Honors Day 2003 Convocation Address
by Dr. King Davis

Exactly 35 years ago, I also sat in an honors convocation, surrounded by proud relatives and loving friends. Most of my close relatives were just delighted that graduation was near so that I would no longer be on their payroll, as I had been for over 4 years. However, the focus of my thought was how to use my new degree in social work to find employment and plan my future. I assume that the future is also the focus for many of you and your relatives, this hour, this day, in this place. However, within weeks of graduation, the answer about my short-term future was provided in a letter from the United States Army, inviting me to join them in their guided tour of Viet Nam. In less than a month of graduation, my best friend and I drove from California to San Antonio's Camp Bullis to do our basic Army training in preparation for duty in Viet Nam.

To the contrary, for the next four years, I worked in stateside military hospitals as a social work officer, helping helicopter pilots and other soldiers from every military branch and their families cope with the horrid psychological and physical effects of an unpopular and unconventional war. Those experiences changed my life. I saw severe injuries, life-long disability, schizophrenia, PTSD, depression, disillusionment and indeed death. I kept a diary of what my days in the military were like - days so vastly different from the serene sense of achievement in the classroom, the spirited debates, honors convocation, and for you the Final Four times two. Life became real only after graduation.

War was hell! However, the military experiences crystallized my thoughts and plans about how to achieve the most desired future: not via war but through science, scholarship, graduate school, study, teaching, public service, and leadership in mental health. These and many others too are your options.

As you prepare for your future and bask in the deserved recognition of your talents and scholastic achievements here at UT, the arid smoke of the near-concluded yet contested war in Iraq waifs over this ceremony as surely as it did for me 35 years ago. However, the issue really is not war per se but how scholars raise, debate and illuminate the issues of how to maintain peace in a world of uncertainty, fear, unpredictability, and disagreement over boundaries, resources, and such concepts as freedom and democracy. In some respects, war is the ultimate disagreement over the future. Phil Bobbitt's recent (2002) book concludes that the world has really been at war continuously from 1914-1990. He also proposes that the element most at the center of this inveterate conflict has been disagreement over the structural form of government. For me there are long-term mental health implications of prolonged war and its aftermath.

When I reflect back over these post-war years, of which Bobbitt writes so eloquently, it is clear that there have been significant advancements in many areas of science and technology. UT faculty and students made many of these discoveries. There have also been new discoveries in the social sciences as well in the liberal arts and communication. In the biological sciences, we note that many if not most of the communicable and environmentally based diseases that took so many lives at the beginning of the century are all but eliminated. Our knowledge of the intricate functions in the human body and the human brain has also increased. As a result, it is possible that within your lifetime the genetic etiology, treatment, and perhaps prevention of male pattern baldness will be discovered soon. This would make your fathers and me happy. Truly, we are standing on the precipice of major scientific discovery and change in knowledge and prevention of some forms of Carcinoma, Alzheimer's, Multiple Sclerosis and Schizophrenia. These discoveries suggest that the hallmark of the 21st century may be these and related scientific discoveries. When we place these and innumerable other scientific changes and discoveries in perspective, we must agree with the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan that progress in science has been nothing less than spectacular.

While there have been notable achievements in many areas of science over the past 35 years, our progress in social science and public policy has not been as spectacular. The problem of this century, the problem of your age is not in scientific discovery but in human discovery. Our century's problem is not in intelligence per se but emotional intelligence. Not in discovery of resources but in their consumption and distribution. Our dilemmas are not in the technology of communication but rather the day-to-day communication between people, nations, families, and races. Our dilemmas are in our insatiable appetite for the world's resources of cocaine, oil, gas, minerals, sugar, fine woods, precious metals and now water. Our dilemmas are in how to solve decades, even centuries-old political disagreements in Israel, Palestine, North Korea, Chechnya, Bosnia, Ireland, Nigeria, Australia, and in Michigan.

If I could guide your lives and your future decisions over the next five years, I would encourage each of you to devote your considerable abilities to the pursuit of answers to what I call the unsolved millennium problems in the social sciences: universal health insurance, poverty, addiction, stigma towards the mentally ill, homelessness, low voter turnout, discrimination, the debt owed to Native Americans, vast differences in educational achievement, health disparities, and divorce. For solving most of these there is no monetary prize as there is for the millennium problems in math. However, our society needs you to use your incredible skills, energy, talents, and achievements to solve the ubiquitous problems that have marked our history and will surely compromise our collective future.

There are several prominent views that can guide your approach to the future. However, what has guided me most have been the futuristic predictions of Joel Barker, Peter Senge, Joseph Campbell, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Belasco, Carl Sagan, and the theologian Howard Thurman - each of whom proposed that the future is in fact dependent on how actively you plan, create, design and move towards the desired future. If you do this, then when you are the speaker at the honors convocation in 2038, -35 years from now, the smell of war will not be on the horizon, many of the millennium problems in social science will have been solved, and you will have a better than average chance to live in peace with your neighbors in an ever shrinking but healthier world. Each of us in this grand theater is fortunate to be part of this microwave century and witness to the social transitions that should give each of us hope that the eloquent but unfulfilled dreams of Martin, Gandhi, and Kennedy will become a reality in your seasons of life.

I honor your academic achievements and wish you well as you ponder the nature of your future, that of the world that you create and in which you must live.

Bobbitt, P. (2002). The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History. New York: Knopf Publishers.

Dr. King Davis is the Robert Lee Sutherland Chair in Mental Health and Social Policy in the School of Social Work and was recently honored by being named the new executive director of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health at The University of Texas at Austin. A former commissioner of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services for the Commonwealth of Virginia, his research and teaching at the University have focused on public mental health policy, the provision of culturally competent mental health services, health care for the mentally ill and disparities in rates of illness and services for consumers of color.

Davis’ previous academic experience has included service as the William and Camille Cosby Chair in Social Work at Howard University and the Libra Chair in Public Policy at the University of Maine, School of Business. Davis also has held the John Galt Chair in Public Mental Health at the University of Virginia’s Department of Psychiatry. He has held academic appointments at Washington University in St. Louis, Virginia Commonwealth University, Eastern Virginia Medical School and Norfolk State University. Davis served on the Surgeon General’s Taskforce on Mental Health and is a consultant to the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health and the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors. He is a member of numerous national boards and commissions in mental health.