Premodern advice for the postmodern young
A GRADUATION-day address at a university like my own (Harvard), where last spring University of Pennsylvania law professor Lani Guinier and Vice President A1 Gore were featured speakers, has a familiar theme. In late twentieth-century America, graduating seniors are challenged to fight the good fight for civil rights, gender and sexual equality, a fair sharing of the world’s wealth and resources, and in other ways to extend freedom, equality, and prosperity to all people, regardless of race, color, and creed— in a word, to engage in a major moral reconstruction of the world as we know it.