Education as Citizenship

by Frank Duehay, former Mayor of Cambridge
Address to Certificate Recipients

Dr. Frank Duehay, this year's Commencement speaker at the Certificate Awarding Ceremony, is a son of Cambridge through and through. He was born in Cambridge, went to Cambridge public schools, and attended college in Cambridge--a fairly well-known school in the area called Harvard, where he earned the bachelor's degree in English at Harvard College, and two graduate degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the master of arts in teaching and the doctor of education.

But most of all, Dr. Duehay is the quintessential Cambridge public servant, having just completed 36 consecutive years as an elected official in the city.

His public career began as an elected member of the school committee in 1963, when John F. Kennedy was president of the United States. From 1963 to January 2000, he served a total of eight years on the school committee, 20 years as a city councilor, and eight years as mayor of the city.

During those years he fostered many initiatives that helped turn Cambridge into the vibrant city it is today. For example, he initiated a school building program, introduced the Community Schools Program, and led a committee on school choice policy leading to the desegregation of the Cambridge public schools. He also developed new city initiatives in zoning, planning, and historic preservation; in healthcare and affordable housing; and in environmental and consumer protection.

This was not always easy to do. The Cambridge political arena can be as fierce as the Roman gladiatorial games. But Frank Duehay was a valiant political gladiator possessing vision, patience, thoughtfulness, and a rare ability to bring people together.

Frank Duehay is also a Harvard man through and through. In addition to earning three Harvard degrees, he has served the university in various administrative positions at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, including assistant dean, director of admissions and studies, and director of graduate programs in educational administration.

Finally, Dr. Duehay has also been a committed friend of the Harvard Extension School. In 1985 he initiated the Leonard J. Russell Scholarship, which awards three free CSS courses per semester to qualified employees of the city of Cambridge; he has also served as a member of the Extension School's visiting committee.

Dr. Duehay chose a fitting title for his talk--"Education as Citizenship"--a title that combines his dual interests in public service and education.

It gives me particular pleasure to be here today at the graduation ceremonies for those receiving certificates from the Harvard Division of Continuing Education. I congratulate you and your families on your accomplishments. Some of you, I know, have labored one course at a time while carrying on busy professional responsibilities. Others have traveled great distances and have completed their work in one year. You are adults, some at mid-career, others in the early stages of your careers, developing new skills, upgrading others, searching for new careers and new opportunities in life. Many of you have families, not just yourselves, to care for. These are challenging times. Company infrastructures are appearing and disappearing before our eyes. Finding where you fit in all of this demands a more flexible outlook and greater determination than in the past. So I congratulate you first for enrolling in this certificate program and then for sticking with it until completion.

You are graduating from a division with which I have some familiarity. In times past, I have served as a member of its Visiting Committee-- a way by which Harvard University ensures external review of its several departments and graduate schools. I was a member of that committee when these certificate programs came into existence. I have monitored their growth and the special way their have been tailored to fit the needs of a changing economy. As a member of the Cambridge community and government, I have been impressed with the availability of courses to local residents to help them to improve their skills and to gain new knowledge. In addition, over the last several years I have had weekly reports about the Certificate of Special Studies in Administration and Management Program since my spouse is enrolled in it.

You have taken courses here to upgrade and improve your employment prospects. You are working in business, government, and not-for-profit organizations all over the world. Some of you already have jobs or new jobs, and now have increased opportunities for promotion. As the first graduating class of the new millennium you are entering a period of new opportunity. The skills you have and the outlook you possess not only give you greater confidence in your own ability by building your professional expertise. They also give the institution for which you work a better ability to serve the needs of your community.

I have spent much of my life in and around Cambridge. I have attended elementary school, high school, college, and graduate school within a one-mile radius of this building. I have worked in schools and universities in greater Cambridge and have served Cambridge as an elected official for many years. One might wonder what a person with such a limited geographic perspective might have to say to this distinguished international audience. An advantage of staying a long time in one place is, of course, the opportunity to get to know that place very well; to know its strengths and its needs; its public sector and its private sector; its businesses and its human services agencies; its public schools, its religious schools, its charter schools, its independent schools; its colleges, its universities, and its research centers; its geographic areas, its arts and music communities, and its communities of faith; its ethnic and racial characteristics; its socioeconomic composition; its housing, environmental, and health issues; its recreational and cultural offerings; its provincial and its international features; its propensity for greatness and its propensity for meanness; its civic health and its civic weakness.

Cambridge has faced many challenges over the past 50 years. It might surprise some of you to know that 50 years ago Cambridge was a declining industrial city. The universities were smaller and less specialized. The populace was largely working class with a substantial immigrant component. Fifty years ago, the local manufacturers of such things as wooden furniture, leather shoes, rubber goods, barrels, bricks, and wire and cable--the staples of the economy--were moving to places where labor was cheaper, leaving the labor force behind. Into this economic vacuum came the post-World War II expansion of the universities. Graduate schools grew, accompanied by new specialized research centers. Graduate students and faculty arrived to take jobs in these expanded settings and needed housing, which, in this densely built-up city, was already fully occupied. New employment opportunities were opening up in Cambridge, but those who worked in the old manufacturing industries were not qualified to fill them. More highly educated workers arriving to take the newly created university-affiliated jobs competed for the limited supply of available housing. Housing costs shot up, leading to government price controls on rental housing in the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, despite these controls, housing costs remained high. And the expansion of new knowledge-based industries spawned by the universities continued apace, tightening housing availability even more. In the mid-1990s, a statewide referendum abolished local price controls on rents.

