I was the faculty commencement speaker at Riverside Community College's Spring 2004 graduation. The following is the graduation address I delivered on that occasion: Graduates: I want to remind you what kind of a college it is you are about to graduate from. The last time I spoke at a college graduation was in 1996. I was an academic advisor and instructor at UC Santa Cruz, where the students of Adlai Stevenson College chose me as the faculty speaker. My son Nathaniel had been born the month that seniors graduating in 1996 had come to the college, and my son grew up alongside students who proceeded through UCSC over the first four years of his life. Because UC Santa Cruz is a residential college, I knew probably 75% of the 200 or so students who graduated that day on a first name basis. I had had them in classes or had been their academic advisor. Because so many students begin their college career at UCSC living on campus, even transfer students became part of the college community, even if they never lived on campus. Aristotle observed in the Politics that "man is by nature a political animal," and by "political," he meant that human beings are creatures that develop their full potential only in community with others. From its founding, UC Santa Cruz is a public institution that has tried to foster a sense of institutional community. The following year, I applied to come to Riverside Community College and moved my family from Northern California Redwoods to southern California sunshine. During my short tenure at RCC, we have been engaged in a benign institutional divorce, through which our three campuses will soon be three colleges. Thus I have colleagues at Moreno Valley and Norco I don't know, as well as some, I'm ashamed to admit, here in Riverside. I also don't know most of you who are graduating today, though I am not ashamed of that fact. RCC serves many more students than UCSC does, and I do know the great majority of you have been a part of our larger community in a way UCSC students usually were not. You have wives, parents, boyfriends, kids, and jobs in this community. Most of you have too many jobs, but in spite of how jam-packed your lives are, here you sit at this crossroads to the next stage of your lives. And did I mention that all of you have too many jobs? Some of you will continue your education in other academic communities in the fall--two of my own past students will go to prestigious public institutions: Maha will go to Berkeley and I learned just this afternoon that Senay's appeal to go to Berkeley instead of UCLA was successful. Most, of you, though, will remain within the Inland Empire, transferring perhaps to UCR or CSU San Bernardino. Many of you in the white robes will stop paying to go to school and will start getting paid here in the community for the skills you've developed during your time here at RCC. Students sometimes referred to life at UCSC as not being "life in the real world." We'd all like to live in a world where checks come reliably from far away and you can afford to buy all your books at the beginning of the semester. But Santa Cruz is the real world: some people are kind and others are cruel; people get sick and people get well; children are born and parents die. But Santa Cruz provides a narrower slice of the real world: students over 25 are rare, few students have family responsibilities, and most students will leave Santa Cruz for other communities once their schooling there is complete. Our community in the Inland Empire isn't more real, but it's quite a bit more representative of the diversity of American life and the American community. In the over twenty years I lived in Santa Cruz, I don't think I ever saw a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf, something I observed the first day I set foot on the RCC campus. In my classes at RCC I've had students from a global community: men and women, husbands and wives, immigrants, children of immigrants. I think I've had students born on every continent of the globe except Antarctica. Because I teach online, I've even had students who were living on different continents while they were in my virtual classroom. For we are all members of different communities. The world is a mess, though you didn't need me telling you so to know it. The world has probably always been a mess: at one time or another, the world looks like my kids' room on a bad day. Many of you had your community temporally reconstruct itself last October and November, when 80,000 people were evacuated from their communities in the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains, when the Grand Prix and Old Fires were visible from Riverside. Your world changed, briefly, because you had to leave your home, or perhaps because you chose to open your home to others who were in need. A new community formed at the former Norton Air Force base where my wife took my kids on October 31, lest they miss out on Halloween sugar. Later in the day, we brought them to the Quad on this campus to yet another community of trick or treaters. The world has always been a mess, but people of compassion have always worked to maintain a semblance of community for those whose lives are, briefly, we hope, out of whack. It is community in this global sense that I hope we all will be mindful of as we continue this ceremony and continue on tomorrow as participants of the different communities we are members of. It is appropriate to be brief on occasions like this, because none of you came to hear me speak: you came to see your family and friends process across our stage. You came not because this is a community college, but because you have a personal bond to an individual in this audience before me. Communities are always made up of individuals, but to the extent that those individuals are aware of the riches they possess in their lives, they are also aware of the communities of which they are members. I miss Santa Cruz, but I am more proud to be a member of this community, where so many of you have overcome much trickier obstacles, to find yourself celebrating your accomplishment this evening. And having been a part of RCC, whether you go to Berkeley or go to work at our local Ford dealership, your success in meeting the challenges you encountered at RCC bodes well for the communities lucky enough to have you join them. I wish you all the luck in the world. |