Deborah Bial Speaks at Lafayette’s 171st Commencement

Lafayette awarded 563 degrees to 549 graduating seniors and honorary doctorates to four distinguished leaders, including Deborah Bial, founder and president of the Posse Foundation, at the College’s 171st Commencement Saturday, May 20.

View the video of Bial’s Commencement address and photos in the Commencement scrapbook.

In her address Bial passionately promoted equity in higher education, challenging top U.S. colleges and universities to “model equity and to educate student bodies that look more like our country’s changing demographics. . . . If [they] do not aggressively take on this challenge, they will be directly contributing to the ossification of our society — where we create a system that excludes groups who will one day — soon — represent the largest part of this nation.” (See complete text below.)

President Dan Weiss awarded Bial the honorary degree of Doctor of Public Service. Also granted honorary degrees were Gregory Farrington, president of Lehigh University (Doctor of Letters); John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History at Duke University (Doctor of Humane Letters); and Mulgrew Miller, the internationally acclaimed jazz pianist and resident of Easton (Doctor of Performing Arts). (Read the citations.)

Nangula Shejavali ’06 delivered farewell remarks for the class of 2006. She is the recipient of the George Wharton Pepper Prize, awarded to the senior who “most closely represents the Lafayette ideal.” Shejavali, of Windhoek, Namibia, received a bachelor of arts (A.B.) degree with majors in international affairs and Africana studies.

The first students to receive their diplomas were Teresa Cridge ’06, Laura Hagopian ’06, and Joshua Porter ’06, who achieved the highest cumulative grade-point average in the class. Cridge, of Newtown, Pa., received an A.B. with majors in biology and government & law. Hagopian, of Chelmsford, Mass., graduated with an A.B. with a major in chemistry. Porter, of Pittstown, N.J., received a bachelor of science in electrical and computer engineering.

Melissa Spitz ’06, co-chair of the Class of 2006 Gift Committee, presented the class gift. Spitz, of Livingston, N.J., received an A.B. degree with a major in art. The other co-chair, Andrew Brown ’06,originally of Ontario, Canada, graduated with an A.B. with a major in economics and business. The percentage of graduates contributing to this year’s class gift is an all-time high. The gift supports stipends that help enable students to serve summer internships.

Weiss congratulated recipients of annual Lafayette awards for distinguished teaching, research, and service to the College and recognized two retiring members of the faculty who have been elected to emeritus status, Susan L. Blake, professor of English, and Shyamal K. Majumdar, Gideon R., Jr., and Alice L. Kreider Professor of Biology. (Read the citations.)

Alan R. Griffith ’64, chair of the board of trustees, recognized Walter A. Scott ’59, a retiring trustee who has been elected to emeritus status.

Weiss conferred degrees upon the graduates and delivered farewell remarks. Assisting in presenting the diplomas were James Woolley, Frank Lee and Edna M. Smith Professor of English and clerk of the faculty, and Rose Marie L. Bukics, Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Professor of Economics and Business and acting dean of studies.

Majumdar, the senior member of the faculty, led the academic procession as Bearer of the Mace. James F. Krivoski, vice president for student affairs, marshaled the class of 2006.

Provost June Schlueter marched at the head of the faculty. Trustee emeritus Charles E. Hugel ’51 led the trustees and the platform party.

John P. Colatch, College chaplain and director of religious life, delivered the invocation and gave the benediction. Nina Gilbert, Lafayette’s director of choral activities, led the singing of “America the Beautiful.” Members of the Lafayette Choir, led by Gilbert, led the singing of “The Alma Mater.”

Address by Deborah Bial
171st Commencement, May 20, 2006

You guys look gorgeous! It’s so exciting, and I want to say congratulations to the class of 2006. This is fantastic!

I’d like to thank President Weiss, the Lafayette board of trustees, faculty, and staff who invited me to speak on this unbelievably special occasion. This is a wonderful day for each of you – and also for your family and friends who I know are so proud of you.

Don’t let this day go by without realizing that this is truly a great achievement. You have each received an exemplary education at one of the finest institutions of higher education in the country, and it will serve you for your entire life. You’ll remember a lot about Lafayette: studying at Skillman, hanging out at the CHT, cheering for the Leopards. You’ll remember your favorite professors. When I was in college, Professor [Alan] Levitan was one of mine. He taught humanities and was so inspiring that he often would get a standing ovation at the end of his lectures. I’m now 40 years old, and I saw him the other day sitting across from me on the #1 subway train in New York City and I got nervous when I re-introduced myself. There’s just something really special about the college experience, and I hope you treasure it forever.

