You, the graduates, are facing a right of passage. And, as I though about that, I realized that I, too, am confronted with a rite of passage as this is my last year as a full-time academic and I move to what we at Grinnell call “Senior Faculty Status.”  (Which is a sort of phased retirement.)  And I will teach a couple of courses for the next couple of years and then run up against that awful age seventy and presumably cease this activity.

And this caused me to think about thresholds.  And tomorrow you’ll probably be challenged to think about the threshold leading into the future.  And I, as a historian, (I guess you would expect that) am going to think about this threshold as time to look back--to look back at the Grinnell experience.

I guess I can claim to have some unique perspectives on the Grinnell experience, as I was thinking about my connections with the college.  I was a student here.  I am a graduate.  I married a graduate in 1960.  And in that same year she and I returned to this campus and I was a sabbatical replacement faculty member 1960-61.  I was in seminary at that time, so I helped in the chapel.  I actually preached sermons from this place.  I taught history.  And, because I had seen the game played and because I had been an athlete at Grinnell they made me the soccer coach.  Fortunately, we had an African student who was a super soccer player and I organized the practices and he did the coaching.  Then, in the 1970’s, when I was a faculty member and dean at Colorado College, I became a member of the Board of Trustees here.  So, for roughly ten years I served as a trustee of Grinnell.  Then I got demoted by the trustees into the presidency-- sorry Russell.  He understands exactly what I mean.

It was an amazing experience.  These folks had been my colleagues, and suddenly I was working for them and I had to answer to them.  And so I laughed about being demoted and then I realized I had been demoted.  That lasted for roughly twelve years and during that time I had a daughter who was brave enough to come to a college where her father was the president.  I won’t go into that.  So, I’ve been the father of a Grinnell graduate.  Finally, and maybe best of all I’ve been privileged for the last eight years to be a full time member of our history department.  So, I think I do have some perspectives.  But that does not necessarily qualify me to get into the shoes of our graduates and to say that I know what your perspectives of you experience may be.  But I will try to make that leap.

But, I’m also going to begin with one more bit of autobiography.  When I arrived on this campus in 1952 (that’s a long time ago—its fifty years ago) I remember my father, who was full of words of wisdom, but offered them in a restrained fashion said to me, “I’m not worried that you’ll succeed in athletics, or that you’ll have an active social life.  I am worried that you’ll flunk out.”  He had good reason to say that.

As a high-school student I had majored in athletics, women, or girls, and student leadership—in that order.  My academic life was a definite last.  Fortunately, I was a depression baby and it was relatively easy to get into a good college such as Grinnell.  Mostly, if you were ambulatory and more or less warm you could make it.  So, I was here.  And I made some sort of vow that I would turn my papers in on time—I had never turned a paper in on time in high-school and, you know, that I would make an effort to be a diligent student.  After all, I realized now it wasn’t the taxpayers paying, it was my parents and myself paying for this education. 

Well, as it turned out, I didn’t have to work hard to fulfill that vow.  It was an exciting place and I suddenly found out that it was exciting to learn.  And I’m saying that about a college that was probably at the nadir of its history.  Now, anyone who was around here in the 1950s knows what I mean.  There were three presidents in my four years as a student.  That says something about what was going on.  Nevertheless, at this relatively weak moment in Grinnell’s history I was turned on intellectually.  I never would have dreamed by the end of college that I would end up an academic.  Yet that’s what happened to me in those years.

Well, what’s happened to you?  I hope that you have had that intellectual excitement that I have.  Because, after all, this college is a vastly stronger institution now than it was in those years.  With a much more uniformly capable faculty than in those years.  So, I would be surprised it if didn’t happen to you in most of you courses that a particular discipline became exciting to learn about and study.

You know that you’ve learned to write.  It is the one thing, I think, that we as a faculty can say, at least in the discipline I teach in—in the social studies, humanities types of courses--that you can see the extraordinary progress that our students make in their writing skills.  So, I’m not going to dwell on that.  But I do want to dwell a little bit on something else.  You are excellent problem-solvers.  Now those of you who majored in mathematics or the natural sciences, I think you recognize that immediately.  But those of you who majored in English—think about the papers that you wrote in English courses.  What’s the role of Prospero in The Tempest? You’re a problem solver as you try to figure out—from reading that text with great care—what Prospero represents and what Prospero says to us.  And on, and on, and on.  In your various disciplines you have solved problems.  And you are much better problem solvers than you realize.  Plus, you have the ability to take on something you have never seen before and you know how to go about solving a problem, an issue in a heretofore-unseen area.  You will discover that you are very good at this and very flexible with it.

