Sunday, May 15, 2011

Graduates Go Forth...and Do the Dougie!

Commencement Day is one of my favorite days of the year. Sure, it requires faculty to wake up earlier than one ever ought to on a Saturday morning. Then there is that trudge from some far-away parking spot to the Convention center, always made more unpleasant by the voluminous robes we struggle under. The wait in the hallway prior to the processional always leaves us sweating under our robes. If we made the mistake of drinking coffee prior to the event, in order to stay awake at such an unseemly hour, it is always just as we are walking into the arena that we realize that choice was a bad one and we will be holding it for a long 2.5 hours.


Still, even in the face of so many discomforts, Commencement Day is a precious one, dear to my heart, because it is a day of happy endings. As the choir sings, I feel myself well up. As I listen to parents and siblings and even grandparents scream, their voices jubilant in their pride, I well up all the more. As students I have known personally - students for whom I have retrieved articles and proof-read papers for - walk across the stage, grinning as big as they can, the tears finally break free and I feel so proud to be a part of such growth and achievement. Graduation is a beautiful thing, to be sure.

This year's commencement speaker ensured that Commencement was as fun and inspiring as it was moving. Ms. Lezli Baskerville, the fifth President and CEO of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, charged our graduates with the task of going out into the world to fix the ills that plague it. That may be a common enough sentiment, but Ms. Baskerville, a seasoned lawyer and a published expert in the field of equal employment opportunity, education access, affirmative action and diversity issues, is also a mighty fine dancer. As she challenged the graduates to be change agents, she led them in an inspiring chant punctuated by the Dougie. The audience roared with laughter as they danced the infamous dance move while pledging to better the future they had just inherited. It was a great beginning to this happy ending.






Good luck to you, our graduating Thoroughbreds, and a heartfelt thank-you to Lezli Baskerville!