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Bring the dignity back to graduation
By Lee Kucera
At our son's UC commencement ceremony last weekend--on a grassy slope overlooking a spectacular view of ocean and city--the weather was California-glorious, the speeches were moving, the graduates were brimming with excitement, their families were proud. The bad news? Most of the people in the audience behaved as if they were at the Super Bowl.
Almost before the final notes of the processional had faded and the graduates were seated on bleachers in front of the audience, families with clicking cameras and masses of video equipment left their seats and jammed the center aisle, jostling and jockeying for position and blocking the view of everyone behind them. Protracted shrieking, whistling and horn-blowing followed the reading of individual students' names. One mom awaited her just-graduated son at the bottom of the ceremonial platform and emptied a spray can of Silly String upon him from head to toe. Midway through the event, half the seats in the audience were vacated by families who milled around trying to find their own offspring, as if the remaining graduates--other people's kids, who had not yet had their moment of public recognition--didn't exist.
In vain the provost at the microphone repeatedly asked the audience to be seated. When our son returned to the bleachers from the dais, he found his place occupied by a mom who had climbed past the Reserved for Graduates sign to get a closer camera shot of her capped-and-gowned child. After about three-quarters of the students had received their diplomas, the event was out of control. The chancellor's formal conferring of degrees was a desperate, one-sentence shout above chaos. The provost's closing remarks and the recessional, both of which were scheduled in the printed program, were abandoned altogether.
I don't know when graduation ceremonies evolved into free-for-all, three-ring circuses--probably about the same time wedding guests adopted the custom of breaking into wild applause as the bride and groom share the ritual kiss. OK, I freely admit to being a certified old fogey, and heaven knows the world has changed a hundred times over since my own graduation days when we listened in tremulous silence to a student choir's rendition of "You'll Never Walk Alone." There's nothing wrong with scrapping the traditional clichés about achievement and success and making graduations a little more down-to-earth and human.
But the behavior of more than half the people in last Saturday's audience--in addition to being astonishingly rude--was based on a couple of premises that bother me a lot: First, that one's own kid is the only student out of 300 who matters, and second, that the photographic record of an experience is more important than the experience itself. The irony at last weekend's event was that there was a professional photographer on the dais shooting a close-up of each graduate as he or she received a diploma. His professional memento (how many does one need?) would have been far superior to any image captured by the frenzied shutter bugs who diminished the afternoon for everyone.
I tried to tell myself to lighten up and go with the flow of youthful high spirits and celebratory (if dim-witted) families, but I couldn't. Bottom line: Much of the audience was indescribably rude; the university administrators didn't do anything about it; and the commencement for which our son has worked long and hard was, in his words, "a joke."
What is a college graduation ceremony supposed to recognize, anyway? Readiness for "the real world"? Scholarship? Personal and intellectual growth? Maybe, although a case could be made that a four-year bachelor's degree does not necessarily confer any of the above. The universal and age-old hopes of parents for their children? Certainly, in part.
But primarily, I think, a college graduation is a re-telling of the oldest story in myth and literature, the story that has intrigued and captivated us from Ulysses to Holden Caulfield: The story of what happens when someone leaves home and makes his or her way alone in an odyssey through a difficult world. For most college graduates, commencement signifies the final, irrevocable parting from home and family. It's probably our society's single most definitive rite of passage into adulthood. And it should be treated with some respect.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
