(Chancellor MacCormack was the Commencement Speaker and received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from her alma mater, Emmanuel College, on May 10, 2003.)
Chancellor Jean F. MacCormack
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
Boston, Massachusetts
Emmanuel Commencement Speech
May 10, 2003
Good Morning! What a wonderful day to celebrate with all of you! What a terrific milestone for each of you and your families. I am deeply honored to be invited to share it with you and very grateful to be recognized with an honorary degree. It is especially meaningful for me to be honored in this way by my alma mater. It is for me a coming home.
This is the place where Julie Billart’s spirit and educational mission launched me off on a learning journey that has not yet ended. The education I received here truly changed me and sent me off to find new pathways that I think, without its inspiration, I would never have explored.
Certainly 34 years ago at my graduation, I would have never dreamed that I would stand before you now as a University Chancellor. I was an English and fine arts major. I expected to teach and paint. In a way I still do that—but my life has led me all around the world, and I find the painting I do most is in the mind’s eye—the creating a leadership vision for my institution’s future and my teaching is done in lots of different places than in classrooms.
So, I guess my first message to you as graduates today, as you get ready to step into your future--when you picture what you are going to do and where you are going to be in five or ten or fifteen years--be open to the moments that might shift your direction or reveal new paths.
Everyone I am sure has told you that you need to have goals, and you need to know where you are going if you are going to achieve success--that is certainly true. But I urge you also to leave a little room for the serendipitous, for the unexpected opportunity that falls in your lap, for the interesting and exciting detour from the familiar path that might open up whole new worlds for you. Don’t be too rigid in setting your direction for the future because you might just miss the opportunities along the way that really shape the journey and are truly hidden blessings.
I once heard Dr. Timothy Johnson, our Channel 5 Doctor to the nation, tell a story that captures so well what I want to say. He and his wife--she a nurse, he a doctor--had just after medical school traveled to the third world to participate in one of the UNESCO health programs for six weeks. They wanted to gain experience and genuinely to offer services to the most needy before they went home to spend a few years establishing a successful practice and before starting a family.
The first night they arrived, they were confronted with a desperately ill child whose parents had abandoned him. He had a high fever, was dehydrated, and was just filthy. They treated his fever, but he desperately needed a bath, and there was nowhere to do it except in the place where they were staying. After searching around for what to do, they ended up taking the child to their living quarters with them, cleaning and nursing him through three days and nights. They brought him back to health. In fact, at the end of their six weeks, they brought him back home with them, adopting him--a son now who is also a doctor and of whom they are very proud.
I remember Tim saying that this son hadn’t been in their well-thought-out plan. He remembers that during the six weeks that they were there, their plans for their life and the pull of their hearts were not in sync. They spent many nights talking about what they should do. It was a struggle for them because having a child at that moment didn’t fit into their schedule and their picture of their life. But they see now that the choice they made to adopt their son in fact created and shaped their entire lives, and they would not have missed it for the world. In fact, they can’t imagine a life not shaped by that choice.
So my message is simple. As you stand at the start of your new post graduation life, don’t be so determined and focused on getting to the end of your journey that you miss the moments and the choices that make a difference. Don’t be afraid to choose something outside your comfort zone. Take a risk--or as we say these days, “Think outside the box.”
Although sometimes my colleagues at UMass Dartmouth must think I do too much of that because I came into work one day and hanging on my door was a cartoon showing a man standing beside a kitty litter box with his beloved kitty doing its thing on his leg with the caption--“Alright, alright that’s enough thinking outside the box!!!”
So, you must have balance in all this. Just don’t be afraid to choose the less traveled road when it pops up in front of you. You all know very well Robert’s Frost poem:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth…I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
My first advice then—as you pursue your dreams, listen to your heart, look around at the paths, and don’t be afraid to take a chance.
As I look out at you, I have to ask this question. How many of you are the first in your families to graduate from College? Raise your hands? Almost the whole class. What a wonderful achievement for all of you--you must be very proud of yourselves. You struck out into unfamiliar territory, and you have mastered all its challenges and made it now your home. I know what it is like to be the first. Thirty-four years ago I, too, was the first in my family to graduate from college—a girl from Dorchester whose father was a mechanic and whose mother was a waitress. They believed that education could open the door for a better future for me and my brother and sister. They made a lot of sacrifices for us, as I am sure your parents have for you.
Let me ask the families of these students to stand up--Come on get up--this is also your day in the sun. Graduates, can we let them know how appreciative you are for their support?
Families, you are to be congratulated because you have started a great tradition with this first--you too made sacrifices to make it happen. You know that it is going to make new dreams possible. Together our “first graduates and first families” have the awesome responsibility to keep this new tradition going. I know Emmanuel will be glad to welcome your siblings, future children and grandchildren, into Julie Billart’s learning family in the future.
Now I also know that many in this graduating class are adult students graduating from the accelerated professional programs. Mom and Dad may have been your distant inspiration for learning, but you deserve our praise and admiration as well because you have come back to make “more learning and more skill development possible” when there could be many other claims on your time. You already know from your experience that learning is life-long, and you made a commitment to do it. You are great role models for your younger fellow graduates, and I know that your significant others, husbands, wives, and even children, have supported you through as well.
