President Alison Byerly Welcomes the Class of 2018

President Alison Byerly presents her Convocation address “Tradition and Community.”

President Alison Byerly presented her address “Tradition and Community”at Convocation ceremonies opening the 183rd academic year Sunday on the Quad. The text of her speech is below.

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On behalf of the trustees and faculty, I declare that the Class of 2018 is now matriculated. We welcome you into Lafayette College. You may be seated.

It is a great pleasure to gather together as a community on this lovely evening to welcome the Class of 2018. Looking out at this crowd, it is wonderful to see so many students, faculty, staff, and other members of the community.

Continuing a tradition I began last year, I will take a picture of the view from up here and send it out on Twitter.

I would like to begin my remarks by acknowledging some of the many people who make tonight’s ceremony possible. These include Dean of Advising and Co-Curricular program Erica D’Agostino; Dean of Students Paul McLoughlin; Interim Provost Bob Cohn; College Archivist Diane Shaw; Darin Lewis and the Lafayette Concert Choir; Chaplain Alexandra Hendrickson; and the Plant Operations staff who worked hard all week to set up this platform and chairs. Please join me in thanking all of these colleagues.

It is appropriate that this year’s entering students are joined today by the faculty who will teach them, the staff who will support them, and the upperclass students who will serve as mentors and role models over the coming years. The people that you see sitting around you will be a source of wisdom, strength, friendship, and inspiration not only over the next four years, but for the rest of your lives. You take your place today as part of a special community, one that is more than 180 years old. I’d like to talk for a few minutes about the role of traditions in strengthening community, and the important role of community in your education here at Lafayette.

You have already seen today one dimension of the college’s traditions: the adherence to the figure of the Marquis de Lafayette as a guiding symbol for the college. When you first learned about Lafayette College, you may have wondered how the College got its name. At the time of the College’s founding, Lafayette was one of the most famous and revered names in America. Lafayette’s dedication and heroism in travelling from France as a young man to support the American Revolution, as well as his status as a close friend of General Washington, had made him a legendary figure. In 1824, he returned to America as an elder statesman at the invitation of President Monroe, where he was greeted with extraordinary acclaim and adulation everywhere he went as he toured every state in the union.

When a group of prominent citizens of Easton decided in 1824 to found a college, a delegation of 200 Eastonians had recently travelled to Philadelphia to hear General Lafayette speak. Lafayette had actually exchanged a few cordial words with James Madison Porter, who would become the president of the new college’s board of trustees (Skillman, Vol. I, p. 23). The founders decided, as the minutes of their meeting noted, “That as a testimony of respect for the talents, virtues, and signal services of General La Fayette in the great cause of freedom, the said institution be named, La Fayette.” (Skillman, Vol. I, p. 29). In choosing to name the fledgling college Lafayette, these citizens were consciously aligning the college with the associations that name evoked: heroism, freedom, and youthful valor. They chose Lafayette as a potent symbol for the new college and its aspirations.

Over the years, this self-chosen identity for the college has been reinforced through conscious adoption of statements, mottos, and values associated with the Marquis de Lafayette, including quotations from his writings that you find in many college documents, and the various portraits and statues that enrich the campus. It has also been the subject of student inspiration, from the 1915 poem “The Sword of Lafayette,” that Connor read earlier, to a student video produced last year for a film and media studies class, “I’m in Love with the Marquis de Lafayette,” a mockumentary examining a student’s relationship with her boyfriend, “Mark” –who turns out to be the statue of Lafayette behind Hogg Hall. Whether treated with reverence or affectionate humor, the figure of the Marquis has been a distinctive guiding spirit for generations of Lafayette students.

Another source of many of the college’s oldest traditions is of course the Lafayette-Lehigh game, which as you know will be celebrated dramatically this fall when we host the 150^th meeting of this historic rivalry at Yankee Stadium. Many of the pranks and traditions associated with the rivalry in past years– such as bonfires, vandalism, kidnappings, and the tearing down of goalposts—have changed with the times, and it is no longer the case that students wear jackets and ties, or dresses and corsages, to the game. But there are still many songs, jokes, and traditions associated with the game that continue, and what has not changed is the way in which the rivalry provides a unique focus for displays of school spirit that very few colleges like Lafayette can muster.

Inevitably, some traditions do not outlast the manners and habits of a particular generation. In 1935, a list of informal rules and traditions for incoming freshmen noted that only seniors were permitted to sport mustaches or canes; that freshmen were expected to remain in chapel till all upperclassmen had exited; and that freshmen were not allowed to walk around campus with their hands in their pockets until after the Lehigh game. However, this same list notes that “the oldest and most beautiful of Lafayette traditions” is that of gathering in front of Pardee to sing the alma mater and other college songs. When we close tonight’s ceremony by singing the alma mater, you can picture to yourself the many generations of students going back more than a century who have done the exact same thing.

These kinds of traditions help bind the community together, both within each successive class, and across generations of alumni. And Lafayette’s powerful sense of community is, I would argue, one of its greatest strengths, and an integral part of the education we offer here.

Education, after all, is not simply a matter of solitary mastery of information or skills. It involves dialogue, questioning, testing, experimentation. This process of active engagement begins in the classroom, with dedicated and creative faculty who will challenge you with new areas of study and new ways of looking at topics you may have thought were familiar. It also involves a broader intellectual community that ideally radiates outward beyond a single course or assignment. You will find that your most powerful learning here often includes the extension of that classroom experience to discussions outside of class, in which you learn from your friends and they learn from you. It will also include the learning and growth that comes through leadership and participation in other areas, including athletics, artistic performance, community service, and other activities. Your education will be shaped not only by faculty mentors, advisors, and coaches, it will be shaped by the students around you, and their experience will be shaped and changed by your presence.

In that sense, the diverse community of fellow students we have assembled here is a critical resource in your own education. I urge you to take advantage of that resource. Your class includes a wonderful variety of students from a range of geographic locations and backgrounds, who have a tremendous variety of talents and interests. Get to know them. Fight the tendency to gravitate towards those who seem most familiar, most like yourself. It is a natural human tendency that we all have, and technology has made it easier for all of us to find and listen to the voices with which we are most comfortable. But you will learn more, and be better prepared for the world you will enter when you leave here, if you look for opportunities to extend yourself beyond your comfort zone. More importantly, you will be in a better position to change that world, and make it a less segmented and divisive place, if you bring with you the habits of outreach and curiosity that we try to foster here.

The orientation groups that you have been part of for the last few days are a good launching point for that effort. As part of our new “Connected Communities” residential life program, they are intended to be a community that will continue throughout your four years here, with other events and programs that will bring you back together on a regular basis. These groups will no doubt be supplemented by other friendships, but they can provide the initial scaffolding for a robust network of support. We hope that in the end you will view each group, team, club, or living group that you join here not as a single, exclusive circle of friends, but as one of a series of interlocking and overlapping circles — connected communities that form the powerful network that is Lafayette.

I will conclude by noting that the anchor of this community is your class: the class of 2018. I’d like to ask you all to take a moment now to look around at the classmates to the right and left of you, in front of you, across the aisle… You may not know them yet, but sitting with you here today are people who will become cherished friends for decades to come. Learn from them, make the most of what they have to offer, and take seriously your responsibility to help them in turn to grow and develop into their best selves. That tradition of strong friendship and support is the most important tradition that we have at Lafayette.

Best of luck to all of you with the start of classes, and the start of your time as part of this special community. Thank you.