Graduation speakers are fond of extolling the great things you will do after graduation. Your great achievements are only a beginning. With the education you received, you can do anything. Wall Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, or Rodeo Drive, breathlessly awaiting you to do that thing that you do, with them.

Because I know you, I know you know not to swallow all graduation rhetoric. You've had psychology. There you discovered most of you, is that which has been done to you rather than by you. What you thought was your courageous, independent decision was, in reality, your mama's manipulation. Thank you psychology.

The slogans of my generation were liberation, do your own thing, autonomy, even as a century of social science said we are caught, jerked around by psychological, sociological, economic forces beyond our control.

In my First-Year-Student Seminar, we presented the case of Dave, in his early 20s, who, after carousing in a bar, despite his friends' efforts, got in a car and, on his way home, killed a child. The question: "Who was responsible?" Assign percentages of responsibility. Dave? His parents (both of whom were alcoholics)? His friends? The bartender? Society? About a third of the class assigned seventy percent of the responsibility to Dave's parents. I was chagrined, as a parent, to see us take the rap for Dave.

A third of the class apportioned responsibility between the bartender, or Dave's friends, for not wrestling him to the ground and getting the car keys. About a third of the class insisted on a new category. Genetics. Studies show a genetic propensity toward alcohol abuse. Dave's genes did it.

And these were the same people who had declared, just the class before, that they decided to be at Duke!

Oh, we prattle on nostalgically, "I am the captain of my fate, the master of my soul." But in our enlightened, Twenty-first century moments, we admit that there is a caughtness to us, jerked around by forces over which we have little control. Decisions made for us, rather than by us, account for us. You're here, thinking about your marvelous undergraduate achievements, while Mom thinks, "I've done a good job on that one!"

Now we may quibble over what percentage of us our parents should take responsibility for. Okay, 20 percent of me is master of my fate, captain of my soul. But mostly we are the result of psychology, economics, genetics, or either that which we have been able heroically to seize from external determinism.

Our culture tells us two stories. One story is that you are free, autonomous, who you choose to be. Which, as I have noted, flies in the face of just about everything the social sciences have taught. (Spinoza said, "If a rock could think, and if you threw that rock across a river, that rock would think that it was crossing the river because it wanted to.")

The other story says that you are fixed, determined at birth, caught. Or, as one of you told me, when I asked the big question, "What are you doing after graduation?"