Pomp and Circumstance

Graduation was yesterday. I go; it's expected of faculty and anyway, several of our excellent students were graduating and I wanted to be there for them.

And I admit, that tiny, stereotypically-German part of me, the part that loves official titles and ancient traditions loves graduations and the associated fuss (Even if we don't do Latin any more, even if the ceremonies are stripped-down relative to what they are at, say, Balliol College of Oxford). Still, I love it because it does give me that feeling of continuity with something bigger than me and older than me.

(I own my own regalia - my father bought them for me as a "you got a tenure-track position" gift. So I don't have to mess with rentals and I understand in the 16 years or so since I've been at this gig, the price of regalia, like everything, has gone up)

Anyway, it is one of those things that is still kind of nice, I think, about academia. And it's good to celebrate the successes of students.

I saw several people I knew well graduate. It's kind of fun in that they go in before us, so those of us close to the head of the faculty line get to see and maybe wave to students we know.

And I had to smile to myself. When one fellow - this was someone who TAed for me for several years, and he was an excellent TA as well as an excellent student, and also just an all-around nice guy, as he was walking in, he gave a grin to the biology profs standing by the door. And suddenly my mind flashed to this:



Except for dropping a wink (he didn't), his expression was almost exactly like Applejack's there. (And at one time he used to wear a t-shirt with three blue diamond shapes on it, so I think he is not unaware of Ponies). And yeah, in a way it's a little like that - oh, there's no villain that's been defeated, really, but it's still a time that feels like a little bit of a triumph - several of our graduates, I know, have been accepted to professional schools, a couple have jobs lined up.

Another student that we smiled over was the woman - an immigrant from one of the African nations - who is heavily pregnant and we all were wondering if we'd have to give her Incompletes if the baby came any early. But no, she finished up well, and she was at graduation, and I joked to the colleague next to me that she needed to get a second copy of her graduation photo to give to the baby, seeing as she was present (in utero) at her mom's graduation. (This was a student who did very well in class but was concerned about her grade and would regularly come in for help from me, and I was happy to give it. I just wish some of the students NOT doing as well would come in....)

And yeah, in a world where there are a lot of not-good things, a graduation where you have students who worked hard and genuinely earned good grades - and therefore, their diplomas - is a good thing. (And despite all the talk about Millennials and about senses-of-entitlement and dumbing-down, the good students we get are fully as good as the ones we've always had, and that's one reason why I keep my standards high and expect people to come in and get help if they're not meeting them, because I want to keep high standards for those students like the African woman or the guy who reminded me of Applejack....)

And yes, they always play Pomp and Circumstance (Number 1, the one most commonly used at graduations in the US) as we are processing in. It's funny, how something that was written to essentially be martial (the title comes from a quotation from Shakespeare, about war) and to glorify the then-Empire is totally associated by us Yanks with stuffy auditoriums and the smell of gabardine that's been in storage for 6 months to a year...but I very much associate it with graduations, so much so that when I was waiting on the thumbs-up/thumbs-down on tenure I couldn't listen to it, because I found myself wondering, morbidly, "Will the last graduation I was at be the last one I ever participate in?" (My plans, had I failed at tenure, were to leave academia and either join up with a consulting firm somewhere or go back to school for something else - I had a vague idea of doing environmental law). Of course that didn't happen, and from a few things I've heard secondhand about myself and my teaching, it sounds like as long as there are funds to keep the university open, I probably will have continued employment - that is, I don't need to worry overmuch about my own merits keeping my job. But yes, I so strongly associate that march with trying to look sufficiently solemn but happy while keeping up with the longer-legged male colleague in front of me as we process in, that I can't detach it from all these years of memories of going to graduations. (I have been a faculty at far, far more graduations than I was a graduate: there was my high school graduation, my over-large college undergrad graduation which I would have skipped had I known, my Master's and my Ph.D. And yes, I went to both graduate degrees; many people skip their Master's but I felt like mine had been hard-won enough I wanted to go. I had come back from being asked to leave the first graduate program I was in, I had worked really hard on the project, I had JUST decided I wanted to go on for a Ph.D......and also it was at my dad's university, and he was going to be at the graduation as a department chair, so I didn't feel like I could skip it anyway). But since then, I've probably been to close to 30 graduations - two a year, except for a couple times I had to be traveling and got permission to skip....