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Today is Friday, March 29, 2024 at 04:01 AM.


Who would have guessed that after all these years, the one thing I have done that would most impress the seniors was I organized a great party in the spring of 1968? I fought hard with the organizers to name the event the "First Annual Reed College Renaissance Faire." For many years, the students produced a spectacular, colorful day-long costume party in celebration of the Renaissance and our Reed community, with historically accurate music, dance, and food. Historical accuracy was assured by a panel of history majors. I understand that the nature of the event has changed; it is my fervent hope that one day soon the students will see fit to return to the original idea.

I am deeply honored and happy to be sharing this moment with you. I am especially happy that my mother, my constant supporter and my role model, Dr. Vivian Howard, is here with me.

So first, to the graduates, our reason for gathering here today: you have spent the last four years, and some of you, more than four years, in dogged pursuit of knowledge and excellence and the approval of your professors. If your experience at Reed was at all like mine, you also had some fun along the way and forged lifelong friendships. Today is the culmination of that effort, and as you collect your prize, you join the alumni of the best college in the nation. I salute you!

To the parents, for whom today marks the fulfillment of a twenty-or-so-year dream, on behalf of your sons and daughters, thank you. Thank you for your sacrifices, for believing in them, for holding a first-rate education as a value, for every word of praise, for every word of comfort, for being here today to bask in your accomplishment. You have and deserve the heartfelt appreciation of the graduates and all present.

I want to share two ideas with you. The first point is that you will carry away with you certain values that you have gained here at Reed College, values that will support you to be successful in whatever you choose to do in the years to come.


(C)Roger Jensen/The Oregonian
The second point is that you have a choice as to how you will apply those values, and they can serve you in a rich, satisfying, rewarding life that makes a difference in the world, but only if that's what you choose.

Thirty-one years ago, in September of 1966, I first set foot on this beautiful campus. Those were tumultuous years. The Vietnam war was raging, the civil rights movement was at its height, and the presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey were moving into gear. The women's movement was experiencing growing pains. Young women were burning their bras. Young men were burning their draft cards, and through it all, Reed freshmen were burning the midnight oil to complete Hum 110 papers on time. They were the sixties. Life was "in our faces." In my four years here, Reed had four different presidents and acting presidents. In my sophomore year, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, followed by the Watts riots in Los Angeles. That summer, Robert F. Kennedy was killed. In my junior year, the Black Student Union, an organization of black Reed students, called for a student strike and took over the second floor of Eliot Hall, the administrative center of the college, virtually closing the college for several days in December of 1968.

It was a troubled time for Reed and for the country. Early on, at the end of my freshman year, I escaped to the math department, where x equaled y, or it did not, or you had a long conversation about it. The simplicity of math, in the context of the turbulence, appealed to me.

Those years at Reed were, in many ways, the defining years of my life and the most important. It was here at Reed that I learned to think. It was also here at Reed where I learned to engage with people whose beliefs and experiences are different from my own, and I gained a profound respect for the other fellow's point of view.