Commencement 2001 - Swarthmore College Bulletin

On June 4, a perfect spring day, faculty members, students, and their families gathered in the dappled sunlight of the arboretum to celebrate Commencement. Senior speaker Evan Gregory ’01 got things off to a rousing start with a speech worthy of an off-Broadway production. The address was so entertaining, in fact, that National Public Radio rebroadcast a portion on All Things Considered. (The segment is available online.)

Gregory opened his speech with a maritime analogy--“College is like a boat! A seafaring ship, buffeted by the waves of controversy and propelled by the engine of bureaucracy”--then broke into a pirate’s growl. “Arrr, mateys, as we sail o’er the ocean of academia, we must surely be swabbin’ our own poop deck lest we be broadsided and forced to walk the plank of overcommitment and be devoured by the sharks of extracurricular activities, at long last ending up in Davy Jones’ locker of scurvy personal unfulfillment.”

He even briefly demonstrated his opera training before comparing Swarthmore with “a colony of hard-working ants, with hundreds of worker ants dashing about, constantly worrying about time management, and dozens of thesis adviser ants reprimanding the workers for not finishing their abstracts or bibliographies on time--not to mention the drones, who regurgitate their own partially digested food for the colony’s larvae until they develop into adult insects.”

Swarthmore, he added, “is about asking the tough questions, such as: “What does it mean to be socially re-sponsible, and how may I bring that know-ledge to my daily life?” or “What is the nature of this cafeteria meat product, and how may we know it?”

NO SMALL TALK

Adrienne Asch ’69, first to receive one of the three honorary degrees, paused to regain her composure after President Alfred H. Bloom introduced her. “Swarthmore means so much to me,” Asch told the audience. “This is very powerful.”

A scholar, psychotherapist, and proponent of equal opportunity and human rights, Asch is known for her studies of selective abortion, genetics, discrimination, feminism, and disability rights (a topic she has firsthand experience of as a blind woman). She has been the Henry R. Luce Professor of Biology, Ethics, and the Politics of Human Reproduction at Wellesley College since 1994 and served on President Clinton’s Health Reform Task Force and the National Commission on Childhood Disability.

“I arrived at Swarthmore in 1964,” she said, “and the second day afterward, I wrote to my best friend from high school: ‘This is a school of non-small talkers!’ I was thrilled to be here, and the talk only got better. There are people still on this faculty who will not be surprised to know that this speech was not completed until this morning. In fact, they will know that the only reason it was completed at all is that you can’t get an extension on a speech.”

Asch urged graduates to have the courage of their convictions and to always do the research necessary to make informed decisions. “Someday, I may get evidence that changes my beliefs about equality in parenting, about the commitments we should make to children, about the worthwhileness of life with disability, about caution in deciding to end life-sustaining treatment, about the difficulty in crafting wise legislation for physician-assisted suicide.

Perhaps someday I will change my beliefs. Perhaps I will change either my evaluation of existing evidence, my understanding of new evidence, or the values I bring to the debate. That is what life is about. Meanwhile, I must keep paying attention and keep speaking out.”

SINGING OUT

Instead of delivering a speech, Ken Hechler ’35 led the audience in a spirited sing-along of verses he wrote to the tune of Swarthmore’s alma mater (see the March Bulletin, page 38). The lyrics were a call to action, something Hechler has heeded throughout his illustrious career.

Hechler earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he taught before enlisting in the Army in 1942. Assigned to the European theater as a combat historian, he interrogated Hermann Goering and other Nazi leaders, for which he was awarded a Bronze Star.

After the war, he taught at Princeton before serving under President Harry Truman as a research director and special assistant. He represented the state of West Virginia in Congress from 1959 to 1977 and served as secretary of state from 1985 to early this year. In both roles, he led the fight for fair elections; mine safety; environmental protection; and, most recently, campaign finance reform. He was the only member of Congress to meet with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala. Last year, he accompanied the 90-year-old Doris Haddock (“Granny D”) for 530 miles of her California-to-Washington, D.C., walk on behalf of campaign finance reform.

Hechler has written several books on politics and American history, including The Bridge at Remagen, which was made into a motion picture in 1969.

MEANING OF LIFE

“As I visited your magnificent campus, peeked into your classrooms and hallways, I found myself envious of the kind of education you have had here and the rich tradition that you are a part of,” honorary degree recipient Abraham Verghese said. “It is the kind of education I never had, and it is the kind of education I would wish for my children.”

Verghese was raised in Ethiopia and studied medicine in India--between interruptions caused by war and political turmoil. He completed his residency in Tennessee and a fellowship on infectious diseases at Boston University. Since 2000, he has been the Grover E. Murray Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso.

Ten years ago, he also received a master of fine arts in writing. His 1995 book My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

It was from the experiences in this book that Verghese drew his theme, offering a simple answer to the eternal question: What is the meaning of life? “Much of my education and many of my most valuable lessons came from my patients, in particular the experience of taking care of people with HIV in a small town in Tennessee,” Verghese said. Time and time again, he said, “when young men at the tail ends of their lives asked themselves where did meaning reside, they found that meaning did not reside in good looks, reputation, power, or money. Instead, they found that meaning resided in the successful relationships they formed over time, particularly with their parents as well as their significant others.

“Graduates of the Class of 2001, this is my charge to you: Make good use of your time.”

--Cathleen McCarthy