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President Jo Ann M. Gora expects Card's speech will fascinate and inspire faculty, students, families and friends attending the ceremony - considered the university's greatest tradition.
Card's lifelong civil service and his adaptation of Italian Jesuit Mateo Ricci's memory palace will be particularly poignant to the graduates, she said. In the 16th century, Ricci taught the Chinese how to build their memory skills by visualizing information as rooms within a palace. Walking through these rooms several times would build a memory palace, which could be as large or small as needed depending on how much a person wants to remember.
Card's take on this mnemonic device is to visualize a kitchen, which he organizes and cleans to remember information. When he stands at his "stove," he visualizes the top-priority items he is working on as cooking on the front burners, while less urgent items are on the back burners. The cupboards are where information is stored until needed.
"Keeping 'your kitchen' organized and clean is a concept that our students can easily grasp," Gora said of Card's adaptation. "Mastering the technique, however, takes hard work and many years of dedicated practice."
Card would amaze fellow White House staffers with his memory mastery by recalling items from President George W. Bush's schedule three months before the engagements.
Card was the White House chief of staff from 2000-06, and his tenure spanned the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as well as U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was the longest-serving chief of staff in nearly 50 years.
In addition, he served in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. In 1992, Card was transportation secretary and coordinated disaster relief efforts after Hurricane Andrew, one of the most destructive United States hurricanes on record.
