“We, your parents, know why we are here,” the mother of graduating senior Gideon Lewis-Kraus asserted, as Commencement 2002 began under chalcedonic skies. “It’s because, as I once heard [author] Toni Morrison say, our eyes will always light up when you enter the room.”
As the featured speaker at the Saturday morning Baccalaureate service that launched the University’s 111th graduation weekend, rabbi Ellen Jay Lewis was the first to touch on the theme of family connection that would echo through two days of celebration. Twenty-four hours later, U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in her Commencement address, invoked the memory of her paternal grandfather, who picked and sold cotton to pay for his first year of study at Stillman College. When the cotton ran out, he asked school administrators how other students were paying for their tuition, and was told that scholarships were available for those who wanted to become Presbyterian ministers. “My grandfather said, ‘You know, that’s exactly what I had in mind,’” Rice told the crowd. “And my family has been Presbyterian and college-educated ever since.”
The weekend’s speakers also emphasized how education had improved the graduates’ understanding of cultural diversity. At Baccalaureate, speakers and musicians drew on Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Native American, Taoist, Christian, humanist, Zulu and Shinto legacies. “This is a feast of and for the world,” Dean for Religious Life Scotty McLennan told family members and friends who filled the Inner Quad to watch the processional.
McLennan noted that it had been “an especially difficult year in the history of the world,” and speakers at other campus gatherings acknowledged the dramatically altered landscape that the Class of ’02 had navigated. When they arrived as wide-eyed frosh, they chatted as much about IPOs as about TAs and RFs, and watched upperclassmen hitch their stars to promising Valley start-ups. But by the spring quarter of their junior year, the nation had entered a recession that would be officially confirmed the following November, and graduate school started looking especially good. Then came the cataclysmic events of September 11.
“We climbed a hill in our town in New Jersey and watched the World Trade Center towers burning,” Richard Cohen said about that day. He and his wife had been reluctant to send their two oldest children far away to college, but they yielded to the adventurous spirit of their third-born, Esther, ’02, who wanted to make the trek to California. Last summer, she worked at Stanford Sierra Camp, and on September 11, she was waiting on campus for a shuttle to take her to the airport for a visit home before classes resumed.
“I finally got back to New Jersey a week later, and it was wonderful to be home,” Esther said. “But Stanford was my home, too. And I think everyone wanted school to start, so our lives could get back to normal.”
Esther darted off to hug a friend, and her mother, Treasure, leaned forward with a postscript. “Sending her back was okay,” she said. “We had been paralyzed, but putting her on the plane to California in September helped us all to move forward.”
Altruism, the resilience of the human spirit, acting for the common good—the themes Rabbi Lewis sounded in her Baccalaureate remarks reverberated as the weekend rolled on. Sohini Ramachandran, ’02, who took home the J. E. Wallace Sterling Award for service at Saturday’s Class Day Luncheon, was lauded for her “visionary stewardship of New Student Orientation 2001, including her thoughtful and inspiring address to freshmen and parents in the wake of a national tragedy.”
Moments of quiet reflection dotted the weekend—three music lovers sitting separately in front of Hoover Tower as they listened to the peals of the carillon’s 48 bronze bells, and clutches of mothers and great-aunts in sun hats posing for graduation shots with the Burghers of Calais. And the zaniness of previous years was turned down a notch or two, with the traditionally rambunctious Wacky Walk emerging as more of a Mellow Mix. Seniors carried pastel kites, balloons, leis, piñatas and pinwheels, and sprouted flocks of pink flamingoes on their mortarboards. Human dominoes toppled themselves and graduates dressed as bowling pins collapsed in a pile when their bowling ball of a friend somersaulted into them. As Frisbees and—what was that?—airborne tortillas zipped across the football field, one young woman dressed as a neon-green palm tree yelled, “Stay in formation, girls,” and 13 of her closest friends dutifully lined up, personifying a well-trimmed Palm Drive.
The main show also had its own share of ad-libbed banter. By the fourth time President John Hennessy conferred the “rights, responsibilities and privileges” of a Stanford degree on a group of graduates, he was encouraging the crowd to join in. And after accepting the graduate-degree recipients from Stanford’s seven schools, Hennessy asked Provost John Etchemendy whether he’d forgotten anyone. Etchemendy, PhD ’82, scratched his hat and looked quizzical: “Gosh, I don’t know. Let me see.” When the 1,756 undergraduates struck up a chant in response-"Four more years, four more years" -Hennessy could only laugh. “You’ll have to talk to your parents about that,” he added.
Secret Service agents on the Rice detail, who tried to blend in with black gowns and caps but were identifiable by their white earpieces and curly phone wires, went on alert when the first beach balls began to bounce from row to row during Rice’s talk. “Three on the right,” one agent was overheard to whisper into her concealed microphone. But her grin said, “Hardly a threat.”
Rice, a former University provost who is on leave as a political science professor and Hoover Institution senior fellow, spoke not about public policy issues, but about the responsibilities that come with a Stanford education. “Many people just as talented and just as smart as you did not get to where you are sitting today, often through no fault of their own,” she told the graduates. “So never ask why someone else has been given more. Ask why you have been given so much.”
In September 1998, Rice had encouraged the incoming Class of ’02 to find their academic passion. But today, she noted, “you are stepping into a world that is quite different than the one that existed when you arrived. It is a world that is more sober, and sadder, clearer about its vulnerabilities, yet stronger, more conscious of our differences, and yet more aware of our humanity.”
When Rice took the podium, a few dozen students staged a quiet protest—walking out of the stadium, or raising their mortarboards with an attached red flyer that spelled out their opposition to actions taken by Rice as national security adviser, provost and a member of the Chevron Board of Directors. Asked about the plans for a protest prior to Commencement, a member of her staff said that Rice “believes in democratic values. And she believes the right to speak one’s mind is one of the most important.”
As a solitary bubble floated past the Commencement flower arrangements and Band members prepared to take the stage, Hennessy turned to the newly minted graduates. “I hope you leave this campus with a strong reservoir of the Stanford spirit,” he said.
Then, as he and Rice descended the steps, Shannon Ashford, ’02, shouted, “Condi, you go, girl!”
The national security adviser was all smiles as she waved back.
