Graduates Share Pomp but Not Circumstances

BOSTON —  On one side of the Charles River, 1,600 undergraduates and their families strolled through a campus decked with banners furling proudly in a soft, late-spring breeze. With pageantry honed through 348 years of commencement experience, these young men and women in robes and mortarboards capped a week of festivities that included a senior class clambake, a class picnic, a baccalaureate ceremony, a band and glee club concert and a chapel service titled “Overwhelmed by Opportunity.”

Finally, there was Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan to remind them: “You are being bequeathed the tools for achieving a material existence that neither my generation nor any that preceded it could have even remotely imagined.”

Across the river, in an alley beside this city’s major highway, 70 men and women pinned roses on their new business suits as they gathered beneath a yellow and white striped tent. They marched to a squeaky recording of “Pomp and Circumstance” and to the applause and occasional loud commentary of homeless people and substance abusers in the neighborhood who had not--as they had--completed a rigorous job-training program.

In his address, former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich marveled, “If accomplishment is measured not by the prestige of the parchment received, but by how far one has come in order to receive it, you deserve the highest of honors.”

So here unfolds a tale of two commencements: one at Harvard University, the world’s richest university, and the other at the job-training program of the Pine Street Inn, New England’s largest homeless shelter. Worlds apart in so many ways, graduates of the two institutions may have more in common than is immediately apparent.

By coincidence, Thursday’s simultaneous ceremonies featured talks by economists who are personal friends, but ideological antagonists.

Under Greenspan’s stewardship at the Federal Reserve, the Dow has stampeded past 10,000. Unemployment in most regions is at record lows. For many fledgling graduates of Harvard, where a year’s tuition and lodging expenses run about $34,000, this means access to first jobs with starting annual salaries of $60,000 to $90,000--or more.

With his new computer science degree in hand, 21-year-old Mikhail Ulinich of Phoenix said he was off to a job with Internet search engine Alta Vista in the Silicon Valley. “A Harvard diploma is very valued,” he said. “A Harvard diploma helps you get a job.” He described his initial salary as “very promising.”

Labor economist Reich, a professor at Brandeis University, has championed the needs of the unskilled who are marginalized by the American economy. He declares regularly that he would like to see the phrase “working poor” become an oxymoron. He laments that with such an exuberant economy, such widespread and seemingly easy access to affluence, many people forget that homelessness or unemployability exist at all.

Pine Street Inn valedictorian Fred Mclemore forgets neither. For 15 years, Mclemore did drugs, day and night. “I had to hide from the working world because I didn’t feel like I belonged,” he said. Every dollar he got, he spent on drugs.

Two years ago he used all but a dollar from his last paycheck to smoke crack cocaine in a basement, he forgets just where. Somehow, the last dollar bought him a subway token for a ride that changed his life. He ended up in a detox center, and soon, at Pine Street. After pledging to remain drug-free, he was admitted to the job-training program. Mclemore, 34, is now a computer specialist at a health care center in Roxbury, not far from the housing project where he grew up.

The truth is, Mclemore said, he and the Harvard graduates are not all that far apart. “I can participate in that market today because I’m clean and I’m working,” he said. “The students at Harvard did what they had to succeed, and I’m doing what I have to do to succeed. We took different roads, but we used the same means.”

Reich said he accepted the invitation to speak at Pine Street long before he knew his friend Greenspan would be at Harvard the same day. Greenspan, describing himself as “an old, idealistic central banker,” used his brief speech in part to express regret that “the [economic] gains have not been as widely spread across households as I would like.”

Greenspan also urged graduates to pursue humanistic values and to think critically. He earned applause when he called on them to be honest and trustworthy in work. “Material success is possible in this world and far more satisfying when it comes without exploiting others,” he counseled.

Not that he wanted to be the bearer of bad news, but Reich said he also felt compelled to add a caveat to the glowing reports of a buoyant economy. “For people who have lost their connection to the labor market, things are as dismal as ever,” he said before the ceremony.

Reich said he also worries that, “we are segregating more by income than ever before. People simply don’t come across the poor.” While their portfolios are exploding, “people have a hard time conceiving that there is a growing population at the other end.”

Reich cautioned that if interest rates go up, “as Greenspan and the Fed are threatening to do because they are afraid of inflation,” the people at the end of the job food chain are most likely to be hurt.

While Harvard alumna Meredith Quinn, 22, of Pasadena prepared to take her summa cum laude diploma off to Turkey for a Fulbright scholarship in Slavic studies, Mark Yalian was elated to be earning $5.70 per hour now that he has finished Pine Street’s clothing enterprise program. Yalian, 35, works in a thrift store, but hopes to move to a major department store.

Pine Street Inn president Erik Payne Butler, the holder of three Harvard degrees, has expanded Pine Street’s job training into clothing enterprise (or retail), commercial cleaning, computer, culinary arts and a kind of crash course in job readiness. An annual budget of $350,000 and enthusiastic community and corporate support have helped, Butler said. For instance, chefs Julia Child and Paul Prud-homme have lectured to culinary arts students.

Pine Street’s job-training students live in special facilities that are separate from the general homeless population. One complex is on an island in Boston Harbor. To graduate, they must remain free of drugs and alcohol, and they must have full attendance as well as good performance. Their training programs last four to six months and in some cases longer. Most students complete a series of externships that place them in real-world job situations.

Behind the grill in the cafeteria of one of this city’s largest office buildings, culinary arts graduate Howard James, 40, said that now that he is clean, “I actually like going to work and not struggling through the day.” James said his final exam included cooking a pork-shrimp stir fry for some regional chefs. James got an A.

He also got a healthy sense of perspective. People who come out of the Pine Street program, said James, are one step away from reaching their goals, just like students at Harvard.

And Harvard, said James, “is one step away from Pine Street. That’s all it is. One step, one turn.”

Times special correspondent Catherine Ivey contributed to this story.