Tomorrow morning, I’ll get up early and drive from Arlington to the Fairfax campus. I’ll park at the Institute and walk across the Mason campus in my University of Michigan academic regalia –FYI the trademark “M” isn’t a part of the get up–to join with colleagues at the Patriot Center, putting a full stop on the academic year that began last August. Commencement paradoxically derives from the verb to commence, but ends the academic year rather than beginning it. To my mind, that’s because commencement exercises aren’t about the faculty or the deans, but rather about the graduating students, who now are about to commence their post-degree lives.
And that thought brings back the memory of an earlier commencement day in May of 1978 in the main quadrangle of Amherst College. On that day, long before there were such things as the Web or Iphones, it was hot and muggy, the sun shown bright. The black cap and gown was hot. As I recall, many of my fellow graduating seniors wore, additionally, the green, red and yellow arm band which protested apartheid in South Africa. The College President John William Ward had been arrested for protesting the Vietnam War at the local airbase; I vividly remember receiving my diploma from his hand under his stern New England gaze and then it was done–I was off to commence my own life, one that initially took me to Capitol Hill and later to graduate school in Ann Arbor–and finally here to Mason, where I’m completing my 11th academic year, and watching our graduating seniors commence their journey.
To all of them, good luck!
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 