Carolyn Zola's 2024 Commencement Speech
The Joy of Being Wrong
I will start with a confession: I hate being wrong. I know most people don’t like it, but I really hate it. But being a historian, conducting research of any sort, means being wrong, revising assumptions, testing new ideas, and rethinking the past. This is the deep current that propels learning and the building of knowledge.
Reflecting on my time at Stanford, I’ve been thinking about how incorrect my own assumptions about this place were. And what a privilege it has been to correct them. My earning a PhD in history was historically contingent, to use a favored term from our discipline. To understand this story of change over time, it’s necessary to burrow deeply into my own archive. And to return to the distant past.
The year is 2004. The setting, Leland Stanford Junior University. The first time I set foot on this campus, it was not as a student, but as a caterer. I had been hired to work what turned out to be a truly nightmarish gig, complete with a chocolate fountain placed, unfortunately, in a wind tunnel. Seasoned professionals - people I had catered with for years - walked off the job mid-shift. At the time, I had only the vaguest idea of what Stanford was. It was a place where other kinds of people went to school, I supposed. I grew up in the Bay Area, and as an unenthusiastic high school student, thought that schools like Stanford were for fancy folks, or students who “liked to go to class” or “took school seriously”- activities that had made little sense to me when I was a teenager. Stanford seemed strange, alien, and unfriendly. The idea that I would one day return as a graduate student to this very campus would have been hilarious, unimaginable to me at that time.
More than a decade later, after many years of taking classes at City College of San Francisco (“Go Rams!”) and then transferring to UC Berkeley (I won’t say “Go Bears” since we are having such a lovely time and I understand that there is a bit of a rivalry between this school and that one) I knew I wanted to pursue a PhD in history. I applied to Stanford at the suggestion of a professor at Berkeley, but was certain - certain - that I would not be admitted. Once again, I was wrong.
After receiving the astonishing news that I had been admitted and picking myself off the floor, I wondered, “Just who are these Stanford folks?” And I decided to do a bit of research. I took the train down from San Francisco, to meet with a few faculty that I had been in touch with. I remember sitting in Estelle Freedman’s office, where she generously, patiently, and inspiringly answered all of my questions (in a pattern that would repeat many times over the ensuing years). I remember exploring campus with Jim Campbell, on his famous ten-cent tour, talking about my research interests, the intellectual offerings of Stanford, and admiring Andy Goldsworthy’s beautiful earth work, Stone River. I met Allyson Hobbs, Jennifer Burns and other faculty at Coupa Cafe, and was warmly enfolded into their conversations. The day was lovely, surreal, and sublime. I could see myself here, I could see working with the people I met. But most astonishing of all, I wanted to.
Maybe I had never imagined myself at Stanford as anything more than a beleaguered cater-waiter, but I accumulated tangible evidence that pointed in a different direction. I realized with a thunderclap: my assumptions had been wrong. This campus was not unwelcoming or inhospitable, as I had expected. Since I hate to be wrong, this was a pretty devastating moment for me. But it was also exhilarating. This being wrong would be repeated many times over.
I remember reading the faculty page of Jonathan Gienapp and thinking, “Hm, he works on the American constitution, that seems interesting but I am guessing I won’t work with him closely since my interests lie elsewhere.” Again, I was embarrassingly incorrect. Jonathan has turned out to be a generous mentor, one whose advice and feedback have shaped my work in important ways. I assumed my fellow graduate students would be standoffish or competitive. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as time and time again, I was met with care, support, and camaraderie. The history department staff too have been a crucial part of my experience at Stanford: when I wrote people with questions (and full disclosure, I did this quite a bit!) people extended incredible generosity to me. Art, Burçak, Kai, Colin, Maria, Vivian, and Van-Ahn, time and time again offered advice and kindness in response to my urgent, bewildered emails.
I don’t want to gloss over the struggles these years have entailed. Graduate school is famously stressful. In some ways, these years were more challenging than I could have imagined. Anxiety, uncertainty, and feeling like I was always behind no matter how hard I worked were not uncommon experiences. And the gnawing feeling that at any moment I was going to be unmasked as a fraud followed me everywhere. Over the years, I have made good friends with imposter syndrome, who generously shared with me a steady stream of self-doubt.
I felt certain, for instance, that through some bureaucratic mishap, they’d admitted me by accident and that somewhere out there, a Marilyn Zola was still wondering why she didn’t get into Stanford. But once again, I was wrong. (At least I believe so - Art, maybe we should talk later just to confirm?) Some voices are with us, always. They are lifelong traveling companions. When my imposter syndrome starts murmuring cruel nothings in my ear, I have gotten better at saying: I think you are wrong, and that you have built your argument on faulty premises. And I have some evidence to back that up.
So what does this have to do with capital H history? I didn't realize it at the time, but I used the techniques of historical inquiry to find my way into the program, and through it. I started with a research question: “What the heck is Stanford?” And I used evidence, carefully gathered, rigorously analyzed, and shaped into an argument. These are tools from the historian’s toolbox. Now, I know what you are thinking: this microhistory insufficiently engages with existing historiographic conversations in the History of Being Wrong. That is entirely fair, and I promise to incorporate these scholarly insights in future revisions.
To conclude, permit me an indulgence. I once again return to my archive to share an experience from deep time, that is, my junior year of high school, in the late nineteen hundreds. This was yet another moment when I was wrong. I had been tasked with writing an essay on John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. Instead of following the prompt, I used the space to meditate on my own feelings of dissatisfaction with high school, very occasionally interweaving material from Steinbeck’s classic works. I do not know if any of you have returned to your high school writings. If I can offer some advice: don’t. Skimming my rambling, earnest thoughts on poor John Steinbeck generated such a feeling of writhing embarrassment that I may never recover. But I will share the response from my teacher: “Interesting juxtaposition of your thoughts/philosophies and Steinbeck’s. Not exactly the assignment, but the impact of these books are obvious and I’m glad.” This was a very generous assessment, one that gave me a little space to grow. I might have remained fixed in that moment, as a disengaged, disinterested high school student who thought formal education was for other kinds of people. It has been a profound gift to rethink those old assumptions and to gain deeper insights into my own life and the world around me.
The opportunity to revise is a precious part of life on this planet, if we are lucky: the chance to learn, to rethink, to get closer to the thing that might be the truth. To see the world with a little more clarity. We might not always understand the assignment, as I clearly had not. But perhaps we can find things that move us, and in time, to celebrate being wrong.
