 | Members of the Yale College Class of 2004 cheer as they are granted their undergraduate degrees en masse at the Commencement ceremony. |
Their finals over or their theses complete, the more than 3,000 graduating students who gathered on Old Campus for Yale's 303rd Commencement were eager for rejoicing.
They cheered readily and exuberantly as their degrees were symbolically conferred by President Richard C. Levin and later when baseball legend Willie Mays rose from the platform to accept an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.
Their cheers turned to roars as Mays, a former outfielder for the New York and San Francisco Giants, gracefully threw his mortarboard into the air. As Levin presented the Hall of Famer his degree, a video clip showing Mays' famous over-the-shoulder catch during the first game of the 1954 World Series -- now simply referred to as "The Catch" -- was projected on large screens on both sides of the Commencement dais. The graduating students -- as well as the estimated 15,000 family members and friends in attendance -- rose to their feet to give Mays a standing ovation.
Mays, an Alabaman who began his professional career in the Negro Leagues and now holds the all-time record for put-outs by an outfielder, was one of eight accomplished individuals who were awarded honorary degrees at this year's ceremony. The other recipients, who also elicited long rounds of applause from the graduating students and their guests, are Egyptologist and archaeologist Jan Assmann, whose interdisciplinary studies have illuminated ancient life in Egypt; biologist David Baltimore, the president of the California Institute of Technology and the recipient of a Nobel Prize for his work in virology; Bernard Fisher, a scientist whose work has transformed the treatment of breast cancer; photographer Lee Friedlander, noted for his images of jazz musicians and his stark pictures of urban life; Nannerl O. Keohane, a former president of Wellesley College and advocate for gender equity in higher education, who will step down as Duke University's president in June; Wangari Maathai, the founder of Kenya's Green Belt Movement and an internationally known environmental and political activist; and novelist and journalist Tom Wolfe, Yale Ph.D. '57, author of such best-selling books as "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," "The Right Stuff" and "The Bonfire of the Vanities." (Visit the Office of Public Affairs [OPA] website at www.yale.edu/opa for more information on the honorands.)
The graduation ceremony took place under overcast skies and a chilly temperature. Some guests covered their legs with blankets while others in the audience huddled close to their family members and friends for warmth.
There was no lack of color on the gray day, however. Blue balloons imprinted with "Class of 2004" dotted the scene, particularly in the crowd of graduating seniors. In keeping with a long tradition, students from the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies decorated their mortarboards with things green: leaves, bushes and flowers. Those graduating from the School Medicine wore blue stethoscopes, and from one end of the historic, tree-lined lawn to another could be seen proud family members cradling bouquets of flowers to present to their soon-to-be graduates.
One proud parent in attendance was First Lady Laura Bush, on hand for the graduation of her daughter, Barbara, a member of the Yale College Class of 2004.
"We pray for the healing of wounds, visible and invisible, being suffered by all those so affected by warfare, and that a way to peace be quickly made in those parts of our world defiled by war," the chaplain said. "Let us not lose confidence in the power of good to overcome evil. May we increase our capacity to respect one another, and diminish our use of violence. Those whom we are sending forth into the larger world have ideals that give us hope for the future. May they fulfill their promise."
In one of his final acts as dean of Yale College before departing to become president of Duke University, Richard H. Brodhead presented the Class of 2004 to Levin and requested the symbolic conferring of their degrees. (Their actual diplomas were awarded at ceremonies held afterward in each of Yale's 12 residential colleges). Approximately 1,320 seniors were awarded their undergraduate degrees.
Each of the deans of Yale's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the University's 10 professional schools then rose to ask that their graduates be conferred symbolic degrees. The students responded with joyful cheering as Levin granted each request with the words "By the authority vested in me, I confer upon you the degrees as designated by the dean and admit you to all their rights and responsibilities."
In all, just over 1,800 graduate and professional students earned master's and doctoral degrees, including 223 Law School students whose degrees are provisional; their school term ends a bit later than those of other Yale professional schools.
Before embarking for the next celebration at their individual residential colleges or, in the case of graduate students, their respective schools, the black-gowned graduates again formed a procession as they left Old Campus. This time, as the Yale Concert Band paid tribute to the exiting graduates, it also acknowledged the "graduation" of Yale College's dean, who earned his own three degrees (B.A., M.A. and Ph.D.) from Yale. The band began its celebratory recessional music with the "Richard H. Brodhead Fanfare," written by the director of University Bands, Thomas C. Duffy. As drum beats rolled, smiling students saluted their families, friends and fellow graduates, eager to depart for the next activity of their festive day.
At Sunday's Senior Class Day festivities on the Old Campus, the soon-to-be graduates received some advice from award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns, whose own daughter, Sarah, is a member of the Class of 2004.
Burns urged the graduating students to use history as their guide for understanding the present and the future, noting that it is the "past that gives [the] present new meaning, and most important, new possibilities."
