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300
NEW ALUMNI GRADUATE
ON A GRAY DAY
Three hundred undergraduates, a record number, walked
across the stage this year to receive their Reed College diplomas. An
amazing number of family and friends of these happy graduates stood in
the rain afterward and congratulated Reed’s newest alumni (including
the two who earned MALS degrees).
Another record was set this year with four students completing the difficult
double major, which entails the writing of two separate theses. The greatest
number of graduates this year majored in biology (42), followed by English
(35), psychology (32), history (25), and physics (17). The largest percentage
of students, 30 percent, graduated from the division of mathematics and
natural sciences.
The
crowd listened attentively to the commencement address by Aaron
Rhodes ’71, executive director of the Vienna-based International
Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF). The IHF, founded in 1982 to
foster cooperation among human rights monitoring groups on both sides
of the Iron Curtain, includes 41 organizations and is a leading non-governmental
human rights organization in Europe. Rhodes offered a thoughtful meditation,
“The Immediacy of Sacred Things,” on the relationships among
human rights, institutions, and the evolution of charismatic ideas. Many
times he related those concepts to a Reed education, as when he said that
“At Reed we confront texts, primary sources. We try to keep contact
with the fundamentals. We try to keep the institution from becoming too
institutionalized, too routinized. We try to ignore much of the clever,
complex intellectual static ofthe ages, to get down to the nitty gritty.
But of course, that is not entirely possible. We are all children of our
time and place, and trying to escape from history is part of the drama
of trying to learn. That is why, I think, this is not such a comfortable
place, but rather a place that is alive, and a place about which we have
ambivalent feelings, feelings like people have about those things that
are most central for them, feelings we have, perhaps, for the sacred.
We should not shy away from the sense that in such an institution, where
at least some achieve immediacy with transcendent things, that we are
on sacred ground, ground on which people feel fear, joy, reverence, and
awe.”
Rhodes
also questioned the ground on which most human rights practitioners stand
and related that to spiritual and religious beliefs. “In my experience,
working with human rights groups all over Europe and the former Soviet
Union, and with international institutions like the United Nations and
the Council of Europe, the basic questions about human rights are not
discussed much or apparently even of concern. . . . Where do human beings
get their dignity, the dignity as individuals that state authorities ought
not violate? If we do not understand that, we cannot make convincing arguments
for human rights protections,” he said. “The idea of human
rights is deeply embedded in our cultural tradition and in the common
tradition shared by Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and its roots can be
seen in other traditions as well. The idea of human rights emerged especially
in relation to monotheism. It cannot be separated from the belief in a
transcendent order, which imposes obligations on political arrangements.
The idea of human rights formed in relation to the belief that if all
men are subjects of one transcendent God, then no earthly king can justly
exert full power over us—that there is a space around each person
that cannot be violated, the space in which we find our relationship with
God, our sovereignty, the space in which the sacredness of personality
flourishes. Furthermore, being all subjects of a transcendent universal
power, we are thus by definition equal with one another, and we owe to
one another, the respect due to an equal.”
NEW PBK MEMBERS
The following 2002 graduates were elected to Phi
Beta Kappa
Christina Athena Aktipis
Seth Adam Belber
Andrew Daniel Berns
Amber Shannon Bradley
Cheyenne Skye Brindle
Christian Roland Buss
Jennifer Anastasia Cameron
Kathryn Elizabeth Davis
Andrew Lambert DeMond
Sarah Katharine Dennis
Chris Lee Flink
Erin Elizabeth Forbes
Monika Anne Gerde
Rhianna Gabrielle Gordon
Harold Mayi Haggard
Kristin Nicole Harper
Michael Scott Harper
Daniel Evan Harris
Ruchama Jerusha
Johnston-Bloom
Alon Karniel
Anastasia Ioanna Kayiatos
Peter Lin-Chen Koo
Amanda Stokes Lucier |
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Laura Michelle Mangels
Hayden James McGuinness
Dustin Bradley Moore
Martin Jerome Mulvihill
Madrona Blue
Sumner Murphy
Erin Elizabeth Pappas
Sterling James Paramore
Miriam Katherine Posner
Samia Shabnam Rahimtoola
Michael Johannes Raven
Hannah Reid Robbins
Nadine Patricia Sauer
Melanie Ann Schick
Tobias Edwin Schine
Amy Lynn Seese-Bieda
Katherine Gibson Sharpe
Tyler Adam Sinclair
Jennifer Sirek-Love
Anna Danielle Stasch
Samuel Stephenson
Jessica Lynn Stults
Evan Dean Vickers |
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