My graduation that wasn't

I entered the Yale Law School with the Class of 2009 but have since found refuge in the distracting sanctuary of graduate school. Barring a further loss of nerve, I should graduate from law school with the Class of 2010. But since friends from my entering class were graduating on Monday, Lia and I showed our collective class spirit by attending the august ceremonies in the law school courtyard. Katharine came with us; Julia and Eli, like Napoleon, persecuted the Popes who uneasily watched over them.

The service, like most graduation services, more than merited Dr. Johnson’s epitaph over Paradise Lost: “None wished it longer.” The place was packed, and we spent the afternoon standing in the hot sun. The first speaker—“a surprise”—was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (tYLS 1973). She emerged from the heavy doors behind the dais, attended by her entourage and greeted by thunderous applause. Her remarks were brief. Her general thesis was the modest suggestion that, in this momentous hour, she, with some help from President Obama, was in the process of saving the country, and wouldn’t the graduates of the Yale Law School like to participate in the work of redemption by accepting employment in the legal office of the Department of State?

Next came Michael Graetz, a retiring tax professor given the bully pulpit at graduation as the customary right of faculty entering the elysian fields of the emeriti. He gave the best talk of the bunch, denouncing the process of “thinking like a lawyer” as morally bankrupt and suggesting that even lawyers can be happy: “Never forget that in his list of fundamental rights Mr. Jefferson included ‘the pursuit of happiness.’ The right is inalienable; you cannot sell it.” Graetz also added, quite rightly, that persons equipped with Yale Law degrees, should they find they dislike their job, ought to be able to do something about it.

Then came the anticipated hour of pomp and show as, one by one, the names of the graduates were solemnly read and each graduated permitte to strut and fret a few seconds upon the stage and then be seen no more. This took an eternity, of course, but there’s no other way to do it. We made the tedium bearable, first by erupting in wild cheers for heroic graduates like Kirk Cheney and Sander Daniels, and then by retreating into an outlet alcove of the courtyard, where we talked to Cheney-family relatives and watched Carter Cheney walk like a zombie and drool like Niagara.

The commencement speaker was Dean Harold Koh, who recently left the law school to become the top legal advisor in the State Department (Hillary winningly apologized in her address for snatching Harold away). Dean Koh is an able, energetic speaker, and he acquitted himself well with one major exception: Much of his address was devoted to a polemic—to all appearances irrelevant to the laureatory business at hand—against torture and in favor of adherence to international law (his field of academic study and professional practice). It was, in essence, a political diatribe, though with the grandiose bipartisan gesture of zestfully quoting Senator John McCain on the wrongfulness of torture. Who, in that audience, was he trying to convince?
When Dean Koh stopped, William Drayton, a “social entrepreneur” and, like Hillary, recipient that day of an honorary degree from Yale College, was supposed to speak. But William Drayton was not there, so Acting Dean Kate Stith haplessly filibustered. At length Mr. Drayton arrived, apologizing for his truancy by boring us to tears. (This isn’t quite fair; I couldn’t hear him well, but the fact that he kept talking seemed unforgiveable.) When he finally had done, the ceremony was over as well.

I was in sour spirits. The whole thing had seemed to me a bit phony and thunderously self-congratulatory—a torrential stream of pious cant and rhetorical gorgianisms. It had been hot, and the meeting very long. I did a lot of grumbling to Lia on the way home, but eventually got over it. In any case, it was worth the sacrifice to bid farewell to a handful of valued friends and extraordinary individuals. And I may even show up next year when it becomes my turn to don again the black robes of the false priesthood.