The producer and director of the acclaimed television documentary series "The Civil War," Burns drew parallels between the United States at the time of that war and its citizens' cultural and political divisions since the start of the war in Iraq. Saying that the Civil War and that era's leader, Abraham Lincoln, have "much to teach us" today, Burns quoted from a speech Lincoln made as a young lawyer in 1838, in which he remarked, "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide."
Having recently watched a re-run of "The Civil War" on PBS, Burns said he was struck yet again by the war's cost in human life, and commented that it was the closest this country has ever come to "national suicide." He told his audience that understanding that period of history puts into perspective America's current war.
Quoting the jurist Learned Hand, Burns told the Class of 2004 that "liberty is never being too sure you're right." He decried what he described as a current American culture of arrogance, consumerism, greed and "selfish advancement above all else.
"Somehow ... we have replaced our usual and healthy doubt with an arrogance and belligerence that resemble more of the ancient and now fallen empires of our history books than a modern, compassionate democracy," the filmmaker said. "We have begun to start wars instead of finishing them. We have begun to depend on censorship and intimidation and to infringe on the most basic liberties that heroically defined and described our trajectory as a nation of free people. We have begun to reduce the complexity of modern life into facile judgments of good and evil, and now find ourselves brought up short when we see that we have, too, sometimes, in moments, become what we despise."
Today, Burns told the class, Americans are "in the midst of a new subtler, perhaps more dangerous civil war.
"The first one proved above all that a minority view could not secede politically or geographically from this union," he continued. "Now we are posed to fight that war again and perhaps again and again, this time culturally, where the threat is fundamentalism, wherever it raises its intolerant head."
The stakes of this war, he emphasized, are just as great as those of the Civil War, and affect the entire country as a whole.
"The lesson for us today," he told the soon-to-be graduates, "is tolerance and the mitigating wisdom that sees beyond the dialectical preoccupation that has set each individual, each group, each region of the country against the whole.
"So I ask those of you graduating today -- male or female, black or white, brown or yellow, young or old, straight or gay -- to become soldiers in a new Union army, an army dedicated to the preservation of this country's greatest ideals, a vanguard against this new separatism and disunion, a vanguard against those who in the name of our great democracy have managed to diminish it," he continued.
He went on to offer some other suggestions for living as they move beyond Yale.
"As you pursue your goals in life, that is to say your future, pursue your past. Let it be your guide. Insist on having a past and then you will have a future." He also encouraged them to read, write (letters and journals), travel and listen to jazz, support science and the arts, and to break away from habits that impede their growth. He urged them, as well, to be activists.
"Serve your country," he implored. "Insist that we fight the right wars. Convince your government that the real threat comes from within, as Lincoln said. Governments always forget that. Do not let your government outsource honesty, transparency or candor. Do not let your government outsource democracy.
"Steel yourself," he continued. "Your generation will have to repair this damage. And it will not be easy."
Finally, Burns reminded his audience of students that each individual, in the end, must rely on his or her own resources. Quoting Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an early leader in the women's rights movement, the filmmaker concluded: "There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried ... more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea: the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced. ..."
(For a complete text of Burns' speech, visit the OPA website at www.yale.edu/opa.)
Class Day also included the awarding of top scholastic, athletic and personal character prizes to 14 seniors and teaching prizes to seven members of the faculty. Honored for their teaching efforts were J. Michael Holquist, professor of comparative literature and of Slavic languages and literatures; Tim Barringer, associate professor of the history of art; Laura Frost, assistant professor of English; Paul Bloom, professor of psychology and linguistics; Charles Bailyn, professor of astronomy and physics; Scott Strobel, professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry and chemistry; and Jay Gitlin, lecturer in history. (More on teaching prizes can be find on the OPA website at www.yale.edu/opa.)
Brodhead received two special honors at the Class Day ceremony. Yale Provost Susan Hockfield announced that one of the annual teaching prizes -- the Yale College Prize for Teaching Excellence by a Lecturer or Lector -- will now be called the Richard H. Brodhead Prize for Teaching Excellence by a Lecturer or Lector. The prize was endowed by a friend of Brodhead's, who wished to honor the dean on his departure from Yale.
Brodhead also was presented with a Mory's Cup by Class of 2004 Secretary Joshua Secrest and treasurer Katherine Capelluto on behalf of the entire graduating class.
Sean Fenton, one of four Yale students who were killed in a tragic car crash in the winter of 2003, was honored posthumously on Class Day with the F. Wilder Bellamy Jr. Memorial Prize. The award recognizes such qualities as personal integrity, loyalty to friends, and high-spiritedness in athletics, academics and social life. Fenton's mother tearfully rose to accept the award as Davenport College dean Dr. Richard Schottenfeld read; "Sean Fenton's life cannot be recalled without a strong sense of the joy he brought to all he did. This energy and enthusiasm was Sean's signature, and it remains his enduring legacy."
