Sewell ’86, Appiah Share Parting Advice at Baccalaureate and Class Day

Rep. Terri Sewell ’86

Photo: Sameer A. Khan h’21

By Brett Tomlinson

Published June 29, 2023

1 min read

In the tradition of writing a senior thesis that foreshadows career goals, Class Day speaker Terri Sewell ’86 titled hers “Black Women in Politics: Our Time Has Come.” At that point, she had won just one election, to become vice president of her Princeton class. Today, Sewell is in her seventh term in Congress, representing her hometown of Selma, Alabama, and the surrounding region.

Sewell’s advice to the Class of 2023 drew heavily on her connection to Selma. After completing Harvard Law School, she joined a prestigious New York City firm (she had student loans to repay), but she eventually returned home — and she encouraged graduates to consider doing the same.

“My mother said, ‘Bloom where you’re planted,’” Sewell said. “Each of you comes from somewhere that would be better served by your help, your service. You know your communities — the schools, the churches, small businesses on Main Street. You know the problems. You know the potential. You can make a difference.”

In an interview after the ceremony, Sewell expanded on that idea. “I get that my district is the poorest district in the state of Alabama,” she said. “But if anybody knows what’s possible from that district, if anyone shares their frustration with the lack of resources and the lack of opportunities in that district, it’s a person who grew up in that district.”

This year’s graduates also received parting wisdom from a Baccalaureate speaker who dispenses advice on a weekly basis, NYU philosophy and law professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of the Ethicist column in The New York Times Magazine.

Appiah, an emeritus professor at Princeton, urged the class to “pay attention, just for a moment, to attention itself” in a wide-ranging talk that covered academia, art, love, artificial intelligence, and social justice.

“To come to grips with what we owe to each other, we have to see each other,” Appiah said. “We have to recognize that a person sleeping on the street is, first and foremost, a person. When you don’t see poor people, when you don’t see refugees, when you don’t see abuse, when you don’t see discrimination, what’s happening can be described, morally, as an attention deficit.”

Published in the July 2023 Issue

1986

1 Response

Peter J. Greenhill ’81

9 Months Ago

Class Day speaker Terri Sewell ’86 deserves our respect for the messages and advice she gave on Class Day this past June, as described in the July/August issue. She is devoting herself unselfishly and wisely to truly worthwhile pursuits in her current position as a congressperson from Selma and its environs. One should hope that recent graduates will follow in her footsteps.

However, I wonder how many PAW readers noticed the tragic detail obscured within the short article on her virtuous life. It is a detail that captures all by itself just how badly broken the structure is of our nation’s education and economic systems in combination. I’m referring to the sentence that reads, “After completing Harvard Law School, she joined a prestigious New York City firm (she had student loans to repay), but eventually returned home … .” This sentence should horrify us all.

The horror is in how many — countless — young university graduates go into fields that not only interest them not one whit but also do tremendous harm to society, such as tech, law, and finance. In the first of those three, as former Silicon Valley data scientist Jeff Hammerbacher infamously lamented, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” and now we know it has made huge, documented contributions to an epidemic of mental illness in young people. The second has been an enabler of the third, and both, through their greed, predation, and unethical conduct, have done little more in the last 40 years than destroy jobs, destroy lives, and in 2008 practically destroy the entire economy while they got away scot-free. Imagine how much of value Ms. Sewell or others could have done already in work that served the common good, instead of postponing it to pursue the almighty dollar, even if the pursuit was for the understandable purpose of paying off huge loans. Even if she did not work in service of her community, she could at least have pursued a genuine passion instead taking a job she didn’t really want in her heart to join the high-end rat race, wherein even if one wins the race, one is still just a rat.

A system that makes young people feel as though they have no choice but to serve dark forces just to avoid massive debt is a diseased system. For a better way, we can look to the example of most of Europe, for instance, where university education is either free or extremely inexpensive — the U.S. government always has plenty of money available to enrich weapons manufacturers so that they can bomb Black and brown people around the world — and where well developed social safety nets mean that fewer people have to sell out to survive. Ms. Sewell’s life is now admirable, indeed, and she deserves to be held in esteem, but the passing reference to the oppressive student loans she was forced to incur should raise among the rest of us not only eyebrows but also alarm.