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John Schwartz, the New York Times reporter whose NASA prank I noted earlier today, gave me permission to post the text of a speech he gave to a graduating class at his alma mater, the University of Texas:

“It was May 16 at the University of Texas at Austin,” John told me, “in the recreational sports center, a big covered gym on campus. There were 1200 people there. The department put up a story about it when it was over. Kinda gushy, but they quoted my parents and so I like it.”

I like the speech, and I hope you like it, too:

Thanks very much to the Department of History and College of Liberal Arts for inviting me to speak here this evening – Professor David Oshinsky for suggesting me, and Dr. Tully for making the invitation. I hope you don’t regret it.

Here goes:

Good evening. My name is John Schwartz.

I am a liberal arts graduate of the University of Texas.

And I. Have. A. Job.

Thanks everybody! Great to see y’all! Good night!

Oh, wait. Apparently, I’m supposed to say more. Well, okay.

Your response was pretty good, but we can do better. My Mom – she’s over there with my Dad, hi guys! – was going to bring an applause sign, but I would hope such a tawdry attempt at getting an enthusiastic response won’t be necessary. So instead, let’s do this: when I raise my arms like this and flap ’em, y’all just applaud wildly and with genuine enthusiasm. Let’s try that again.

I. Have. A. Job. Thank you! (FLAP FLAP FLAP)

Much better.

So. About the gown. (flap flap flap) (No, not now!)

Apparently, when the History department invited a Reporter from the New York Times to speak at graduation, they expected someone of more … impressive stature.

That’s been a problem for me for a long time.

A few years ago I met Morton Mintz, a pioneer of investigative journalism and a hero of mine. We knew each other by e-mail, but hadn’t come face to face til that night. “John!” he said. “I had a completely different mental image of you!” Then he stopped. He was too polite to say more.

“I know, Mort” I said. “I write taller.”

So let me now say the only really important thing I can possibly say today:

Congratulations! You’ve done it, and you deserve a huge round of applause. Flap flap flap

You have graduated from a wonderful program that is much harder to get into, much more rigorous, and just plain better than what I went through way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and admission was – let’s face it – mainly a matter of just showing up.

I couldn’t get into UT today, and certainly couldn’t have graduated. Standards were lower then. My daughter had better grades and much better scores than I ever did and was rejected by UT. She’s Not Bitter!

I am, but she isn’t.

Anyway, the good folks from the department have asked me to talk a little bit this evening about myself and my own experiences after college. This, frankly seems odd on a day that should really be about y’all.

But I do, at least, know a lot about myself. And there might be some good stuff for you in there somewhere.

I got a liberal arts degree, instead of journalism or some other trade degree, because I wanted an education, not training. I wanted to learn how to learn. I didn’t understand that at the time. Back then, the liberal arts just looked like where the smart kids were going, and I wanted it to rub off on me.

Hey. That wasn’t meant to be dirty. In any case, I did learn how to learn, which turns out to be a lifelong skill.

I picked it up in places like Pat Kruppa’s class, and George Forgie’s class, and when I snuck into lectures by Howard Miller and Brian Levack. Since then, I’ve used it in in law school, and in journalism jobs, covering dinosaurs, tobacco, naked mole rats, levees and the space shuttle. This degree you’ve got – it makes you adaptable. Flexible, even.

An editor once told a colleague of mine who was suggesting I take on a tough assignment, “He can do anything.” Wow. Too bad it’s not true.

Actually, I can fake anything. And you can, too. A good liberal arts degree makes you a utility infielder. Did I get that right? I actually know nothing about baseball. See? With a liberal arts degree, you can fake anything. Because — this is important life wisdom here — you will always feel like a fraud. At the same time, in many ways you are entering the world several steps ahead of the game. You are History majors. You have a liberal arts degree. You know things about the world. As Georges Santayana said, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But you, armed with knowledge of the past, will be able to go on and make Brand New mistakes!

When I was in school, I had a way of getting under the skin of officials. I got appointed the editor of the Daily Texan in 1981, after the previous editor got caught plagiarizing an editorial from the New York Times and things went downhill from there for him. Once, in an argument with journalism school professor over something or other, he complained that I seemed to want to buck every rule I found. “John, what you want is no rules! No rules!” That worried me – I’m no anarchist, though in school I did occasionally go drinking with the anarcho-syndicalists and the Blanquists. Still — I don’t like making people mad.

