THE TRUE MEASUREMENTS OF LIFE

Address by RAYMOND V. GILMARTIN, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Merck & Co., Inc.

Delivered to the Union College Commencement Exercises, Schenectady, New York, June 13, 1999

President Hull, members of the faculty and administration, parents, family members, friends - and most of all the Class of 1999: it is an honor and a privilege to be here with you today.

As a proud graduate of Union College, and an even prouder parent of three college graduates, I am familiar with the feelings of excitement, joy, and anticipation this day brings.

I recall similar feelings on my very first day at Union, forty years ago, in September of 1959. I had spent most of my life within a radius of about fifty miles of my hometown of Sayville, Long Island. The trip to Union was a big one for me - I arrived on campus with my parents in a black and white 1956 Ford station wagon, and it was the furthest I'd been from home in more than one way. I was the first person in my immediate family to attend college.

It was a different time then - a different world. Alaska and Hawaii had just been admitted to the Union. The Dow Jones was at six hundred seventy-nine - but few people off Wall Street even knew what it was. An epic semi-historical movie, Ben-Hur, was tops at the box office. Today, the Dow is over 10,000, and you hear about it on every street. Today, it's the lines of Europe that are changing, not America. And an epic semi-historical movie holds the box office record. Well, some things never change.

Union too, has both retained its wonderful traditions, yet evolved and grown with the times. I've had the privilege to serve as a trustee, and I've come to all but one of my class reunions. As good as the school was when I was a student, I have seen it become stronger and stronger over the years. The educational experience has advanced, and the campus has grown: it looks terrific. The students - all of you - are far more sophisticated, and even more representative of the best minds in our society than in my day - especially since Union went co-ed.

The first thing I learned at Union was to say, Union College in Schenectady, New York. (Saying it that way pre-empted the inevitable "Union College ... where's that?") Even after the business school (in Cambridge, Massachusetts), I would still say with pride when asked where I went to school: Union College ... in Schenectady, New York.

The second thing I learned was that many of my classmates were very, very smart. As an electrical engineering major, I was horrified to discover that so many of them had graduated from Bronx Science, having taken far more advanced courses in high school than I had. I was in a calculus course for two days wondering why the professor was talking...