President Hiram E. Chodosh delivered the following Commencement remarks to the Class of 2023:
Wow, what a moment!
My heart swells, and aches, and swells up quickly again for every one of you.
Swells with love for all of you here to celebrate:
The love and care of our parents, families, and friends.
who have sacrificed so much:
the financial stress, the worry with you far away,
I might add, patience in the wake of many unanswered texts
the unconditional support and high expectations
the championship of our graduates through thick and thin.
The dedicated brilliance and love of our faculty and staff,
including the legendary, retiring Marc Massoud,
who has demonstrated for over 40 years that
love is a powerful medium for full learning success,
even in the discipline of accounting,
a tough test case by any standard!
The leadership and generosity of our board of trustees and alumni.
Incalculable contributions of time, talent, and treasure
to fuel our rocket ship as it soars through CMC’s 75th commencement.
From the original idea of a college
in this rocky valley of orchards
to prepare this next great generation
for our future world of affairs,
to this gorgeous campus, on parent’s field
to prepare for a future that is now.
We express pride in our outstanding graduates
Your shared commitments--
to strive for excellence
to build a close-knit community
to leverage the fusion of learning and experience--
all in order to produce a powerful,
virtuous cycle of expanding opportunity.
We celebrate
all the moments that got you here,
all the moments you made here for yourselves,
to get to this point
a proud finish, as you graduate
a thrilling start, as you commence.
We have no fear of spreading a virus, today.
Instead,
we spread joy
we spread pride
we spread championship in one another.
And yet, my heart aches
For the deep loss, delayed experience, social disconnection
You arrived and suddenly left.
Theo roamed the campus for 18 months,
looking for you (and food scraps) on the deck of the Hub,
sniffing North Quad doors for signs of your return.
The first year back, we muddled through the virus and policy whiplash.
This year, we tried to restore,
like a diaspora community with a lost language
a compromised social memory,
looking for social warmth in a cold, rainy winter,
peering through our tears to reimagine our community.
That has been tough and wonderful,
hard and fun,
disappointing and rewarding
hitting us all in different, at times, unfair ways.
COVID may be over.
But we are not over it.
Not over its profound effects.
The amplification of affective divisions
Even against shared outrage and grieving
in the wake of senseless violence,
the devastating, repeating shocks, and resulting fear
(unfairly distributed across race and other divisions),
from the murder of George Floyd and others
to mass murders in our schools and public squares.
Amplifying our most recent pandemic,
as recently framed by the US Surgeon General:
loneliness, a national health crisis.
Were Bowling Alone to have a title today, it might be
Alone, No Longer Bowling.
--
And yet, right now, as I look out at this assembly of the beautiful people
that Priya and I (and Theo) love most in the world:
my heart swells back up again
Because here, today, we open the closed doors,
We cross this stage, this threshold.
We rally with the resilience Annette leads us to reinforce.
We roll together in the intellectual exchange across disciplines and
embrace the ostensibly contradictory pursuits
Amery champions in our Class of 2023.
We push through the barriers, led by our students.
From Tatiana Amaya of Philadelphia who surmounted unimaginable challenges
to put herself so successfully through college
to become our only Truman Scholar finalist in 2022
and is heading off to Washington DC to get her masters and;
create educational opportunities for others
through the Urban Teachers program at American University.
To Moe Yassin from Tamra in Northern Israel who, years ago,
on his way to take the SAT in Jerusalem,
was struck by a rubber bullet that glanced off his back
before he was detained by the military.
His commitment to come to the US for college was so fierce,
that Moe fought through the trauma,
arrived at the site, and took the test,
and now is off to work for WestRiver Group in Seattle.
Through us, Brother West
Before my charge to the Class, I have a challenge for all in attendance today.
Earlier this year, Cornel West came to the Athenaeum
and inspired us all with his unmatched love and humanity, erudition and brilliance.
He asked: when you go through college, does college go through you?
I would like to build on Brother West’s question today, by asking:
When our graduates pass through College, and CMC passes through them,
do their stories pass through us, too?
Can we learn from our outstanding graduates how to overcome our own loss,
how to surmount the barriers that frustrate our success,
how to traverse the divisions that cut into what holds us together?
fences
We all carry a healthy ambivalence about the demarcation of space through barriers, walls, fences.
property rights,
secured borders between countries,
the mapping of voting districts.
Those are big questions for our graduates, all of us, to grapple with.
From the political to the personal, we appear torn between
the comfort of being enclosed by fences (the sense of our special place and community in the world) and
the excitement of stepping through them, over the threshold of our discomfort, (the sense that we can expand our place and community in the world)
On the one hand:
Frost tell us:
Good fences make good neighbors.
Gregory Dreicer goes further:
Fences . . . tell us where we belong and who we are in relation to others.
