Thank you President Arnn, trustees,
platform party, distinguished faculty and deans, parents, alumni, Governor
Romney. Thank you, Governor, for addressing our class.
My task here this afternoon
is to plead on behalf of the class for our diplomas. If I succeed, we can walk.
If I fail, we’ll have to start all over again as freshmen.
It is the significance of a
Hillsdale diploma that we are more than alumni
of a college. We are the inheritors of an experiment. It is an experiment in
self-government, testing the capacity of men and women to love and serve and
worship without the rule of a tyrant. Our generation was born at the end of a
bloody century when the tyranny of ideology had supplanted the idea that man is
made in the image of God.
But we, the Class of 2007, will not give up on that idea. We cannot
forget the mighty truths we have learned here.
We should thank God every day
for Hillsdale College. I will fall short of the task
my class has entrusted to me, of expressing thanks. We will find more lasting
ways to show our gratitude in the years to come.
To President Arnn—you are the
custodian of an old mission, and you have been faithful to your duty. You have
defended the college’s independence, rallied its friends, and reminded us at
every opportunity that we came here to study. You taught us leadership by
example and by conversation: that statesmanship and scholarship are
inseparable, that serious leaders cannot take themselves too seriously, and
that greatness begins with goodness. Because of your leadership, this campus
looks very different than it did four years ago—among other things, Kresge
stands no more.
You often say that the founders
of the college were the greatest men who ever worked here, and you would
correct me if I suggested that anyone could be compared with them. So I won’t
do that. I will say this: there could be no higher honor to the men who founded
this college than the man who leads it today.
We are grateful to the
hundreds of people who work at Hillsdale who make it operate—people like Steve
Casai at Curtis Dining Hall who taught us diligence, or Linda Solomon at the
front desk in Central Hall, who taught us friendliness, and Nancy Ryan, who is
retiring from the Provost’s Office, who taught us prudence. Behind the scenes,
extraordinary people have served us all.
To our professors, who asked
us ultimate questions about God and man, who guided us through the greatest
books ever written, who taught us that we are heirs of a great tradition, who
have shown us our place in the order of existence--you have inspired us to
wonder at the blessings of life. I should mention particularly Dr. David Paas,
our Professor of the Year, and Professor Mark Watson, who is retiring after
forty years of teaching mathematics.
And to our parents, this day
is yours. Though we have been imperfect sons and daughters, may this day be
some small compensation for your devotion. Since the days when you first taught
us to walk and to talk, you have been the guardians of hope for a nation. We
said goodbye on this very lawn four years ago. When we greet you today, you
will see that we have grown up.
When I was four years old, I
cried to my mom that I desperately wanted to go to college. Well, mom, if I can
persuade President Arnn to let us walk, we might even come away with diplomas.
Today a new generation of
leaders is waiting at the commencement platform. The task at hand is nothing
less than the defense of truth in the midst of falsehood, of goodness in the
midst of sin, and of beauty in the midst of death. In this we may not succeed;
we may have the privilege to fail in defense of the highest things.
Tolkien wrote that “it is not
our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the
succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields
that we know, so that those who live
after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
It is not for us to change a
broken world. But we may go home to our own little corners of the country, to
tap the awesome possibilities of simple things, to give and to sacrifice, to
redeem the time. I have been inspired by many of my classmates who will be
leaders in their careers and in their communities, and yet their highest ambition
is to be moms and dads. And of course, we will send our kids to Hillsdale College.
And when in the midst of the
years we pause to reflect on the path, our hearts will come back to Hillsdale. The
friendships that began here will last long after we part ways this evening; together,
we must make our way into a world of comedy and tragedy where real men and
women are badly needed. We must stick closely together. We must be witnesses
that as Whittaker Chambers wrote, there is “a reason to live and a reason to
die.”
And so to us, this ceremony
is not a completion. It is a challenge. It is a call that will echo through
this century and through our lives, to live and die well. And when we are here
for our last reunion, we may know by experience better than we know today by
aspiration what is meant by the college motto: virtus tentamine gaudet: “Strength rejoices in the challenge.” For
now, President Arnn, teachers, beloved parents: we accept the challenge. (Thank
you.)
CLASS GIFT
It is traditional for the
senior class to give a gift to the college. This year we will give two. First,
we will dedicate a flag pole outside the new Grewcock Student Union. That flag
means something at Hillsdale
College. Here we have
learned to love our country—to celebrate its foundations, to remember its
successes and its failures, and to serve when called. On September 11, most of
us were high school juniors; it was the lesson of that day that each generation
must rise to the defense of liberty.
One of our classmates, Rachel
Somogie, will leave for service in Iraq next week. Rachel is senior
airman with the 927th Security Forces Squadron, and she volunteered
to spend three and a half months at Kirkuk Air Base in Northern
Iraq. She represents the best of our class. Rachel, our prayers
are with you. Would you please join me in acknowledging Rachel Somogie?
Service is an old Hillsdale
tradition. Three Congressional Medal of Honor winners are among the 500
Hillsdale men who fought in the Civil War. One of them was Moses Luce, who would
have graduated with the Class of 1865. But because he sacrificed a year of his
education, he graduated in 1866. His Congressional Medal of Honor had this for
a citation:
“Voluntarily returned in the face of the advancing
enemy to the assistance of a wounded and helpless comrade, and carried him, at
imminent peril, to a place of safety.”
That wounded and helpless
comrade was a fellow Hillsdale
College student.
Our class decided to give our
other class gift as a scholarship to a classmate who sacrificed a year of his
college education to serve in a foreign war. We are calling this scholarship
the Moses Luce Award for Military Service. Instead of walking today, biology
major Aaron Hummel will graduate next year.
Lance Corporal Aaron Hummel
left Hillsdale a year ago to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps, with the 1st
Battalion, 24th Marines Charlie Company. He patrolled the streets of
Fallujah. He was shot at by snipers. Twenty-two men in his regiment were
killed. Forty-five men with serious wounds were evacuated. Some were blown up
by bombs. They didn’t eat much. They didn’t sleep much.
When our Vice President Lauren Clark and the other officers put out the
appeal for our class gift, seniors, parents, and college supporters responded
generously, and we far exceeded our goal of $2,007. Aaron will be receiving a
scholarship of $6,782. He’s a humble guy; he told me that we should give the
award to somebody else, but it is Aaron who served. It is Aaron Hummel, U.S.
Marine, who deserves the highest honors this class can give.
Would the Class of 2007 join
me in welcoming home a classmate and a hero—Lance Corporal Aaron Hummel.
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