One more thing before we wrap up this national graduation season and march forward towards the beaches, suburban malls and fast food counters, job applications in hand.
Marshals, please keep the doors closed. Will the band sit down, please. MBAs please turn off your beepers.
It’s time for a pledge, a workplace pledge.
Don’t worry. This will not show up on your credit card.
For some of you, these may be the most meaningful words you will ever utter outside your income tax preparer’s office:
I pledge to investigate and take into account the social and environmental consequences of any job opportunity I consider.
Out there in Indiana, we would like professor Neil Wollman to stand up and say a few words about this pledge. He is out there in North Manchester, at Manchester College.
Will the people in New Jersey and California stay in their seats a little longer while professor Wollman, who teaches psychology at Manchester, a small liberal arts college, explains a project he has been nurturing for the last few years. He has been coordinating the national graduation pledge alliance.
For those of you in Florida, who are bit off in a corner, let me repeat what professor Wollman is saying.
Someone who cares deeply about social activism, he has been working on this drive to get college graduates, upon the day of their great departure, to take a vow to seek and support work that is socially responsible.
About a dozen colleges formally take part in this little ritual, which began in 1987 at Humboldt State University in California and has very slowly spread across the country.
Here and there the words have been changed, but the idea is the same: A job is more than a paycheck.
What with professor Wollman’s teaching demands, it has not been easy keeping up the crusade to spread the pledge. But he does keep it up, telling himself that some day it may catch on.
What if, he wonders, 1,000 colleges one day took the pledge? That could make a real difference.
And he has hopes. Not all of the people taking the pledge lately have been of the liberal persuasion. Even those who find comfort in conservative politics and the sayings of the once powerful Newt have taken the pledge.
This is how it works at Manchester. Just before graduation, the departing students are given a letter telling them about the pledge. They also get a wallet-sized card.
The letter explains how to find socially responsible careers and employers, and helps them with questions they can ask in an interview when deciding if they are considering a truly socially responsible employer.
Come graduation day, at least half of the students at Manchester regularly say the words, and wear green ribbons as a sign that they have taken the pledge.
Three-fourths of the faculty support them by wearing green ribbons. That part of northern Indiana, by the way, is not exactly a haven of liberalism.
Now can we hear briefly from Jessica Eller, 22, a graduating Manchester senior from Merritt Island, Fla.
New Yorkers and others, who have become accustomed to pushing their way through life on the streets and in the corporate boardrooms might want to pay some attention to Jessica.
She majored in peace studies, and hopes to work in programs that teach people how to get along with each other: programs that work with troubled families, troubled communities, or troubled businesses.
She has yet to taste what the 9-to-5 world is really like so she is not sure how her pledge will hold up down the road, when she is out earning a living in Corporate America.
But she thinks it will hold up. Her hope is to be able to do the kind of work that will combat the way some companies exploit workers.
If nothing else, she will make it clear to her future employer what she thinks is ethical behavior. That’s her hope.
As she has gone about her own college, stirring up support for the graduation pledge, she hasn’t heard too many critical or cynical remarks.
That is heartening, considering signs in the broader world issued by a generation more attuned to the quality of running shoes than the quality of life of those who make the shoes.
So say these words after me if you think this is what you care about.
Wait. A few more items.
Graduating seniors with computer skills who have not landed a job yet please exit by the doors on the right. Vans will sped to your future employers. Your families will be notified where to forward mail if they haven’t already got your e-mail address.
Future social workers, teachers, child-care workers and foreign-bound Peace Corps volunteers please limit your emotion-tinged embraces and lingering. We’ve got to clear the rented hall.
On your way out also please do not clog the parking lots. The part-time faculty will be directing traffic out there.
For those of you sticking around, they will also be working later in the cafeterias. They have to make a living, too.
Congratulations, workers of the millennium.
