lives of your long-term faculty, the traditions this school continues, and even the way we adapt our teaching over time.

I must admit I have no idea what I spoke about during that long-ago presentation. Instead, I remember my classmate Rachel Davis’ vivid description of Ojai ranch life, the hard work it took to maintain her family’s orange orchards, even the way she evoked the scent of bitter smoke from smudge pots wafting amongst the trees on icy mornings--that now old-fashioned way of protecting citrus from frost damage during cold snaps in Southern California. This was long before the tradition of Servons speeches began, but then, as now, Cate classmates inspired each other. Often a trick of a good teacher is to simply get out of the way as budding scholars wrestle with their questions and share their stories, and that was such a moment in Jim Durham’s class.

Whatever it was about, my own speech would have given no one--least of all me--any clue that a large part of my adult life would be given over to public speaking. Librarian, yes: I was the head student librarian my senior year, loved everything to do with reading, research, and libraries, and the only shock is that it took me until my 40s to go to library school. Politician, no: I was reserved with adults, rarely shared my thoughts in class, and was so terrified of speaking in public that I don’t think I piped up once in assembly as a student here. Long-time art teacher Patrick Collins described me in my art history class comment as “quiet” and “bemused.” 

And yet, in 2006, after just one year back in the workforce following a long stint as a stay-at-home mom and with no political background at all, I ran for and won a seat on the Santa Barbara School Board in a crowded field with six candidates. The next sixteen years of my life were devoted to politics and public service in education, both at Santa Barbara Unified and then at Santa Barbara City College. And the girl who never raised her hand in class, who listened but rarely spoke, gradually found her voice thanks to many, many public meetings, speeches, debates, and voter forums. What did I learn from my time in office that I could share with brilliant young academics like you? 

First, I’d ask you to stay or get involved as leaders in your communities wherever you go. Many of you in front of me have done this at Cate: run for student government, served on student committees, truly participated. But if you haven’t, don’t let old self-concepts hold you back. Now is the time to shed the labels you may have held onto for too long, the ones you picked up here that no longer fit. We are so different as we get older than we were as teenagers. One day, you’ll look back across the years and be astounded at how much you’ve grown. Change is a gift. Embrace it, shake off those invisible restraints, go forth and lead. Your perspective matters.

And as you do, actively seek out opposing views and arguments. Dear students, I wish I could say that the wide world beyond the Mesa has community conversations with good snacks, kind adults, and group norms that assume positive intent. Serving on a school board, I learned first-hand how deep caring, intelligence, and utter rage can walk hand-in-hand. Getting along civilly with people who will not be civil with you is hard. It is so, so tempting to try to cast out those we disagree with, to shut our ears to their voices, and attack their character just as they attack our own...to call them names like far right, far left, bigot—terms that are used so extravagantly these days that they’ve lost a common meaning. And when you’re a politician, part of your job is to get other people who think just like you elected, so you never have to listen to your opponents at all.

Of course, politics is all about winning majorities to get party policies pushed through. But this practice simultaneously holds real danger: like-minded politicians need a strong opposition to help them recognize when their ideas may have unintended consequences, when they’re foolish, or even downright dangerous. If I were a history teacher, I’d be bringing up Lincoln’s war cabinet about now. It’s a fact that when I served with school board members who all thought the same way or who so wanted to get along that they would not publicly disagree with each other, we made worse decisions--often decisions that temporarily placated a vocal majority but that were not best for students and staff in the long run. So, as you fan out across the globe, think of me when a peer makes you uncomfortable with the points she’s raising in class, when that annoying gadfly goes to the mic yet again at your Associated Student Government meeting, and when your irritating professor tells you to more fully develop counterpoints to your argument. It will not seem like it at the time, but these are all good things.

I’ll also note that you should beware of attempts to restrict your speech and think twice when you seek to restrict others’. Sometimes, these attempts seem small and come from the best of intentions. You may have noticed when you came here as freshmen or sophomores that, at times, Cate has a blind spot in this area, and trusted adults occasionally put forward ideas about speech that are, well, a little crazy. With time and experience, in this small community, we gradually and individually figure out the difference between word change that is meaningful and word change that is not, and I hope we take that wisdom with us beyond the Mesa. In the broader American landscape, when speech becomes truly contentious, we have the First Amendment to lean on.

During the years I served as school board president, I was required by law to allow all voices to be heard, and woe unto me if I forgot to watch the clock at a contentious meeting and gave one speaker 20 seconds longer than another. To the short-changed speaker, that clearly made me an evil sympathizer with the long-winded bigot from the opposing side, rather than simply a human who was briefly distracted. My advice to you? Know that in speech, as in life, what goes around comes around: if you think someone has such bad ideas that they shouldn’t be allowed to speak on your campus or in your town, there will come a time when others think your ideas are so bad that you shouldn’t be allowed to speak either. Indeed, we’ve seen ample evidence of this on today’s college campuses. Also, if you’re an elected official running a difficult public meeting, always keep your eye on the clock!

Finally, understand that you are sometimes wrong, that you will need to listen to people you disagree with to realize this, and that changing your mind and your practice with evidence is very, very hard for humans to do. We all know Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” that classic parable of vanity, fear, power, and foolishness wrapped up in one short folktale. When I was little, I thought for sure I would always be like the child in the story--of course, I would speak truth to power! Of course, I would express myself freely and point out fundamental reality, good grief! As I got older and humbler, I thought perhaps I would be like the townspeople--I might not personally feel comfortable speaking up first in a difficult situation, but hey, when someone else did, I’d recognize the truth, I’d change my mind, and I’d speak up, too. After years in elected office, however, I gradually came to realize that we are most often the emperor. Andersen closed his story with the realization spreading like wildfire through the crowd that the emperor was naked, “The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, ‘This procession has got to go on.’ So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn't there at all.”

Oh, the times a board threw good money after bad, let terrible decisions stand, and poorly served the community when a majority of members could not only not accept they had made an error, it was so unthinkable that it simply could not be true…even as a particularly disastrous decision was as clearly visible to a sometimes contemptuous public as that naked emperor on the high parade. I wish I had wise words on how to always know when you’re a fool to speak up or a fool to stay quiet. If only we could avoid the disillusionment or shame that comes when we realize that we have wholeheartedly believed something that is not true, made an all-too-public mistake, or defended bad ideas for far too long. These times come to us all, and I can only share that as hard as it is to be either the child or the townfolk, to speak openly against the will of the king or the mood of the crowd, to publicly acknowledge we are wrong and change course without pointing fingers at anyone but ourselves, those are the times we hang onto our self-respect, if only by our fingernails.

Jim Durham was an enthusiast of Ralph Waldo Emerson, so I’ll close with this quote from his favorite Emerson essay, “Self-Reliance”: 

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

To the newest members of Cate’s Cum Laude Society, thank you for bringing us sunshine today and throughout the years you graced this campus with your presence. I have every faith that you will live up to your academic and intellectual promise and the spirit of Servons as you move through the world. Remember always that you are your own guiding star: be independent and trust yourself--not who or what others tell you to trust.

Listen widely, and speak freely.