Transcript
Well, Class of 2024, the clouds parted for you. They really did. And then the sun shone in. So my part is brief, but heartfelt.
Dear graduates of the Class of 2024, we’ve gathered here today in the revered company of our venerable honorary degree recipients, of the esteemed faculty and staff of Grinnell College, and of your dearest loved ones from all over the country and the globe to celebrate you, to cherish you, and to honor you. You may now — this is for you, KJ — you may now move your tassels from the right to the left of your caps in the ceremonial acknowledgement of your tremendous accomplishments. It was whispered to me on stage, “Grinnell degrees don’t earn themselves.” I will let you finish the sentence.
Please join me in thanking Peter Sagal for his message to us today, for his presence among us, for his wit and verve. And our thanks to Alvin Irby ’07, Shane Rasmussen, and Stuart Yeager ’82 for their light and illumination. Thank you to the nine seniors who are listed in your program as the Senior Commencement Committee and their multiple campus partners for making this incredible weekend possible and wonderful. Thank you to the Grinnell High School Band for their beautiful music bringing us into this moment. And a warm, warm, warm, really warm embrace to all of the parents, families, and loved ones who are here today and to all the parents, families, and loved ones that graduating seniors have told me are joining us through our livestream from the home countries of Australia, Bhutan, Brazil, Canada, China, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Germany, Greece, India, Jamaica, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Pakistan, Romania, South Korea, Spain, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Vietnam. Hello from Grinnell!
So, in the powerful words you’ve heard today and over the past two days, my fervent hope for you is that you have felt the deep respect and high regard in which all of us gathered here hold you. And how much we will continue to hold you and champion you and love you as you strive and persevere and press on in your brilliance, your work, all that you believe in and all that you will make possible in a fraught and wondrous world.
After I give the charge and before the final benediction, you will have the chance to throw your graduation caps in the air to begin to express the exuberance of this day and of our joy for you. And families, I will let you know ahead of time so you can get the cameras ready.
So, it is now my honor to present my charge to you, the graduating Class of 2024. I do so through three experiences of the human condition that strive to speak to yours.
The first is living in the unbearable stillness of an exploded diagram. If you’ve ever put together a piece of furniture from Ikea or studied a diagram of a car engine or one of animal anatomy, you’ve seen an exploded diagram — all of the parts of the hole suspended in animation, existing in relationship, but not in motion. In the year 2020, you came to Grinnell in the unbearable stillness of a world held in the suspension of an exploded diagram by the COVID-19 pandemic coursing through an immuno-naïve global population, and by the wrenching tragedy of the murder of George Floyd and its violation of Black life and Black joy. There was stillness and isolation and working so hard to find each other. And when we did come together, and we did, when the diagram of parts became a community of the whole, we each brought something wonderful and we each carried something weighty. You have lived in the unbearable stillness of an exploded diagram, and you have gathered into the vibrant possibility of a community through your hard-earned experience. You know how to do this.
Secondly, living in the “and” of simultaneity. You learned to know — and you taught us to understand — that realities are simultaneous. That Grinnell is a rural town in Iowa and a place that exists within the global reach and thrill of more than 70 countries and languages. That there is war and suffering raging in too many parts of the world, and that there is the hard sustained work of seeing each other’s full humanity right here. That we can be visited and weighed down by grief, and that there is a poem or an idea or a friend that has given us comfort in the past that is waiting within reach right now. That Mrs. Edith Renfrow Smith, the first Black alumna of Grinnell in 1937, whom we honor in the new Renfrow Hall, experienced both the community and the barriers of Grinnell and said, “Yes, and you will always be my home.” That Grinnell will forever be available to you as a deep wellspring to revisit and be refreshed by as you become alumni, and that it is an open field to the new Grinnellians who will walk on campus for the first time this fall.
Third and last, finding each other in this age of pareidolia and this marvel of a word — pareidolia — gives expression to the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. Pareidolia is a word of cognitive perception. It’s seeing a famous person in a piece of toast — Elvis often shows up in toast — or an animal in a cloud or a person’s silhouette in the sand. Pareidolia is a word of cognitive perception that speaks to finding meaning in randomness and maybe even wonder in ambiguity. I think it also speaks to the experience of these past four years to searching for meaning and for each other in the midst of global scale ambiguity and (remember this word?) “unprecedented” randomness. Now in the magnificent 2018 novel, The Overstory by Richard Powers, pareidolia is described as “the adaptation that makes people see people in all things” — we are adapted to find each other in the random, in the absurd, in the ambiguous, in the complex. We seek each other out in what confounds us. And so may you strive, may you always try, to find each other in what is most confounding and bewildering in our world and in our human condition. Dear graduates of the Class of 2024, as you have all shaped Grinnell, so, too, will you shape the communities and societies of which you will be both constituents and characters. As you do, you bring the wisdom and experience of living in the unbearable stillness of an exploded diagram, living in the “and” of simultaneity, and finding each other in this age of pareidolia.
Okay, families, we can get those cameras ready. Graduates of the Class of 2024, you have achieved great things in your time here, you will accomplish many more, and it truly gives me hope for the world to be able to say to you, the Class of 2024, “Go forth, Grinnellians!” Let those caps fly and congratulations! All right, now I will invite everyone else who has gathered with us today to stand as you are able to receive the benediction to send us on our way.