On the other hand:
Bill Clinton warns:
A world without walls is the only sustainable world. . .
Ronald Reagan aspires:
There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.
Where do we look for answers?
Our poets and politicians may help,
but today we look within.
For within, we find the lessons, stories, values—
that live beneath the surface of our census data or resumes or LinkedIn pages—
three images that inspire my Charge to the Class of 2023:
brown blanket
chain link fence
open palm
==
brown blanket
Some fences are criminal; they imprison us. We discover freedom.
The resolution on Bob Nakasone—his extraordinary journey,
his selfless contributions back to this College—rests on one underlying, untold story.
The story of an 80-year old brown blanket he still has,
from his mother, Kay, who just recently passed away at age 98.
This was not an ordinary blanket.
It was given to Bob’s mom by the US government.
This was no ordinary handout.
This was an Army-issued internment camp blanket
for Japanese-Americans unjustly incarcerated during World War II.
After forcibly losing all of her family belongings, and was never paid for them,
Kay received this blanket as she was forced to stay in a cold horse stable at the assembly center on the Washington State fairgrounds
right before she was moved to a more permanent internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho.
Interned at 18, she never went to her high school graduation,
or walk across this kind of stage.
Instead, she received her diploma (along with two classmates) from the assembly center warden.
this was the only source of any warmth Kay had left.
Over his lifetime, for Bob Nakasone, his mom’s brown blanket served as a symbol of inspiration,
an artifact to honor his parents’ resilience,
a source of comfort on an unimaginable journey to and beyond this College:
from winning baseball championships with Coach Arce in Europe,
to building a beautiful family, trailblazing career, and philanthropic legacy.
He went through CMC.
CMC went through him and all he has accomplished.
the chain link fence
Some fences keep us out of the public square. We find a way in.
A few weeks ago, I asked Professor Putnam if he could recall a single experience in his youth that drove the body of his life-long contributions.
Why him, why this?
He recalled a moment when he was about 6 years old.
He was standing, just outside a playground, looking through a chain link fence, with his hands high, fingers intertwined.
On the other side of the fence, kids were playing and having a blast, and young Bob Putnam thought:
“I want to play with them; they don’t want to play with me.”
He could have collapsed into that feeling;
instead, he invested a lifetime of scholarship (and along with his wife, Rosemary, a generous scholarship) to transcend that fence,
not only for himself but for others left out on the exterior,
to see the value of community and civic connection and friendship and play,
to encourage us to reverse the corrosion of our civic life and bowl together again.
open palm
Some fences are those we ourselves create, many that we cannot see. We invite outsiders in.
Just last week, I was telling Professor Putnam’s story to a graduating senior in my office, Truman Knowles,
and asked whether there was an image like that for him, something vivid and powerful and defining.
In contrast to Professor Putnam’s poignant story and inspiring response to the feeling of being left outside, Truman spoke of “posture.”
What did that mean to him?, I asked.
He explained that he tries to meet every encounter, every person or group with an open palm.
Not a clenched fist, recoiling in defense, or for a fight.
An open palm to invite them in.
That open palm is Truman’s posture towards every person, every community, including those locked on the outside.
A powerful ethos on his quest to cure rare pediatric disease.
Now, imagine
Truman on the other side of Professor Putnam’s fence, inviting him in.
Annette is absolutely right. This is about more than just making friends.
This is the commitment to open the gate and welcome those on the outside.
This is Amery’s commitment to learn, engage together.
This is the courage of Zach, Daryl, DT, Moe, Tati, and Annette to emerge from the confined place of the world’s unjust constraints.
The inspiration of Bob Nakasone, never to forget where we or our ancestors have been, to hold and cherish the legacy of Kay’s brown blanket.
And once up the ladder or just inside, to extend Truman’s open palm, to anyone left behind.
With us all rolling, bowling together.
My point is this.
The answers are here.
Within each of us.
We only have to see them, grasp them, apply them, contribute them to others.
So:
clutching the brown blanket to remind us of our struggles,
climbing the chain link fence,
our palms open, even to those whose fists are clenched,
I now ask the graduates of the Class of 2023, please, to stand for your charge.
sear a constellation of these stories
these images deep in your hearts
don’t rest in the confines that the world imposes
don’t rest in dangerous comfort of your good fortune
let these stars in your soul light every future step
navigate through unwanted barriers
traverse the chosen thresholds in your dreams
turn your deficits into dividends
rubber bullets into your resilience
turn injury into remedy
disease into cure
turn fences into your bridges
dead-ends into your new trails
let others into you
and you into others
let the them into us
and the us into them
keep running through CMC
and CMC running through you
brown blankets to hold
fences to flatten
palms to open
we roll together
we bowl together
Congratulations to the Class of 2023.
Congratulations to you all.