- Thank you, David,
for that wonderful introduction.
And welcome Pomona Class of 2020.
Let's hear it for the class.
(audience cheering and applauding)
It's great to be here in this majestic,
101 year old space,
to mark the beginning of classes,
and the official start of your Pomona College journey.
As a word nerd by nature and trade,
I like to pause to savor words,
to catch their nuances,
to see if they can answer questions
I didn't think to ask.
For instance, I stopped to consider
the name of this event.
Convocation is the noun form
of the verb convoke,
which means to summon together,
to call for an assembly.
Today, we have been summoned, called,
assembled by our college
to reflect upon what lies ahead.
Turning nouns into verbs
is more than just a word nerd language trick.
Look for ways to do this in your speaking and writing,
and you express your thoughts more energetically.
Look for ways of doing this in your life,
and you will avoid becoming passive,
or worse, boring.
(audience laughing)
You are here to act.
In the spirit of word appreciation,
I picked three key words to fuel my remarks this morning:
convoke, connection, commence.
The first and third, convoke and commence
are the actions that bookend your college experience.
As nouns, they become convocation, and commencement.
The middle verb, connect,
is the repeated activity at the heart of your learning.
Word one, convoke.
10 days ago, you ran through the gates,
and chirped goodbye to your parents and loved ones,
marking the outside of a new phase in your lives.
Congratulations on that first big step.
You were then, as now, convoked,
or called to be a part of Pomona College.
In the past week,
you've gone off on OA trips,
you've read and discussed
Claudia Rankin's American Lyric Citizen,
your shared class book,
and you've begun to get your bearings on campus.
As of today, you embark on your course work,
and on behalf of the faculty,
I can say that we are eager to meet you,
and to help guide you in the coming years.
I am enormously pleased to be with you here and now.
My journey into Pomona took a while.
(audience laughing)
After 22 years at Claremont McKenna College,
I moved a short distance geographically,
literally from right across the street,
but I stepped into a brand new world.
Pomona called me,
and I couldn't be more delighted
to have been convoked.
I won't strain that seldom used verb any further.
It's not a great sounding word
in that form.
Convocation is much better,
and here we are.
Onto word two, connect.
As I thought about what I would say this morning,
I recalled when I started college,
and that space between convocation and commencement,
between all the convocations and commencements
that followed,
I measured my life in school years.
At 17, when I was getting started,
I didn't know that places like Pomona existed.
I attended a rural high school in Oklahoma,
and out the handful of my peers who went on to college,
most of us gravitated to Oklahoma State,
a large, public land grand university.
We were first gen students before anyone used that phrase.
At OSU, in the late 1970s,
pretty everyone I knew was first generation.
We came from cornfields and subdivisions,
from tiny towns in the flat middle of the country.
My goal, at the time,
was to become a writer.
I used to get teased at home
for always having my nose in a book.
I was and still am a nonstop reader,
and I wanted writing to be my living.
Without ever having known a professional writer,
I wasn't sure what to study,
and so I started out as a humanities major,
and eventually went with philosophy.
It turned out that at OSU,
philosophy majors were few and far between.
Go figure.
(audience laughing)
So I connected with teachers
who challenged and inspired me.
I found that I learned best
when I'm fully engaged and passionate
and that learning is an activity,
not something that happens to you.
You happen to it.
I decided to go to graduate school
at the University of Virginia,
where I earned an English Ph.D,
and discovered Women's Studies,
a field that was in its infancy.
I didn't really plan to be a professor,
but I fell in love with research and teaching.
That early passion for writing stayed with me,
and over the years,
I've been able to write not only scholarship
but magazine articles, essays, book reviews,
blog posts, interviews in feminist zines,
a few thousand long comments at the ends of student papers.
(audience laughing)
And to date, exactly one convocation address.
(audience laughing)
The beauty of a liberal arts education
is that the boundaries between disciplines
are not fixed.
There's a web of connections
that each of you will discover,
formed by the choices you make,
and your willingness to explore.
Last week, my associate deans and I told you
that it's not about the major.
It's about learning.
We urged you to ask one another not what's your major,
but what are you learning?
Take stock on a regular basis
of what matters most to you,
and ask yourself if what matters most to you
is connected to what you are learning.
If so, you will find that something magical is taking place.
In the coming years,
you will connect with people who are like you,
and ones who are not.
You will discover connections where you least expect them.
You will go beyond the superficial,
and question your assumptions.
Beware of the assumptions you make about others.
Beware of othering as a rule.
In the gay rights movement,
we used to say, "Don't assume I'm straight."
I'm not.
I'll add to this, "Don't assume I'm cisgender."
I am.
My pronouns are she, her, and hers.
Remember that what you don't about people
can hurt them.
Become aware of your own biases,
and seek to unlearn them.
It is only then a path can be cleared to connect.
To be sure, there is value in distinguishing
and dividing and taking things apart,
but connecting is a supremely creative act.
