As a Wesleyan alumnus and strong supporter of Barack  Obama, I must confess
that I have a problem with Obama's Commencement Address delivered at
Wesleyan University yesterday.

Obama explicitly cast himself in the
tradition of John F. Kennedy -- and the  entire Kennedy family -- in calling
on students to serve their country and the world. Well and good. Obama has
the standing to issue that call. As a
young man, he walked the walk,
choosing the hard path of community organizing, making a success of it,
shaping a political career that's grounded in his experience of working with
ordinary people to influence politicians. That's why I support
him.

Still, there's something simplistic, unduly binary, even misleading
about advice framed like this:

Now, each of you will have the
chance to make your own discovery in the years to come. And I say "chance"
because, as President Roth indicated, you won't have to take it. There's no
community service requirement in the outside world; no one's forcing you to
care. You can take your diploma, walk  off this stage, and chase only after
the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture
says you should buy. You can choose to narrow your concerns and live life in
a way that tries to keep your story separate from America's.

But I
hope you don't.

I prefer the advice of a Brown professor -- I'm afraid I
can't recover who  it was -- who spoke at a small alternative graduation
service in 2005 for students who were missing graduation because of athletic
tournaments (the women's rowing team and the Ultimate Frisbee team). To
paraphrase loosely, he said, I hope you do the work you were meant to do.
And by the way, if that means poring over spreadsheets for fourteen hours a
day rather than teaching children in Ghana, do that.

To be fair,
Obama did not directly suggest that everyone ought to choose a career
directly focused on public service. He did speak at length about volunteer
activities. But the implication lingers that graduates who choose the
professions that lead to "the big house and the nice suits" are selfishly
wasting their talents.

Obama of course knows, and often acknowledges in
speech passages addressed to competitiveness, that this country and the
world depend on private enterprise to generate jobs and wealth.
Notwithstanding some recent Wall Street bashing, he would doubtless also
acknowledge that even the "malefactors of great wealth," when they're not
too busy malefacting, play their part in allocating capital where it is most
productive. And that Democratic Party powers such as Richard Rubin and Jon
Corzine did well to spend decades doing what they do best before turning
their energies to the
public sector, and that if they'd become inner city
elementary school teachers or even microfinance program developers the world
probably wouldn't be better off. And that even corporate tax attorneys and
CFOs and mid-level marketing executives do their parts to help
job-generating companies survive and thrive (probably, today, without
creating as many domestic jobs as we'd wish).

I'm sure Obama would
not suggest otherwise. But the way he framed choices implied otherwise. And
at Wesleyan in particular, he tapped directly into prejudices embedded this
many a decade in the culture of the place.

When I was at Wesleyan, many
of my classmates were getting themselves arrested at nuclear power plant demonstrations - and the more power to them
for their commitment. My friends
were ashamed of the trappings of wealth and favored reverse status symbols
-- and better that way than shamelessly flaunting it, I think. I took
history and English classes with avowed Marxists, and the more foolish
they.

Those teachers did not make me a Marxist. But I did imbibe a distaste for "big business," advertising, commercial culture and a cluster of related associations, a distaste not all that distant from the scorn of high-minded young
gentlewomen in Victorian novels for neighbors who engaged in trade. It took
me a decade to get over the prejudice (if not some of the particular dislikes). And I think that Obama -- in casual
swipes if not in the direct import of his advice -- tapped right into that
prejudice yesterday.

Cross-posted from xpostfactoid.