"She's a big, tall, strong blond," a Pitzer College admissions officer scrawled enthusiastically, in summing up the qualifications of a bright and idealistic student applicant.”
[I know what you’re thinking.] That was written, not 4 years ago, and not about me, but forty-five years ago about a young woman hoping to enter just the second class of Pitzer College students.
In the Fall of 1964, Time Magazine ran a short piece about the brand new liberal arts college way out in California and its novel approach to education. Even then, it was clear that Pitzer was a different sort of place.
Time wrote: “Personal evaluations count heavily at California's intensely informal Pitzer, where the teachers lecture in shirtsleeves and barefoot girls pad into class carrying Cokes.”
We are still chill people, and some teachers do lecture in t-shirts, but Pitzer became coeducational in 1970, and we’re in the process of kicking Coke off campus for committing human rights abuses.
So that much has changed.
Time wrote: “The original Sanborn and Holden dormitories were wired for closed-circuit television and tape recordings designed to transmit lectures, panel discussions and dramatic productions right into the girls' rooms.”
The remnants of that system still exist; when I lived in Holden there was a wall-mounted, grapefruit- sized metal disk in my room that I could not figure out. [We would hit it sometimes to see if it would emit noise or turn the lights off or something.]
Today, Pitzer students are not content to be transmitted to. We talk back. We dine with world leaders and policy experts, and we drop by our professors’ office hours-- often unannounced but always welcome. We commune on Facebook, we argue with each other at lunch in the dining halls, and we trade ideas on every imaginable topic on student-talk, our internal email list-serv. On this campus, we create our own culture.
So that’s changed too.
Time wrote: At weekly "Town Hall Meetings" they debate issues that range from whether the girls should be required to wear skirts at meals . . . to writing a school constitution.
Okay, some things never change.
But over the last 45 years we have become a very different place.
The Grove House was not built on a foundation of ancient bedrock, or ancient anything. It was someone’s home before we put it up on blocks and dragged it across town to its current perch at the top of the Mounds. Even then, Pitzer was big on recycling.
[As President Trombley noted,] this class was the last to spend a year in what we now call “Old Sanborn”. The dormitory housed first-year classes for more than 40 years, before we destroyed it two summers ago. This Commencement Plaza is built on that plot of land. A few weeks ago, I saw on Facebook that an alumna from the class of 2008 was able to salvage her freshman year door placard. So now the little metal A205 lives a new life under a glass-topped coffee table in a Seattle apartment.
At this point, you may be thinking, what is this college that is constantly under construction, and reconstruction, and post-construction? What is this college that happily sends its students off to all corners of the world? When the walls keep tumbling down, and we put them back up, and then tear them back down again, what are we really made of?
We mention frequently that Pitzer College is young. It is the youngest Claremont College; it is the youngest top liberal arts college in the United States. There has never been a US President or a Supreme Court justice that attended Pitzer College. But what some might call a weakness of Pitzer requires us to make it a strength. We are so young, as an institution and as individuals, that we can’t rest on our laurels. We don’t have any, not yet.
The Hippocratic Oath includes “Do no harm.” The Google corporate motto is “Don’t be evil”. Woody Allen said, apparently, “80% of success is just showing up.” My Pitzer diploma symbolizes that I have loftier ambitions. My Pitzer education demands that after this day, I dedicate myself to combining empathy with action. It demands that we have an impact as eager participants in the world around us.
As teachers and poets and artists and mentors. As reporters and learners and scholars and activists. As musicians, entrepreneurs, organizers, farmers, and translators. As engineers, coordinators, advocates, and leaders.
Now, we are diverse by background, by interests, by skills, and by choices. And we often struggle amongst ourselves with differing views of how to contribute.
But we have forged a community not out of bricks and mortar, or even stone and bamboo. Every year we rebuild this community out of common values.
Of love for each other.
Of searching for not only knowledge but understanding of communities all over the world.
Of wanting to be subject to each other.
Of recognizing the privilege of our academy and attempting to harness it for the common good.
Of wanting to change things [and believing that we can].
And because we are built on values, we are free to leave for months at a time in order to climb the Himalayas, to experience the rain forests of Costa Rica, to snag a photo of the David in Florence, to create vaccines for diseases in Botswana, to teach English in Korea, to clean up the mean streets of New Jersey, and still call ourselves Pitzer College students.
And because we are built on values, when we accept our Pitzer College diplomas, the spell is not broken. Like the song says, “Home is wherever there is you”.
The morning coffees before class, the books we’ve read and committed to memory, the professor’s advice, sun-baked afternoons by the pool, the midnight moments on the mounds, greasy burritos and bitter beer, trips to In-N-Out just before closing, the hard-fought A’s and the gracious B’s, the blurry Polaroids at the bottom of our suitcases--
they all come with us wherever we are going, even if we’re traveling light.
If, after today, we represent Pitzer’s values in our daily lives, we will always be students of Pitzer College students.
Early last Fall, I sat on a Preview Panel for the incoming Class of 2014. Just before it started, someone asked me what it felt like to be a senior.
I responded, without really thinking about it, “I don’t feel like a senior. I feel like a freshman of the rest of my life.” I still feel that way.
I'm reminded of a passage from the autobiography of Helen Keller, the Story of My Life. Keller is now a symbol of disability rights, but she was also a champion of minority rights, women’s rights, and worker’s rights. She proved that each of us is more than the situation we are born into. But before she did all of that, she writes of a moment in her childhood, just after learning to sign.
“I made my way through a shower of petals to the great trunk and for one minute stood irresolute; then, putting my foot in the broad space between the forked branches, I pulled myself up into the tree. I had some difficulty holding on, for the branches were very large and the bark hurt my hands.
But I had a delicious sense that I was doing something unusual and wonderful, so I kept on climbing higher and higher, until I reached a little seat which somebody had built there so long ago that it had grown part of the tree itself. I sat there for a long, long time, feeling like a fairy on a rosy cloud. After that I spent many happy hours in my tree of paradise, thinking fair thoughts and dreaming bright dreams.”
Today we are ready for new adventures.
Our foot-holds may be uncertain; and we don't know what lies ahead.
But our potential is awesome. And our dreams are bright.