520 Graduate During 171st Commencement Exercises May 10
Trustee emeritus Bruce Stewart ’61 challenged Guilford’s 520 graduates to “engage your minds, hearts and resources to address these and other powerful matters of common concern” at the college’s 171st commencement exercises Saturday, May 10, on Quadrangle Lawn.
“You have the values of this blessed place in the very fabric of your soul, and I am confident that as you leave this community you will live in such a spirit of civility, care and service that you will inevitably bring America back to its fullest and dearest sense of promise, a land unequivocally dedicated to liberty, justice and opportunity for all,” Stewart said.
Stewart, this year’s invited speaker, has a life-long career in the education field. He has been dean of students at N.C. School of the Arts and head of school at Abington Friends School (Pa.) and Sidwell Friends School (D.C.), from which he will retire in 2009. From 1970-1984, he served in several roles at Guilford including director of admission, academic dean and acting president. Stewart was a member of the Board of Trustees from 1986-2003 and chair from 1999-03.
He recalled his own “coincidental journey” as a working-class first-generation college student from Lynn, Mass., to Guilford. From his own his biography, Stewart drew the lesson that “we each arrive in our place in life more by the finger of fate than by any measure of personal choice.” He then listed the world challenges graduates will be called on to address: what he characterized as the continuing social and economic injustice in the United States, citing trends in rising education costs, disparity in prison sentences issued to non-white minorities and uneven burdens on the poor.
“We are a ‘planet in peril,’ but optimism must prevail. I see in you great promise for America and for the world,” Stewart said. “I am confident that you, like George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, will ‘walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone.’ I also know that you will, like him, ‘let your lives speak.’ Your generation, as can be seen in our recent presidential primaries, is raising its head and its voice and is doing that, quite thankfully, for the collective good.”
In his charge to the graduating class, President Kent Chabotar also urged graduates to be fearless in pursuit of their dreams, charging them to “visualize success, don’t sweat the small stuff and live your passion.”
“Don’t give up on being a force for social change,” Chabotar said. “Don’t buy the status quo in environmental protection, health care, housing for the homeless and paramount issues of war and peace. We can do better. Yes we can.”
Student speakers Garrett FitzGerald ’08 and Cynthia Bowen ’08 also addressed the responsibility graduates will now have to the wider world.
Bowen, an adult student of Greensboro and psychology major, spoke of the gratitude graduates feel for both their families and home communities and the Guilford community. “On the outside, we share receiving a diploma with Guilford College written on it. This document tells the world that we have successfully met the learning objectives required by our degree programs. What the diploma does not make obvious, but what we know because we are a community, is that we have been changed right down to our core by our experiences here at Guilford College,” she said.
Bowen, currently an employee of Greensboro Day School, plans to pursue a graduate degree.
FitzGerald focused his remarks on another core value, stewardship, calling it “possibly the least understood” of Guilford’s core values. “In obtaining these degrees, we have been given a privilege shared by only one percent of the world’s population,” he said. “Rather than owners, I say we have instead become stewards of knowledge, and the failure to properly manage this knowledge would be a lapse of our duty as responsible stewards and a slight to the world into which we are now prepared to depart.”
FitzGerald, a traditional-age student and religious studies and peace and conflict studies major of Louisville, Ky., will be pursuing a master of theological studies degree at Harvard Divinity School beginning this fall.
Student speakers were nominated by the Class of 2008, faculty and staff; one traditional and one CCE student were chosen to speak by the Convocation and Celebrations Committee.
To view speaker remarks click here.
May 10, 2008