The other winners of student prizes and their awards are: Rebecca Hunter -- the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize and the Roosevelt L. Thompson Prize; Silas Meredith -- the James Andrew Haas Prize; Raisa Rexer -- the Warren Memorial High Scholarship Prize; Andrew Klaber -- the Arthur Twining Hadley Prize and the David Everett Chantler Prize; Prescott Murphy -- the Russell Henry Chittenden Prize; Kathryn Whalen -- the Louis Sudler Prize for Excellence in the Arts; Alexis Hoag -- the Roosevelt L. Thompson Prize; Nicholas Zamiska -- the William H. McKim Prize; Elizabeth "Miles" Whitman -- the Nellie Pratt Elliot Award; Nathan Lawrie -- the William Neely Mallory Award; and Shannon O'Pray, Alex Galuten and Luis Poza -- the Robert E. Lewis Award. (More on the student prize winners can be found can be found in the May 23 story in the Press Releases section on www.yale.edu/opa.)
Joshua Secrest welcomed his classmates to Senior Class Day exercises by joking that there may still be some graduating students who still wonder why Yale ever accepted them in the first place. In a more serious vein, he acknowledged the hard work of his classmates and the encouragement and support of all of the parents in the audience.
A tongue-in-cheek class history was told by Matteo Borghese, Matthew Kirsch, Allison McCarty, Elizabeth Meriwether and Greg Yolen. Afterward, Justin Cohen and Natalie Krinsky announced that the senior class had raised $23,785 to donate to their soon-to-be alma mater, and, following a tradition dating back to 1852, Ryan Sheely and Iaian Ware planted an ivy and dedicated a stone engraved with "2004" near Phelps Gate in memory of the graduating class.
As they did so, David Gorin read the Ivy Ode, a poem he wrote for Class Day. His poem, which was later translated into Yoruba following another Class Day tradition of reading the ode in an "esoteric" language, describes how he must finally leave his beloved Ivy, a personification of Yale. The Class of 2004 sat quietly while Gorin read how "Ivy" responds to her lover's poignant farewell, wishing he didn't have to leave:
"Stop it. We can't do this again.
Like the bittersweet parting described in the ode, students were both joyful and reluctant to part after they joined in the traditional Class Day singing of "Bright College Years," marking yet another Yale passage and taking yet another step toward saying their own farewell to the place that, for four years, has been "home."
-- By Susan Gonzalez
T H I S
University celebrates its 303rd graduation
President Richard C. Levin and Provost Susan Hockfield march behind Professor Frank Ruddle.
Commencement exercises officially began with the procession of graduates onto the Old Campus as the Yale University Concert Band played marches and other instrumental music fit for the occasion. The Reverend Frederick J. Streets, University chaplain, opened the ceremony with a benedictory prayer, during which he called on the graduates to pursue peace over violence.
Class Day advice
In his speech to members of the Class of 2004, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns -- pictured with his daughter, Sarah '04 -- called on the seniors to join the fight to preserve the nation's highest ideals.
"...I pray we are prepared for the costs, and I shudder when the full force of Lincoln's youthful warning comes back into my consciousness -- that the real threat always and still comes within this favored land, that the greatest enemy is, as our religious teachings remind us, always ourselves," asserted Burns. "It seems abundantly clear that when we Americans heed the advice that echoes back from our inexpressively wise past, we ensure that we will indeed, as Lincoln predicted, live through all time."
I can't help you figure yourself out any more.
When you finally do, maybe you'll see who
I was, and why this way is best, for both of us.
I confess, I've grown attached to you --
but now we both have other walls to climb.
Growing up is something you'll be doing
as long as you live, and you should learn
to do it elsewhere than the paradise
I made for you, imperfect as it was.
Wipe off those tears. It's spring again.
Ripe time for new beginnings to perk up.
Get on your solitary way, baby.
You loved me well. It isn't you, it's me."
W E E K ' SS T O R I E S
University celebrates its 303rd graduationLevin calls for U.S. to change student visa policies
International arts festival returns to New Haven
ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIPSAnthony Kronman is appointed Sterling Professor of Law
Paul Gilroy is designated as the Charlotte Marion Saden Professor
Joan Panetti named the Sylvia and Leonard Marx Jr. Adjunct Professor
New campus programs will cut costs and boost efficiency
Installation at city's historical society features tales about urban renewal
Show recalls Victorians' attempts to capture nature's wonders
Exhibit spotlights works by one of Britain's most neglected artists
Medical and nursing schools to host alumni reunions
Yale and state officials consider ways to promote smoking cessation
Poll shows state of the environment a concern for voters
Scientists identify molecule that causes irreversible nerve damage in MS
F&ES symposium will examine effects of forest certification
Campus Notes
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