Graduates, parents, families, friends, faculty and staff packed the Warden Arena on Mother's Day, Sunday, May 11, for the commencement ceremony of the College of Arts & Sciences, during which nearly 350 graduates received diplomas. For the first-time ever, the College hosted a live streaming video of the ceremony. More than 240 people in 20 countries viewed the live broadcast.
Rollins President Lewis Duncan opened the ceremony and shared that most of these graduates started their Rollins careers in the first year of his presidency. "Together we weathered three hurricanes and got to know our new home in a very special way," Duncan said. "You went on to take part in the first Campus Movie Fest, the first Dance Marathon and were deeply involved in developing and implementing the Academic Honor Code. You reached out to children of Fern Creek Elementary, the homeless and the victims of Hurricane Katrina. You are indelibly a part of Rollins history."
Dean of the Knowles Memorial Chapel Patrick Powers gave the invocation. Highlights of the ceremony included the presentation of Honorary Doctorates of Humane Letters to poet Billy Collins and Michael Winston, president of The Alfred Harcourt Foundation. In addition, Professor of Modern Languages and former Dean of the Hamilton Holt School Patricia Lancaster, Professor of Anthropology Pedro Pequeno and Professor of History Gary Williams were elevated to "Emeritus" status.
Class of 2008 valedictorian, Joseph Patrick Kuhlman, who graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA, encouraged his fellow graduates to give back to the world and shared the words of Mother Teresa: "It is not the magnitude of our actions but the amount of love that is put into them that matters."
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins addressed the crowd. Collins has published eight collections of poetry. In 2001, he was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, serving 2001-2003. In 2004, he was named New York State Poet Laureate, serving 2004-2006. Collins immediately endeared himself to the audience at the beginning of his keynote address by offering the guarantee that his speech would only last 11 minutes. "Like people who attend poetry readings, you need to be assured that this will be a finite experience," he said.
Collins remarked on the idyllic location in which Rollins students had received their college education. "Over the past four winters while most of the nation has been freezing its ear muffs off and losing its mittens, you have been sailing Frisbees in these blue skies and graced by the natural and architectural beauty of this campus and you have not had to sacrifice the quality of your education," he quipped. "Flip flops year-round and a quality education, it's just not fair."
"What I have been asked to do here is an honor and a privilege, but also a challenge," said Collins. "How to give advice to a crowd of strangers? We tend to resist accepting advice from those who love and care for us the most, so why accept it from a stranger? And a poet, no less...stranger than your average stranger!"
Collins encouraged students to sustain their desire to learn and to perpetuate their thinking by reading regularly and widely. "Not as a distraction or a way to kill time on an airplane or at the beach," said Collins, "but as part of an ongoing, imaginative and intellectual adventure called the life of the mind."
Collins encouraged graduates to "carpe the diem, because we don't know how many diems are going to be given to us," and to live with gratitude. He offered his poem, "The Lanyard," as a Mother's Day salute:
"Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even."
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1:48Gospel for Teens Performance at Rollins Collegeby rollinscollege14 views
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