Commencement 2018 Welcome Address

(remarks as delivered)

Good morning, everyone. Trustees, honored guests, members of the faculty, colleagues, our distinguished graduates, class of 2018. Good morning and welcome. It is my very great pleasure to welcome you all to the 181st Mount Holyoke College Commencement. With Barbara Baumann, chair of the Board of Trustees, I extend my warmest congratulations to all those receiving degrees and certificates today, and acknowledge the support that has helped you along the way. To all the family and friends with us today, and to those who could not be here in person and are watching the ceremony, or thinking of graduates as the celebrate this moment, thank you.

Thank you for the encouragement you have offered, and in many cases for the sacrifices you have made so that your student could earn the degree or certificate that they will take today. Graduates, please would you take a moment to acknowledge all those who supported you, near and far, including your own classmates, and the faculty. Would you please also all stand so that we can acknowledge you and show our gratitude to you? Faculty, would the faculty stand? Stand.

Thank you. One hundred eighty years ago, on August 23rd, the very first Mount Holyoke graduation exercises, known as Anniversary, were held. With a small procession of students dressed in white, from the seminary to the meeting house, where student, where certificates were awarded to the three graduates. Mary Lyon wasn’t given to great ceremony or public display, nor to personal display of emotion, but Miss Caldwell’s account of that afternoon describes it as, and I quote, “An hour in Mary Lyon’s life never to be forgotten. Wonder, gratitude and praise filled her heart.” She continues, “Her great soul was so charged with joy, smiles and tears stove for mastery of her radiant face. For an hour, she resigned herself to the emotions of the occasion and gave way to a joy with which no one could intermeddle.”

Class of 2018, all graduates and honorary degree recipients, we are here today to participate in the praise and wonder at your achievements. You join those first three graduates in a great lineage that honors your endeavors, as well as the historic legacy of Mount Holyoke Seminary and College, to ensure that your education is, in the words of our founder, “Not for you only, but for our country and the world.” Today, as we celebrate over 600 graduates, who hail from 33 different countries, who are citizens of 36 nations and who have come here from 39 states. There can be no doubt about Mount Holyoke’s commitment to a global education, nor about your individual and collective impact upon this community and henceforth upon the nation and the world that you are entering.

You have shown us that you challenge boundaries, break out of them and redefine them. That you are individuals committed to each other, to social change and to the planet. You are always connected, and you use that connectivity to change things for the better, and you are intrinsically a part of the global community. Today is a moment to reflect on how you spent your time here as the world has changed around us. To celebrate your engagement with facts, opinions and interpretation, in all that you do. Today is a day to acknowledge and celebrate your unwavering commitment to advance the causes and the knowledge that matter most in this time and to you.

Graduating today, there are students with first and advanced degrees, and some 565 members of the class of 2018, along with two post-baccs and 65 graduates earning master’s degrees — for some of them, this is their second Mount Holyoke degree. Twenty-two of you came to Mount Holyoke as transfer students. Twenty-seven of you are Frances Perkins scholars. One of you is a current Mount Holyoke staff member. And one of you first matriculated in 1982, and after some twists and turns and more than two decades away from Mount Holyoke, you are back here today to claim a degree earned over half a lifetime. Congratulations.

Some of you have braved illness and other personal challenges and losses. Today we also remember those who are not here to graduate or to celebrate your achievements with us. To get to this point, you’ve completed over 21,000 courses. Twenty-one thousand. At Mount Holyoke. Twenty-two hundred of these were in physical education. Over 1,200 were in psychology, while almost a thousand were in each of biological sciences, economics, English and math. You took over 800 courses at the undergraduate and the graduate level in education, around 700 each in politics and computer science, over 500 in history and in dance. Over 450 in philosophy and in sociology. Nearly 400 in Spanish. Over 300 in environmental studies. As well as nearly 11,000 in other enriching and glorious liberal arts college subjects. That’s just the Mount Holyoke courses.

In addition, collectively, you took well over a thousand courses in the Five Colleges. They ranged from Money and Banking to Barbarian Literature. From Queer Feelings to Machine Learning. Chinese Religions to Marine Mammals. Statistics Through Baseball to Swahili III. You committed to learning about Black Women in U.S. History. Anthropology and Tourism in South Africa. National Parks, Linguistics, Film Production Design, Student Farm Management, Human Physiology, Cyberpolitics and What Jane Austen Read. Your commitments are expressed in a stack of diplomas behind me. Diplomas that represent three graduate programs, 49 different undergraduate majors and 304 different combinations of majors, minors, certificates and Nexus credentials. One hundred and four of you are graduating with double majors.

Congratulations. You have customized your degrees and your pathways to express who you are and what is meaningful for you. To prepare yourselves for a future that matters to you and to the world. We celebrate your commencement knowing that as your journey begins, whether in graduate school as advocates for social justice and the environment, information technologists, healthcare professionals, researchers, performers, public servants, economists, entrepreneurs or business leaders, you will continue to serve and empower others in your own distinctive way, and to live in the spirit of this place and this education as unravelers of complexity, responsible fact-checkers, open-minded knowledge bearers, and most of all, persistent truth-tellers.

As I look out at you, I see both great accomplishment and great hope. I see a student body that has challenged and livened and emboldened this college and each one of us, to live up to its promise, to your promise. I see one of the greatest incubators of intellectual and social progress, and a collective comprising extraordinary individuals, accomplished graduates and mature thinkers who will make that progress their imperative, just as our honorary degree recipients have done. You will hear more about their achievements in due course, but taken together, they have worked to promote civil rights, equity and opportunity, to eradicate systemic discrimination, to empower all Americans, and to ensure access to education, to healthcare and to fair pay.

They are women who, in the most daunting of times and situations, have held fast to what they believed in and redoubled their efforts so that others would be empowered. Through their achievements, they serve as a model for what is possible with noble impulses, perseverance and sheer hard work. This kind of endeavor is at the very heart of Mount Holyoke and its founding. Mount Holyoke has always been an incubator for great ideas and unwavering commitment. A place founded on a desire to provide an education for women and a place that now continues that historic legacy in advocating for gender equity wherever it is challenged.

The 1839 Commencement speech at Mount Holyoke was delivered by Dr. Anderson, who many thought should not endorse a liberal education for women. He spoke with great passion, enthusiasm and support for the seminary. “There are,” he said, “important experiments in progress, and this seminary is one of the most important.” While we might take issue, as T.W. Higgins later did, with being an experiment, and not from the outset an institute of higher learning, we might draw from this a yet greater sense of our historic role in pushing boundaries, in challenging received ideas, and in being the place of vision for what the future should be. Anderson described Mount Holyoke as a powerful transforming influence, and continues, “It is not a local institution. The experiment is one of general interest and its success will be a national good.”

Two years later, the Anniversary speaker, Professor Bela B. Edwards, picked up this theme and proclaimed that were such an institution to exist in every state, it will be one of the firmest props of the union. Continuing to say that, “no beetle-eyed prejudice, no narrow-minded bigotry, can find a home where the sciences are truly taught. The air which is breathed is too invigorating. The impulses which it prompts are too noble.”

As you reflect on your time at Mount Holyoke, on all that you have done here, abroad and in neighboring communities, on the learning and the leading in which you have engaged, and as you take in deeply and nostalgically the invigorating air of South Hadley and your success, my hope is that you will carry these noble impulses with you, wherever you go. That, shaped by this education and your own values, transformed by Mount Holyoke and your peers, inspired by all those who have gone before you, you will know great happiness and see progress in your endeavors, and that you will continue to be a force for good in the world. This is our heritage, and this is the charge that comes with your diploma. Congratulations.