Today is your rite of passage for all the hard work you put in to get here. When you get ready to walk across this stage, be in the moment. Pay attention to the weight of your robes, to the eight stairs you have to climb to get up here, to the president’s handshake. You will have several thousand people watching you receive your diploma. Enjoy it. It only happens this once.

And then what will you do? Who will you become? How certain are you of where you will go next? The most important thing for you to know is that you can do anything. And I suggest you dream big.

I want to take just a few minutes to talk to you about two things: leadership – the leadership you can provide – and committing yourself to something that you care about, following your passion.

Just think about this: What if Michelangelo said, “I don’t do ceilings?” What if Anne Frank didn’t feel like writing? What if Einstein felt insecure about not finishing high school? What if Neil Armstrong was afraid of flying? What if Martin Luther King didn’t become a preacher? What if Che Guevera didn’t follow his heart?

I want to read you a quote from a biographical essay on Eleanor Roosevelt. “When Eleanor Roosevelt journeyed to New York City a week after her husband’s funeral in April 1945, a cluster of reporters were waiting at the door of her Washington Square apartment. ‘The story is over,’ she said simply, assuming that her words and opinions would no longer be of interest once her husband was dead and she was no longer First Lady.”

Amazing, isn’t it, that Eleanor Roosevelt felt insecure! We’ve all felt insecure. We’ve all doubted our abilities. But the one thing that differentiates a leader from the rest is her ability to push aside emotional insecurities, reject intellectual barriers, and pursue what she feels is important in order to serve a greater good.

Today when we think about excellence, leadership, and service, we often mix up these concepts with celebrity, million-dollar donations, and Hollywood. We think about Oprah’s angels network, and Bill Gates’ work on AIDS in Africa, and entertainers running for office. Don’t fall into that trap of glamorizing leadership. We cannnot forget there are so many of us who do not get recognized on TV or in the New York Times who are also doing very important work. I know that many of you here can already talk about the difference you’ve made in your family, on this campus, or in the larger community, and all of us celebrating you here today are hoping you take your passion out into the world, find something that moves you, and work hard to make a difference.

You know, I was only a year or two older than you when I started Posse. For those of you don’t know that much about Posse, it’s a college scholarship and youth leadership-development program that connects some of this country’s most outstanding high school leaders to some of the top institutions of higher education in the country. It was designed to help those institutions be more sensitive to the growing diversity of America.

I was hired by a youth organization in New York City and kind of thrown into the public schools to run what we were calling at the time “leadership workshops.” To be perfectly honest with you, I had absolutely no idea what a leadership workshop was and I could have said, “I can’t do that.” But I didn’t. I thought, “OK, I’ll figure it out,” and that was lucky for me, because it was through those workshops that I got to meet scores of students. They were smart, funny, full of dreams. And, a you can imagine, in New York City, these students represented every nation, ethnicity, race, and political orientation. So I ran leadership workshops with them. They graduated from high school and lots of them went off to college. Well there’s no story there, right? Wrong.

So many of them dropped out! Now as you know, when you develop relationships with people, you think you have some sense of their abilities, right? And I knew there was something dreadfully wrong when smart, funny, full-of-dreams students were dropping out of college. The simple bottom line was that moving from a big, diverse urban environment to a small college town in a rural location wasn’t as easy as it might sound. And – this is a true story – one of those students said to me, “I never would have dropped out, if I had my Posse with me.”

Well, what a great idea! Why not send a team of students together to college, so they could back each other up? Lucky for me again: a great idea! A faculty member and friend at Vanderbilt University thought it was a good idea, too, and that’s how Posse began, and since that year, in 1989, Posse has identified over 1,500 scholars. They’ve won more than $140 million in leadership scholarships from Posse partners like Lafayette and they are graduating at a rate of over 90 percent. And of course, if you happen to know any Posse Scholars – they’re also inclined to change the world.

I hope you hear in this story that it doesn’t matter how old you are or how you find your passion. What matters is that you recognize opportunity and seize it. It matters that you believe you can do it. It also matters that no matter where you are in your life, you are constantly developing networks of individuals and organizations who can become partners with you. A leader cannot lead alone.

