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May 11, 2006

Commencement 2006

Pitt’s Class of 2006, some 6,000 strong, were told by a trailblazing educator that “the highest motives in life are those that compel us to stand up for our beliefs and reach out to others. The world will test your values and you have to be ready. Start figuring out now who you are, and what you stand for. Then, when the challenges come — and they will — you won’t flinch.”

Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin, the first female to serve an Ivy League school as president, delivered the University’s 2006 commencement address and received the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.

Prior to becoming president of the Rockefeller Foundation in 2005, Rodin served as the seventh president of her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, from 1994 to 2004. She held faculty appointments at Penn as a Fox Leadership Professor, a professor of psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences and a professor of medicine and psychiatry in the School of Medicine.

Rodin came to Penn from Yale University, where she served as provost from 1992 to 1994 and held appointments as professor of psychology, medicine and psychiatry. She also served as dean of Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and chair of the Department of Psychology.

But it was in graduate school at Columbia, working on a Ph.D. in social psychology, that Rodin learned a most important lesson that she shared with Pitt’s newly minted graduates.

In her speech, titled “A Lesson From the Underground,” Rodin told a packed Petersen Events Center audience on April 30, “My work as an academic psychologist revealed many striking facets of human nature. I’d like to talk about one of them with you today. I learned an important lesson about how we make choices, about the decisions, big and small, that one by one make up our lives. The lesson only took about nine and a half minutes but it has stayed with me a lifetime.”

Following a national news story where Kitty Genovese, a young woman in Queens, was murdered while dozens of neighbors heard her screaming for help but did nothing, Rodin helped design a human behavior study to examine the conditions under which people reach out to strangers in distress.

“We wanted to know: What makes a Good Samaritan? What creates feelings of compassion? What determines moments of neglect?” she said.

Using the New York City subway as the laboratory, the researchers hired actors to pose as passengers in need of assistance. “On the subway in New York, there’s a stretch between 59th and 125th streets without any stops,” she said. “That’s 66 blocks without the doors slamming open and shut. Without passengers shoving one another. Nine and a half minutes of uninterrupted time. Nine and a half minutes to test what motivates people to help.”

What she found was shocking and discouraging, Rodin said. “We watched while the majority of people hesitated, looked around, then looked away. We were stunned as we watched the inaction unfold. But we learned that it’s not so easy to act with other people around.”

Even when the initial reaction is to help, most people will rationalize themselves out of the impulse, Rodin maintained. “The excuses play inside our heads, an internal chant of doubt, saying: ‘No, no, no — don’t get involved.’”

People think: “Maybe someone else will step forward. Maybe there’s something wrong with my judgment, and this person doesn’t really need my help. Maybe there’s nothing I can do.”

Rodin added, “There’s no end to the maybes, but in the end, they’re all ways to diffuse responsibility and do nothing. Make no mistake: Doing nothing is a choice in itself.”

It was also surprising, she added, that the smaller a group of bystanders, the more likely that someone will lend a hand. “To act on a stranger’s behalf, you have to feel individual responsibility. When we think it’s up to us alone, we tend to recognize our responsibility and we act on it.

“That’s the lesson of nine and a half minutes — not much time, but enough not to act, or enough to do something that matters, to extend a human touch, change another person’s life.”

What can new graduates do with nine and a half minutes?

“One thing you could do with nine and a half minutes is go over to Freedom Corner, at the intersection of Crawford Street and Centre Avenue, and learn about some of the people who made this city a better place through their fierce and selfless advocacy.”

Rodin noted that Pitt recently had helped fund a documentary called “Torchbearers,” about a group of people who stood up during the Civil Rights era and made a difference.

One of those torchbearers was Rev. LeRoy Patrick, who on a summer Saturday in 1951, with 500 policemen standing guard to prevent a riot, jumped into the “whites only” pool in Highland Park.

“Rev. Patrick jumped in that pool, even though he didn’t know how to swim,” Rodin said. “But he did know that African-American kids had the right to swim alongside white kids. He stayed in the water just long enough to make his point, probably about nine and a half minutes.

“Rev. Patrick knew what he believed,” she continued. “How do your actions reflect what you believe? You must continue to act, recognizing that everything you do affects other people. That is how incredibly powerful you are. You won’t rationalize your way out of action, regardless of the size of the group you’re in. You will act as if the fate of those in need depends on you alone. Make a difference. Reach out to a stranger on the train. Bear a torch.

“This was my nine and a half minutes with you. I hope I’ve used it well. Congratulations.”

In all, Pitt this year conferred approximately 6,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees, including 432 doctoral degrees, to students on the Pittsburgh campus and approximately 1,000 undergraduate degrees to students on the Bradford, Greensburg, Johnstown and Titusville regional campuses, which hold their own commencement ceremonies.

—Peter Hart


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