REMARKS OF WELCOME TO NEW STUDENTS AND PARENTS
MATRICULATION CEREMONY

Faces and Windows
William L. Fox – Sunday, August 23, 2009

To the Class of 2013: we’ve been waiting for you, we’ve been waiting and getting ready for a long time. The medieval custom we observe today called “Matriculation” is an academic membership ceremony whereby a student’s name is officially entered in the register of the university. It signals the moment of belonging to a community and vital tradition.

The word “matriculation,” however, has a distinctive meaning apart from other terms that define the start of something new. The derivation of our regal-sounding word “matriculation” contains the same idea as matrix, matron, mater, and matrimony. These words all hold the idea of mother. In fact, the familiar term “alma mater,” simply means, if you will, your “other mother” in the form of a bountiful and nourishing community. So, in matriculation we are invoking the continuation of a natural process of development and growth, which is an extension of the formative years at home that have shaped your values and ambition.

This hour ties together symbolically the lines between your home and your college, your origins and your destiny, your achievements and your dreams. I mention this history and word-play briefly because it is important for me to acknowledge that our new students are not the only participants in this ceremony. You have family members here to witness this arrival, coming now to a rise on the hill where St. Lawrence University was first planted 153 years ago. Members of the entering class, let me first have a word with your parents and other family members.

Thank you for sharing your young people with the St. Lawrence community. We are deeply honored by your trust and I, in turn, wish to make clear that we cannot do this important work without you. A partnership between St. Lawrence and the families of its students has been a long-standing philosophy of this university. Our students will need your encouragement and will need to know, without necessarily saying so explicitly or too frequently, that you believe in them, no matter where the new paths may lead. They will stand on their own two feet here, but your whispered reminders and occasional care packages will make a tremendous difference.

I recognize that for many parents this day bears the dual emotions of pride and memory. It was only yesterday that you were packing a lunch for the first day of school. I understand this as a parent myself of a very recent college graduate. Lynn and I have been in the chairs you occupy today, which is why I mention the role you have in getting this generation ready for the work of their times and lives. We are at St. Lawrence committed to caring about the whole experience of the individual person—intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually—but we cannot be all-knowing even if we had fewer individuals on our campus. If you have suggestions, concerns, or advice for us, we are not only a community of scholars; we are also by nature people who will listen.

I also remember the perspective of the students. I have never forgotten my own first-day on the St. Lawrence campus in a moment much like this one in the early 1970s, a soft collision of good-byes and hellos. My parents were with me, my belongings were quickly put in order, perhaps my mother made the bed. But I knew it was not just a matter-of-fact boundary crossing, exchanging a house key for a room key. I was entering an experience altogether new, exciting, strange, and scary. St. Lawrence accepted me and I agreed to enroll, but I only knew one other student before arriving, out of the 2,000 who would become my fellow campus-dwellers. To the entering class: I also say to you, as I have just said to your families, I understand what it’s like to be in your seat, too. I was once there, a long way from home, and not yet sure how far my readiness or confidence would take me. St. Lawrence met me more than half-way in that beginning year, one of the hardest, most rewarding, and happiest of my first eighteen years of life. If I could do it and love it—and now come back to it 35 years later—you can, too.

We have expectations. My colleagues will be discussing them shortly, but let me suggest to you, as you are welcomed into the St. Lawrence community and matriculate this day, a point of view that will make this transition for you the great success I am confident it can be. I want to take a few moments and talk about the concept, familiar to all of you by now, called “social networking.” I have a different take on Facebook than the millions who live for it, swear by it, and speak through it.

At St. Lawrence, it is your face that matters, not your Facebook page. It is an interesting note of history, albeit the recent history of six or seven years, that the origin of Facebook in name and function was on a small northeastern private college campus that gave to all its first-year entering students, as St. Lawrence once did, a picture directory of the class. While that printed publication is obsolete, it had its day and purpose, just as the online phenomenon serves as a way of meeting people with whom you have friends and places in common.

We expect you to transition this day from Facebook connections and relationships to face-time conversations. This is a significant new boundary to cross and explore.  While the convenience and two-way mirror aspect of checking out people on Facebook will continue, I encourage you to notice that the magnificence of your campus home is not just in the beauty of our setting and the quality of our facilities, it is in the faces of the community. We learn best face-to-face, not screen-to-screen. Our community is built on this close-up and intense premise. While we encourage and use the most powerful technologies available, we remind you that our daily work must always be the face-to-face kind

Notice also that portraits are placed all over campus; they are the faces of Laurentians who were once students and teachers here in years gone by. Study their faces. They made it possible for us to be here today. As you get to know Gunnison Memorial Chapel, you will see in the stained glass clerestory windows and in the lower nave windows an array of faces, some easily recognizable because they are icons such as Gandhi and Lincoln. Most of them, you will never have seen before, but they are the faces of people, many with familiar names, who were curious to learn, inspired to dream, and translated their principles into ambition for making a difference. Study their faces. The faces in the window are not abstract; they remind us that we belong to a community of experience that stands for the larger hope of humanity.

Today St. Lawrence expresses that hope in each of you. The faces in the window suggest to me the possibility that sitting in this audience is a future Nobel laureate, U.S. Senator, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, or the bearer of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The faces in the window are from the fields of science, the arts, language and communication, athletics, religion, law, education, and environmental conservation. The images write large for us to read ourselves into the story summarized by the old Latin proverb, “the face is the index of the mind” (vultus est index anima). Some day, I believe, the faces in the class of 2013 shall be like those placed around campus as portraits in glass or on canvas. I encourage you to see yourself in those best ideals of human life.

Another thing to notice is that at St. Lawrence you will learn how to negotiate, how to manage differences, and how to take a perspective that was not, at first, your own. You cannot hide behind a text message or be singularly persuasive by posting a short clip on YouTube to accomplish the best that a St. Lawrence education includes.

Your concerns, misunderstandings, or need for affirmation must occur by going to the other person—professor, student, coach, or staff member— face-to-face to explain or inquire further the matters on your mind. The great life skill of negotiation and the deepest pleasure in accomplishing the art and substance of conversation will carry you far in this world. But there are no short-cuts by e-mail or twitter. This is a face-to-face kind of education.

A few years ago, as you will recall, there was a terrible tsunami upon the Indian Ocean. A baby hippopotamus that had been washed out to sea somehow survived and ended up on a beach in Kenya. It was found and immediately placed in the safety of a game park and, there, the hippo attached itself to a surrogate mother who happened to be a 100-year-old male tortoise. We come back to the idea built into the word “matriculation.”

The two became inseparable, swimming together, sleeping together, and finding comfort in each other’s daily routine. This story could easily be dismissed as a fable or sentimental whimsy, except it’s true. The relevance of the story today is in a statement made by one of the Kenyan officials in charge of the park. He said, “Life is not measured by the breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. It also tells us that our differences don’t matter much when we need the comfort of another… [Look] beyond the differences and find a way to walk the path together.” as quoted in Stephen J. Trachtenberg, Big Man on Campus (New York: Touchstone Book, 2008, 94).

You may not find the 100-year-old tortoise on the paths of your campus. But you will find many people here who will assure you that you are not merely a face in the crowd. Your mind, your experiences, your reflections, your changes-of-mind, your falling-down moments, your sharpened ability to live with fresh awareness of other people’s interests and worries—all matter in the way we believe that St. Lawrence will, over time, take your breath away.