And when you have success, that success can give you other opportunities. The success of Posse gave me another opportunity, and that was to have a platform from which to speak out on an issue I personally feel is critical to the health of our nation: promoting equity in higher education. When we look at our institutions of higher education, it is important to ask the questions that Martin Luther King left us with almost 40 years ago. Colleges and universities are struggling still with issues of access, opportunity, and equity. On campus, these same institutions are struggling with trying to establish a truly diverse environment. The common experience for college students today is a kind of “segregated diversity.” Students from different backgrounds often don’t eat or socialize together, and many graduate saying they haven’t experienced a diverse environment at all. How far have we really come?

You may know that within the next 50 years, whites will no longer be the majority demographic in the United States. Latinos are the fastest growing population and already represent 37 percent of the population in the West. We also know that post-secondary education – college – has become a critical determinant in life chances. You know that with a degree from this fine institution your opportunities for good jobs increase exponentially. Yet when we look at our most impressive institutions of higher education, we often see very homogeneous student bodies.

And although we’ve made major strides in becoming a more unified nation, there are still great challenges to overcome in the way we treat each other. The challenges are not limited to our campuses, but our great colleges and universities have a responsibility to model equity and to educate student bodies that look more like our country’s changing demographics. Why? Think about how much more divided our social and class structures will become if we limit opportunity to only a select few.

Last year I was in California for a conference at Laguna Beach, a lovely, exclusive place. I noticed numerous gated communities where people of wealth could purchase a fancy home and live safely with their families. I also noticed that all the hotel and restaurant staff where I was staying were Mexican. They were named Jose, Maria, Juan.

There is a very serious social, economic, and racial crisis when we see the promise of access to higher education systematically assigned to only certain segments of our population. If our top colleges and universities do not aggressively take on this challenge, they will be directly contributing to the ossification of our society – where we create a system that excludes groups who will one day – soon – represent the largest part of this nation. Every person in this country, not just some, should have a right to an excellent education, and I’m proud to be speaking at an institution with a president and community that is already aware of this and engaged in trying to make it happen. Posse, in its own small way, helps to address this issue, and as president and founder, I have the privilege of leading the charge.

We all have a common dream: We want a safe place to live, a home, a family. We can’t let ourselves become part of a system that promotes stratification and exclusion. We have to figure out a way to be a national community.

In the midst of all the pre-graduation excitement, or maybe you were finishing some last minute paper frantically, I don’t know how much you’ve been paying attention to the news.

We’re engaged in a war with Iraq that has no end in sight. There is serious talk about a possible U.S. strike against Iran. Gasoline prices have soared to record highs. Our president is reassuring us that he is not spying on millions of innocent Americans. We’re considering using the National Guard to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. We’re trying to make English the national language. We’re fighting like crazy against gay marriage. And we’re worrying that the United States of America’s national anthem might be sung in Spanish.

How much these things are caught up in race and class is scary. There’s a complicated world going on out there, and I can’t tell you how much there is for us all to do. I suggested earlier on that you when you think about your future life you dream big – yes, for yourself, but I hope you dream big for our society as well.

I’m afraid in many ways we’ve become a society without leadership. Well, this means we need you more than ever. Which brings me back to what today is all about: your success, your leadership. You will become the earliest leaders of the 21st century. You should see this as an incredibly exciting opportunity. So, remember: great leaders rally the troops. They create community by sharing passion and vision, by contributing to a greater good, and by serving a cause.

It’s a wonderful thing that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, that Anne Frank wrote a powerful account of the Holocaust, that Einstein gave us a formula for relativity, and Neil Armstrong made it to the moon. It’s an incredible thing that the Civil Rights movement took place and brought us all a little closer to our humanity and that revolutionaries have stood up for the downtrodden. But now imagine

What will Andrew Grimes [of Philadelphia, graduating today with an A.B. engineering major] discover? What will Sara Jay [Oceanside, N.Y., A.B. history/French] achieve? What will Kyle Palmer [Perkasie, Pa., B.S. mathematics] overcome? What will Liam Yao [Bronx, N.Y., A.B. economics and business] invent? What will Jennifer Ryan [East Meadow, N.Y., A.B. government and law] found? What will Ibrahima Bah [Bronx, N.Y., B.S. physics/A.B. mathematics] challenge us all to think about?

What will you do?

Good luck to you all. We are expecting great things!