You also, and this maybe is I think, one of the most important aspects of an education such as you’ve had . . . you have developed your imaginative capacities.  We, as humans are, we think, somewhat unique among the animal kingdom in having this ability to picture, to imagine.  I mean, think about it for a moment.  You can take black marks on a piece of paper and you can turn those black marks into words and those words into images in your mind, so that you can move vastly beyond your temporal experiences.  Beyond the here and the now.  You read Huck Fin.  I mean, most of us are not going to go down the Mississippi on a raft.  But, you can almost literally experience what that is, or was.

If you know science, think about what you know about this space.  And what is in this space from the point of view of the chemical composition.  Why is it that we aren’t floating about in space?  Could easily happen, I suppose.  But there are reasons why we don’t.  One of my colleagues in my presidenting years--Wally Walker, was a botanist and every time I walked across this campus, he showed me things that I was not seeing before.  It’s an enormously rich experience to have some sort of botanical grasp of your surroundings.  So, I think I’ll stop with those—well, one other experience.  To look at a great painting allows us to view reality, the world that surrounds us, in a somewhat different way—a new way. 

These experiences are there so that what you’ve been doing in these four years is furnishing your imaginations.  And developing your imaginations so that you have the capacity to experience the richness of what it is to be a human being blessed with an imagination from now on.  Really quite apart from your material circumstances you will have a rich life because of those endowments and that stimulation.  Now, I treat into areas I know less about, but I’m going to say something anyway.

If you’re honest as a faculty member, we have no idea what kind of lives you live day by day in the residence halls.  I sort of laughingly say it’s the closest thing to ghetto living that any of you will ever experience.  (Even though we have fine residence halls and good residence lifestyles.)  But, nevertheless you’re just jam-packed in there and you’ve got to live with a lot of people, some of whom you like a lot and some of whom you don’t. But, I’ll venture to say this:  That you have developed your moral capacities while at Grinnell.  And I’m not saying that you always do the good.  But I think you’ve learned more and more about what the good is.  At least that’s my experience interacting with students and I recognize that in class you’re on more or less your best behavior.  But, I think there has been what we would call moral development during your years at Grinnell. 

And this thing that we call self-government isn’t just ‘I’ll govern myself and you govern yourself’.  It’s more than that because you are in that ghetto, the dorm, and you have to interact with each other.  It’s a close campus.  There is community here and in the process of living in that community there is, I think, considerable development.

And, finally, let me say something about leadership.  Now, that’s a bad word at Grinnell, with a capital L.  Most of you don’t want to be leaders in the sense of standing out from the crowd.  And yet again when you think about it—think about the multiplicity of organizations and activities on this campus, of all of these complaints about his extraordinarily crowded calendar that we have.  We’re doing it do ourselves.  And it’s the faculty and staff doing it in part, but it’s the students doing it.  You have this tremendous multiplicity of activities and organizations.  And almost all of you have been involved in planning and executing those activities.  So, even though it’s not particularly popular on this campus to stand out from the crowd, nevertheless, I think you have developed considerable leadership skills.

There are other things that could be commented on—but what I am doing here is just asking you on this day, your day, at this event that the students have organized, to look back at this threshold before you part from friends—and that’s a scary thought.  Some of you will never see each other again even though you’ve just interacted closely for four years.  Other of you, by the way, will see each other a lot.  That certainly has been Sue’s and my experience to be very close to some of our Grinnell friends throughout life. 

So, it is an extraordinary change that’s coming and I’m inviting you to think back today about what that experience has meant to you.  And tomorrow, I suspect, you’ll be asked to think about what awaits you in the future.

Now I want to close by thanking you, the students whom I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, excuse me, you and others whom I’ve had the good fortune to know have blessed my life and the life of this college.  It has been a privilege to be your teacher.  Thank you.