Colin’s sister Justine was part of Antioch College’s graduating class of 2008 this past weekend. Colin, Anne, Owen, and I all flew out to Yellow Springs, Ohio to watch her graduate. We’re all so proud of Justine!
The event was made particularly interesting by the fact that all the news says that Antioch College is closing this year, making this the last graduation. However, the mood at the ceremony was really different than the mood you get from reading the news. There’s still obviously a really strong movement to keep the college alive. The ceremony was very loud and spirited. It started about an hour late, because they couldn’t get everybody into the auditorium who wanted to be there.
Some of the speakers were really very good, including many of the student speakers (Antioch always features several). Among the student speakers was a guy who sang a song he had written for Antioch – “Be ashamed to let it die”.
In an interesting twist, the commencement speaker, James (Jimmy) Williams, former dean of students, was the keynote speaker. As he said, “I’ve never been fired and invited to give a commencement speech for the same college in the same year.”
The main theme of many speeches was the theme of Antioch College, a quote from Horace Mann – “Be ashamed to die until you have achieved some victory for humanity.” It’s pretty striking to see a college that really emphasizes such a hard-core activist message.
After the ceremony, we went to a mini-ceremony, where Justine and another student were presented with the Abrams Prize for excellent scholastic work in Peace Studies. They were seleted for this prize by the Antioch College Chatterjee Committee, and the prize was presented by Irwin Abrams himself, a world authority on the Nobel Peace Prize.
Two days after graduation, Justine and her brand new BA were off to try their hand at New York City. Good luck, Justine!
May 9, 2008 at 10:15 pm
One of the speakers at the graduation, a woman from the school’s board of trustees made some bland comments about how “no news is good news” (about the school’s possible closure). She ended with a truly bizarre story, that she claimed was a true (both before and after telling it). She said that her uncle (or great uncle) was a doctor, and was attending to a birth, at his house. His wife was very sick, and didn’t have long left to live. She stayed upstairs at their house. Someone else called to him, “Come quickly! Your wife is dying!” He replied that he couldn’t come, because he was helping with the birth. His wife died before he was able to make it upstairs. The woman telling this story left it up to the audience to figure out the moral. I guess it was “pay no attention to the dying woman upstairs … there’s babies here”.
May 28, 2008 at 5:12 am
spiritless says : I absolutely agree with this !