Final Commemcement

For the last 10 years, I have regularly visited a college campus not as a student, not as a professor, but as a trustee. Being a trustee of Fontbonne University has been a role I have taken seriously, so I have been on campus fairly often. There have been board meetings and committee meetings, parties and receptions, and, as Fontbonne was a Catholic university, Masses. I have also been there for lectures, plays, concerts, and tours of facilities of many sorts. And I have played my role at ceremonial occasions, attending all the commencements and convocations I could. And today, in what may have been my last visit to campus, I played a new role, receiving doctorate of humane letters, honoris causa, and serving at the speaker at Fontbonne’s final commencement.

While a recognition of loss is a natural part of a university’s final commencement, the mood was mostly one of celebration. We are proud of the achievements of the students who received their doctoral, master’s, or bachelor’s degrees today. We are proud of the faculty and staff who have remained at work to help those students complete their studies and join in this final ceremonial celebration of our common enterprise. And we are proud that we are closing only after having given every student a chance to complete his studies, if not on on campus, at a university that will recognize all the work he has already completed. Thanks to President Nancy Blattner and Provost Adam Weyhaupt, we can be as proud of the way in which Fontbonne has closed its doors as of anything in its history.

These final commencement exercises were held in Doerr Chapel, the heart of Ryan Hall. Ryan Hall is the oldest building on campus and its center. Its design, like those of so many main buildings at American universities, embodies a particular vision of what a college is. The main entrance is up a fight of stairs, for scholarship is an elevated enterprise. You then enter what is at once a hallway leading to rooms where people pursue their various disciplines and a common room where all may gather. If you do not linger in this space, you are at the entrance to chapel, for the worship of God is central to life of the college, not peripheral. The message embodied in the architecture has been obscured as colleges have grown too large to fit in a single building and the original structures have been taken over by administration. But from Nassau Hall at Princeton to Fontbonne’s Ryan Hall, that was the message built into the structure of the building at their founding.

The “Prayer Hall” at Nassau Hall has been renamed the “Faculty Room” and refitted to look like the British House of Commons. At other colleges the central chapel has been transformed into an auditorium. But at Fontbonne the chapel remained a chapel to the end. I am glad to say that its altars and sacred furnishing will find new homes in the chapels of a high school and a graduate school of theology. And I am glad our final commencement was held there, rather in a gym or even outside in the quadrangle (through our spring commencement there was lovely).

The video of the final commencement is not of the highest quality—our best videographer may have been working on a touching legacy video, which uses film from our penultimate commencement in May—but here is the film I have of the conferral of my degree and my remarks. (It will open in a new window and may take some time to load.)

Here is the link to my Remarks at Fontbonne University’s Final Commencement Exercises. (Those who watch the legacy video will see that my opinions on academic dress were not shared by all members of the university community.)