As a consequence, while Cambridge seems now to be a prosperous, happy, bustling, competitive, international city, great strain and unhappiness lie just below the surface. The economy is booming, but older residents relying on fixed incomes can't afford rapidly rising rents. In a city where cutting edge companies are created every day, residents can't figure out how to upgrade their skills to qualify for the jobs in this new marketplace. Families with two wage earners working two or more jobs struggle to pay the rent and to find quality childcare. And one-parent households are in more difficult straights. Campaigning for re-election several years ago, I spoke to a Cambridge resident who had to drive 50 minutes each way to the daycare she could afford. A total of more than three and one-half hours each day to drive her daughter to and from daycare when the parent lived only minutes away from her work.

So what are people doing about job training, education, affordable housing, healthcare, and daycare? And how can a community face its problems? Individuals, corporations, agencies, and institutions in Cambridge, as in many other communities, spend countless hours working to ameliorate these problems. As a result, public education is improving. When I was first elected to the School Board in Cambridge in 1964, the secondary school drop-out rate was very high. Today it is below five percent. In 1964, only one-quarter of the graduates went on to some form of higher education. Today the rate is 80 percent. Despite the loss of rent control, Cambridge is now producing more affordable and low income housing annually than any city of its size in the United States. Yet it is not nearly enough. Cambridge, working with Harvard and Tufts Medical Schools and the Harvard School of Public Health, has developed a public health system where those who need healthcare can pay for it according to their means. Schools, colleges, and businesses are working together to teach new job skills.

The problems Cambridge encounters differ only by degree from those of other cities here and abroad. What is remarkable is that many people, in individual or collective ways, are working to solve our problems. Who is it in Cambridge, or in any community for that matter, who works on these issues to find solutions or engages others to do so? It is people who come from all stations in life. They are in government and in nonprofit agencies. They are in hardware stores, labor unions, and high-tech. They are in software companies and in communications. They are employed--they are students--they are retired. Everywhere one looks in Cambridge, people give their time and energy. College and graduate students volunteer in the public classrooms and after school. Businesses provide internships, citizens press government for more affordable housing, agencies provide training for mothers on welfare. Graduate students in dentistry get course credit for cleaning poor children's teeth free of charge. A Harvard graduate student interning with me wrote the successful state legislation that created Cambridge's Affordable Housing Trust. That program has produced several thousand units of affordable housing and has been widely copied. Another volunteer wrote the city's recycling law. People who work in banks and businesses, state, local, and federal government, and nonprofit agencies contribute to affordable housing. Inspiration comes from clergy and volunteers from religious communities. Parents band together to serve on school improvement councils and in parent-teacher associations. Volunteer citizens lend their expertise to candidates for election to local and state government. Activists lobby corporations and government to increase the quantity and quality of childcare.

Healthy communities do not wait for ugly problems to overwhelm them. Citizens take it upon themselves to find the answers. Government alone cannot command solutions to any problems. A community's human resources build its future. What I have tried to describe to you today is how one city, in all its complexity and diversity, has struggled and continues to work to surmount its problems.

In every business there are those who think "outside the box." In every community there are those who use their talents to create solutions to community problems. In every work setting, there are those who can see beyond the immediate requirements of their jobs. In every institution, there are those who can project applications of what they do, not only for the company they serve, but also for the community they live in.

I say, finally, to you, who graduate from Harvard University in the certificate programs here today, that you came well prepared to understand the institutions and communities you serve. You now have more tools and training to help not only the institution you work for, but also your home community to prosper. More than 80 percent of graduates of Harvard Business School, at some point in their careers, become board members of nonprofit organizations serving their communities. I would guess that similar numbers would characterize graduates of these certificate programs. This is one reason why the course offerings in nonprofit management have increased at the Harvard Business School and are increasing at the Division of Continuing Education. Those of you who accept the challenge to engage the community, who are able at the same time both to fulfill and to transcend your job descriptions, will help create the institutions that shape your community or country--the social institutions, political institutions, economic and financial institutions, legal and educational institutions. In short, today, along with your certificate from Harvard, you embrace the most ancient and fundamental purpose of education--education for citizenship--the responsibility of banding together with each other to embrace that fundamental precept of democracy, that is, managing your community, your state, or your nation.

Democracy has an infinite capacity for improvement and expansion when citizens engage in it. You are prepared to lead that engagement. You can build those democratic institutions that will create a healthy community while you contribute to the prosperity of the companies for which you work and raise your own families. It has been said, "Democracy is the view that not only the few, but all are free, in that everyone governs his or her own life and shares in the responsibility for the management of the community."

You have the training to move to the next stage in your careers. But you also know that if economic prosperity reaches only a sector of the population, trouble lies ahead. Poverty, lack of education, and lack of opportunity breed racial, ethnic, and religious division, violence, and political instability. How countries develop economically, whether all share in the prosperity of a new global world, who steps forward to shape the institutions of our cities and our nations--these are the challenges of the first graduating class of the new millennium.

You are trained, you are ready, you are confident, and you are impatient. Your city, your country, and the new global world need your talent, your common sense, your perspective, your imagination, and your commitment. Winston Churchill said, "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."

Graduates of the Class of 2000, I offer my best wishes for your personal, professional, and civic success. I congratulate you and I salute you!