We also have 51 master candidates in education, management, and human resources. They are getting that second degree--one was not enough. And folks, two may not be enough--life requires today a lot of nimble change management over the course of a lifetime, and I applaud you for adding to your repertoire of skills and creative thinking that will help you adapt and make contributions in your chosen fields. You already know something very important--that education is for making a life, not just a living.
I can see that this is a class rich in talent, full of hope, and ready to make its mark. I think only two additional messages are important.
The great poet William Butler Yeats said many years ago--Education is not about filling a pail; it’s about lighting a fire--the fire of learning. Sometimes we can think of education as only about putting facts in and getting test answers out. It is not about tests, or GPAs or SATs or GREs. We all need to master content, but more importantly we also need to make meaning from facts and information. As I look out at your faces, I can see that you have had a fire-lighting experience here at Emmanuel--I see it in your eye --those flames burning brightly. Fresh fires of knowing and idealism, of energy to do good, to contribute effectively, and to make a difference in this world that so needs people who are enlivened with passion and fire.
We find fire in learning when we get to be around people who have a passion for what they do. People who love what they do--are on fire--seeing them do what they love, sets off flames in others. A history professor I knew here made a very modern girl fall in love with the ideals of another age and be able to imagine in real color the world of medieval history. He made me understand what it meant to really learn from the past. I was blessed with art professors—Sister Vincent De Paul--who not only changed my seeing of color and light but opened my eyes to grasp the richness and inspiration of the great masterpieces. Classes in English from Beowulf to Modernism transported me away on the wings of literary imagination and have over many years inspired me to write. Your professors here have been lighting and stoking and tending this learning fire in you. But you are the ones who have made it burn brightly. And our world desperately needs the inspiration and light you can bring them.
I want to urge you to keep your educational fires burning. You do not know all you will need to. You will have to be life-long learners, and you now you will have to tend your own fires. Read, listen, talk about ideas, and interact with others who hold different views than you. Learn new things; nurture your curiosity, practice taking other people’s perspectives. Hang out with people who challenge you, who expose you to new thinking, and who know how to make learning fun not drudgery. It is so easy to get lulled into group think by the media or TV--sharpen your critical thinking skills every day, and make informed, independent decisions about how you want to shape and contribute to public debate. Certainly, Massachusetts needs informed citizens whose active participation in civic life will shape our tomorrows.
Emmanuel has given you a flame. Now, you have to tend your own learning fire, and you do have a responsibility to pass it on to others. Be passionate in what you do so that others will be drawn to the fire. The great Poet William Blake expressed it well in a poem you all probably know:
Tyger, tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetryIn what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes
On what wings dare he aspire
What the hand, dare seize the fire.
A second simple message then--seize your fire
One final message that is by being last, no less important. You must be true to your values. The world we live in needs risk takers, it needs life-long learners, but it needs--more desperately people who ground their decisions in values that make a difference. Your learning has taken place here at Emmanuel nurtured in a set of Christian values. A set of values that says community is as important as self, that caring for others who need us is most important, and that rewards are not just material.
But what we believe, what we care about, what we hold dear comes from ourselves, our families, our experience. It was my parents who set me on my value pathway--who taught me that learning was important, that effort would lead to achievement, that helping others was a value that would make you happy, and that doing things because they were right was more important than being right. They did tell us we could do anything that we worked hard at, that it was OK to make a mistake and to admit it. Telling the truth was not a choice but a necessity. That it was important to try--sometimes more important than succeeding, and they taught us to care about others, to respect people who were different from us, to always be fair, to be willing to take risks for what was important, to welcome people to our homes and hearts, to be loyal to our friends and our values, and to treasure family and friends not things.
I am a product of those values--their values--and I do believe that anything that I might have achieved and the reason I am standing here today is because of the path they laid out in from of me--this value path which I internalized. It was greatly reinforced by the Sisters of Notre dame and continues to be nourished by the fellowship of my family and friends.
You have internalized your own values. Be true to them. The world needs you to be grounded in your own integrity. You cannot be truly happy in life without a sense of wholeness in who you are. That wholeness will not come from being considered important by others, it certainly will not come from material things, and it really cannot be deeply grounded in what others say about you. It will come from your sense of commitment to what you hold dear. This does mean it’s all about you--you will not find true happiness alone without others, without a sense of community--perhaps in this age a sense of global community--but forming true bonds with others, making a difference for and with them, requires a sense of internal grounding that no one else can give you.
So, if you remember only three things from what I have said---Remember I urged you to be willing to take chance. I called upon you to be fully engaged and be passionate about your commitments and what you do. I told you that you must be true to a set of values that you can be proud of and which resonates with who you are. Be risk takers, firelighters, and be centered. With these qualities, there will be infinite opportunity, myriad possibilities, and a lifetime of happiness.
It is the moment now that you should be a center stage. I offer to all the graduates my heartfelt congratulations. Keep your fires burning.
Last Updated On: 3/22/06
