On the east side of US 23 sits Eastern Michigan University, where I have served as a faculty member and administrator for nearly 30 years. For half that time, I have performed the high-wire act of commencement name reading. It is not a task for those with shaky convictions or a lack of diaphragm training.
As a name reader, you are presented with a card and given a millisecond to digest, internalize and project a name into a space of thousands. For many students, this is the most profound public moment of their lives.
If I have learned anything in my years on that stage, it is this: It is not about me. It is about that student, that family and that legacy. My job is to launch that name so clearly that even those in the heavens can hear it. I take this gig seriously, and I am never not nervous.
This year, I had the added honor of being the “opening act” for the entire ceremony. My charge was to foster community and set the tone. I told the graduates:
Before you walk across the stage
Before your families cheer and cry and ‘click’
Before our president and student body president speak
Before the faculty processional
Just take a moment, look around …
Soup it up …
Sink it in
This is YOURS.
The universal zeitgeist of a commencement is that it is an institutional event. Unlike a sporting event or a lecture, it has a singular common denominator: the collective celebration of an ending and a beginning.
On the west side of US 23, Professor Derek Peterson, chair of the University of Michigan faculty senate, also spoke at his institution’s commencement. He may have had a different directive than mine, but surely he knows — as every sound tech, usher and keynote speaker must — that graduation is an act for the collective. It is the intentional creation of community.
Did Professor Peterson have the “freedom” to address 70,000 people in the Big House and laud the pro-Palestinian student activists that have caused documented harm to Jewish students and families in attendance? Yes. Should he face professional retribution for doing so? No.
As a tenured faculty member and administrator, I will always defend the autonomy and academic freedom to speak and ideate. Yet, my question to my colleague on the other side of the highway is this: In this moment, with all the words and phrases available to you, why choose the ones you knew would be divisive and hurtful to a portion of your own flock? Did you forget that this ceremony was not about you?
In the university world, we often feel the tension between our personal expertise and our role as representatives of the institution. But these can coexist. As part of the university ecosystem, our fundamental task at commencement is to lift up all our students and thank them for journeying with us.
That is, quite literally, our job.