A while later, I interviewed Robert Benton, the filmmaker who did the Trip from Bountiful and other great movies, and he told me that “being from Texas means you’re willing to be a S.O.B.” What he meant by that is that we are willing to break the rules, or at least bend them. Usually we can claim that we’re too dumb to have known those rules were there, but by then we’re in the door.

This really works, now and then. When I went after my first job in big-time national journalism, I shot for a gig at Newsweek. An editor there who I’d done some freelance for said I was “on his list” of people he’d like to hire. This pleasant relationship went on for a year or two, and one day I called him up and said, “Jerry, you say I’m on your list and everything, and I want to move to New York with my wife. We’ll be there next month. Why not hire me? You won’t have to pay moving expenses or anything.”

And he said, “Okay.”.

Nowadays I shake my head. “You’re on my list” actually means “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” It’s a brush off, not a come-on!

I was too dumb and tone deaf to know that, thank goodness, and too country to understand that it was next to impossible to get a job like that in big-time national journalism straight out of college. But I did happen to call the same week that one of his best writers quit, and he was desperate and – I was breathing. I was the lowest-paid person in the building, including the janitors, and got a desk in a corner that already had a bottle of John Begg scotch in the lower right drawer. But I was in the door, and I worked there eight years. I got raises. I left the scotch in the drawer, because it seemed cursed. It’s like they say in the oil patch: it’s good to know geology and geophysics and economics and markets and the technologies for secondary and tertiary recovery, but Never trade brains for luck. Showing up the week that the other guy quit is what really got me in the door.

After a year in that job, the business editor offered me a job writing for him. It was going to be a big step up, but I thought I should admit something important to him. I didn’t know anything about business. You know what Lewis said?

“Read a book.”

So I did. After all, that’s what Liberal Arts students do!

Seven years later, I went for a job at the Washington Post as a science writer. That time, I didn’t trumpet the fact that I didn’t have a science background. Instead, I told the editors that the job they were hiring for – writing about the Food and Drug Administration – was actually about law and regulation and business, with some science thrown in. And I promised I’d learn the science. “I’ll read a book,” I said. I got that job, too.

Did I feel like a fraud? Yes. But I felt like a fraud… With A Job.

By the way – while I was at Newsweek, I picked up another hard little nugget of wisdom. It came one day when I was fretting about a big story I’d been told to do. It was going to lead the Nation section of the magazine, and I was frankly intimidated. My friend Nancy, who was working as an editor for the section at the time, sent me a quick message: “You just start working and you keep working until it’s done. That’s all there is to it; no mystery.”

Sounds simple. It’s actually deep.

More than 20 years later, it’s still taped to my computer.

Here’s another piece of advice. It’s what veteran astronauts tell rookies before their first space flight:

“Don’t forget to look out the window.”

Again: Simple but deep. You can get so caught up in everything you have to do, fulfilling every objective, hitting those marks that you lose sight of what a tremendous adventure you’re on.

Here’s another nugget for you: get out of town. Paul Burka, great friend, and my former editor at Texas Monthly, once took me aside and told me, “Johnny, you know your world very well, but it starts at the river and ends at 29th street.” He advised me to get out of town. Austin has a very strong gravitational pull, and it’s hard to do big things here. Not impossible, but hard.

So get in the door. Don’t wait for he perfect perfect job. Sure, everybody feels like a fraud at first. You will, too. But just keep pushing. Read a book. You’ll know what you’re doing after a while. And when you do finally feel competent and comfortable – it’s probably time to change jobs.

Here are some last bits of what passes for wisdom from me.

Work hard. And when the work seems intimidating or too big, just start working, and keep working until it’s done.

Play hard, too.

Read books that you’ll love. Listen to music that makes you smile. Read a newspaper every day – I have to say that, but it’s really true. It makes you smarter.

Keep in touch with the people you care about. Write notes. Remember birthdays.

Call your Mom and Dad for no reason.

And, finally: write taller.