It can also be an act of bravery.
When we open up,
we risk rejection or worse,
we may discover that we're wrong about something.
Connecting can shake you,
and make you question,
but that's what we're here for.
Here, at an institution of higher learning,
here on this planet.
Allow me to slip into lit professor mode for a minute.
The title of my talk, as some of you know,
is the epigraph to the 1910 novel, Howard's End,
by the English writer, E.M. Forster.
Only Connect is a guiding principle
for the female protagonist,
who wants to change the man she loves for the better.
At a moment of crisis for the couple,
the narrator shares the heroine's thoughts,
quote, "Mature as he was,
"she might yet be able to help him
"to the building of the rainbow bridge,
"that should connect the prose in us
"with the passion.
"Without it, we are meaningless fragments,
"half monks, half beasts,
"unconnected arches that have never joined
"into a man.
"With it, love is born,
"and alights on the highest curve,
"glowing against the gray,
"sober against the fire."
That's heady stuff.
The monk and the beast,
the soul and the body.
If the language sounds lofty
and somewhat religious,
that's because in this book,
which concerns itself with clashing value systems,
gender and class biases
and the artificial barriers
that create divisions within society,
to connect is to become transformed to transcend.
The idealistic heroine,
in imagining the conversion
she would like her lover to undergo,
believes that the merits of connecting
should be self evident.
Quote, "It did not seem so difficult.
"She would only point out the salvation
"that was latent in his own soul,
"and in the soul of every man.
"Only connect.
"That was the whole of her sermon.
"Only connect the prose and the passion,
"and the both will be exalted,
"and human love will be seen at its height.
"Live in fragments no longer.
"Only connect, and the beast and the monk,
"robbed of the isolation that is life to either,
"will die."
According to the novel,
the rainbow bridge can connect soul and body,
intellect and passion within an individual,
thus paving the way to greater bonds
between and among people,
and resulting in an elevated form of love
that will soar above the petty prejudices
that divide us from one another.
Those of you who have read the book
know that building this bridge
is far from simple.
Bad things happen to good people,
just like in real life.
Yet, only connect is a powerful mandate,
and one that I have taken to heart.
It has served me well in my roles as a professor,
a mentor, a friend, and a wife to my wife.
As we launch this new school year,
it is my fervent hope that you will look for ways
to connect to one another and in your learning.
Whether you already know what you want to be,
or you're in questing mode,
your time at Pomona will be filled
with unexpected connections
and the discovery of new and surprising passions.
Try to stay open to different points of view,
and ideas that may seem alien.
Have fun with those connections.
Remember that social media can breed confusion.
Impart your words with care.
In person dialogue is best.
I know I speak for all of your professors
when I say that we want you to cross divisions,
and expand your horizons.
I promise you that at some point in your studies,
you will get the dizzying sense
that everything you are learning, ultimately, connects.
I can't tell you how many students
have said to me,
usually two thirds of the way into the semester,
"I'm amazed that the things I'm learning in your class,
"on comedy, or Jane Austen, or Gender Studies,
"overlap with these other classes I'm taking
"that would seem to be unrelated,
"politics, or history or science or economics."
Trust me.
This will happen.
Connections lead to more connections.
That's just how it rolls.
Okay, last word, commence.
At the end of this particular journey
is a fresh beginning.
In 2020, your time as Pomona College alumni will commence.
It's worth noting that convocation and commencement
are the two main formal events
that will bring this class together as a group.
You can't read the future,
but the people you see here will be in it.
Maybe you've already met someone
who will remain your friend for life.
Maybe you will exchange hard words
with a person and then reconcile.
Maybe that stranger who seems remote
will open up to you,
or you will open up to them,
and you will see you have more in common
than you thought.
Maybe you will stay up all night
discussing poetry or physics or neuroscience.
You will most definitely learn
a great deal about yourself from the bonds you form
with the other members of this extraordinary class.
Look behind me, on this stage.
I can guarantee that at least one of my colleagues
on the faculty, probably more than one,
will influence you profoundly.
I found that as a professor,
you never know when you will say something
that will change somebody's life,
and it's seldom the phrase you polish and perfect,
the nugget of wisdom that you yourself cherish.
Quite often, it's something that can seem extraneous
to the subject at hand.
My pronouns are she, her, and hers,
a reference to my wife,
an acknowledgment of white privilege,
even an admission of ignorance,
the rainbow bridge,
the link between two people,
the light on a path hitherto untraveled.
Now, I don't want to hurry you into the future,
to the day less than four years from now,
when you will cross the stage
and accept your Pomona diploma.
Instead, I will repeat that you are here to act,
to build your own adventure,
to be alert and open to possibilities.
It may be a cliche to say
that what you get from your education
will depend on what you put in,
but it's true.
We all want you to succeed,
and even more, we want you to define the terms
of your success.
Convocation and commencement are markers,
but connections are the key.
What are you learning?
Only connect.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)