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Professor Laurence Tribe at NYU Commencement: ‘Thank mom and dad for doing it.’

Thursday, May 15, 2008 11:04 AM - By David Lat

Laurence Tribe Laurence H Tribe Larry Tribe Above the Law.gifWord about Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe’s rather odd commencement address at New York University is spreading rapidly throughout the blogosphere. It’s already been picked up by Gawker and Instapundit. Here’s an eyewitness account from an NYU alum:

Larry Tribe just gave a seriously weird commencement address at NYU — especially the end, where he turns an amalgam of cosmologist / 60s love child, and tells all the grads to thank their mom and dad for screwing instead of watching TV, and thereby conceiving them….

Not to be too tough on Tribe, but I think the basic theme of the speech was that he’s really, really smart and well read, and knows how to turn creative, even strange, phrases. (I thought we already knew that.)

How did Tribe get picked? Some speculation from our source:

I really think the only reason Tribe was honored, and got to speak, is that he was a key mentor to John Sexton, the president of NYU. Tribe probably recommended Sexton to be the NYU law dean, and then the NYU president, so this looks like payback.

Tribe has accomplished enough to have gotten the degree on his own merits, and I don’t begrudge him it, but I’m sure the audience would have loved to have his co-recipient, Michael J. Fox, speak instead of Tribe — Fox is vastly better known, and liked. On this point, see here.

Posted below is the “thank mom and dad for bonking” clip. A more detailed write-up from our tipster, after the jump.

AN NYU ALUM’S ACCOUNT OF PROFESSOR LAURENCE TRIBE’S NYU GRADUATION SPEECH

The speech is collected in three videos available here. The second video repeats the last 7 seconds of the first video. The 7 seconds involve the wartime atrocities apparently committed by the Japanese on Tribe and his mom (apparently related to his “fate/randomness” theme). More about that here. (For a guy who said he had to cancel classes this semester because of a benign brain tumor, Tribe’s not doing too bad, traveling to China and speaking at NYU, and what-not.)

Most of the speech seemed reasonable to me, but several places in the second video struck me as weird, and quite unlike other commencement speeches I’ve seen. As an NYU alum, I’m somewhat embarrassed that NYU would host such a speech, and that the speech wasn’t more carefully vetted (perhaps it would have been difficult for John Sexton, Tribe’s former law school RA, to do such vetting).

At 2:50 in the second video, Tribe gives us a two-minute summary of the anthropic principle, particularly concerning how close we came to there being NO WATER, or NO ATOMS, or NO STARS, or NO LIFE. Frightening! At 4:35, he concludes that in comparison, Goldilocks was “child’s play” (whatever that means).

At 5:00 is where Tribe tells everyone to thank mom and dad “for doing it” (at 2:45 of the first video he did a shout out to his mom, but not to dad; I’m not sure if it was for having “done it” with his dad — is his dad that ugly?). Hard to believe? Tribe’s words: “Think about it, if your father and mother had watched yesterday’s equivalent of ‘The Wire,’ instead of making love at just the right moment, you would not exist. So thank mom and dad for doing it!”

At 5:30, Tribe spends about a minute reading a poem by Wislawa Szymborska called Could Have, without mentioning it’s about the Holocaust, so it’s puzzling to follow.

At 6:30, he concludes that “in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.” Isn’t this the sort of thing you’d expect from a high school student graduation speaker?

But that’s not enough of a conclusion — at 6:45 Tribe spends half a minute on a tortured use of the “ask not … but what …” locution to exhort his listeners. (Did Tribe had to pay royalties to Ted Sorenson for that?)

As his final, final — honest! — conclusion, at 7:15 Tribe says that one of his favorite sayings is, “the only things you can take with you are the things you have given away” (ever heard that? I haven’t. Couldn’t even find it with Google), and Tribe gives a “parting thought: may all of you give of yourselves — give ‘till it hurts, give all you can, while you can, to make the planet we have inherited a bit greener, the lot of humanity a bit lighter, the light of the world a bit lighter.”

Though Tribe gave the speech in Yankee Stadium, I doubt it will rank up there with Lou Gehrig’s “Luckiest Man Alive” speech, which Tribe invokes at 1:15 of the 2nd video. But it’s interesting at any rate. I guess my take-away point is that we’re lucky Tribe’s mom and dad did it the particular night in question, instead of watching TV, and we’re lucky the Japanese didn’t kill Tribe during World War II (hence his use of “Could Have” about the Holocaust, get it?), which is why we’re lucky enough to be able to enjoy Tribe’s speech on YouTube. Maybe Tribe is the REAL “Luckiest Man Alive” — or at least the “Luckiest Lawyer Alive” — for being permitted to give such a speech in Yankee Stadium. But maybe I’m reading too much into Tribe speech — maybe it means nothing at all.

Thanks For Boning, Ma And Pop! [Gawker]
LARRY TRIBE: Thanks for boning, ma and pa. [Instapundit]
Correction: NYU is Lamer Than Predicted [Googly-Eyes.com]
“Thanks for Boning!” — Larry Tribe at NYU, 5/14/2008 [YouTube]
Collected Laurence Tribe clips [YouTube]

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Posted in: Harvard Law School, Laurence Tribe, Law Schools, NYU Law School, Videos, Weirdness

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