It is that time of year in academia … commencement. A time of great excitement and some trepidation for grads, and if last week’s Inside Higher Ed commentary on the topic and the comments it generated (https://tinyurl.com/3fm497z) are to be believed, a time of rather conflicted responses on the part of faculty.
If you were bored this past weekend, you could have spent some time watching CSPAN rerun several of this year’s more notable commencement speakers; in particular, Denzel Washington delivered a great, theatrical address at the University of Pennsylvania. The role and the status of the commencement speaker sometimes seems to have become larger than the stage of commencement itself: President Obama at Miami Dade College, Tom Hanks at Yale, Whoopi Goldberg at SCAD. New Jersey is so up in arms about commencement speaker fees that it may pass a bill to ban state-funded colleges from paying them. However, in most cases, the speech is anticlimactic—delivered by a well-meaning but not-well-recognized individual with little connection to the college or the student body. In fact, as I spent some time Googling “best commencement speeches” in preparation for this message, I was struck by an anonymous comment posted in response to an article on that topic:
“It is the rare commencement speech (or speaker) that is worth the time/effort of the audience, which will not remember much if anything about it. The pomp and color of the traditional commencement exercise are worthy tributes to students, families, and faculty, but the traditional speech should have gone the way of the Dodo bird long since.”
A rather pointed observation that underscores why we’re changing our commencement ceremony. We began with a radical notion: commencement should be about the students. It is their moment in the spotlight, literally, and we want to make it the best experience we can. Each change we’ve made can be traced back to this notion. Here are the changes you’ll see Saturday:
-- Most obviously, we’ve moved commencement out of the work week and into the weekend to make it easier for family and friends of our graduates to attend and to stay through the entire ceremony.
--We’ve also streamlined the ceremony. The goal is for our graduates to shine, not to sit. (If you’ve already picked a time in the pool, sorry!)
--We’ve redefined the role of our commencement speaker to be someone who represents our students, their future paths and opportunities. Who better to do this than an MCC alumnus? This year, George Moses, Executive Director of North East Area Development, Inc., will offer a brief address to our students highlighting what the MCC experience has meant for him.
MCC’s commencement should be (paraphrasing the words of anonymous) a worthy tribute to our students, to their families and friends, and to the many MCC community members who helped our students’ walk in our front door end with a walk across the stage at graduation. We hope these changes will make this vision a reality; please let me know.
I look forward to seeing you Saturday morning for a grand celebration of our students. Happy graduation!
What is your favorite student graduation story? Please share it in the comments.
Anne Kress
President's Office
06/01/2011 |