The world needs you, Governor Patrick tells Wheaton's graduates
May 16, 2009
NORTON, MASS.--On a sunny Saturday morning during Wheaton College's Commencement, Governor Deval Patrick painted a bleak picture of the world. But he said the graduates are the hope for which the world is waiting.
Families are losing their homes. Millions have lost their jobs. Hearts are being broken, he told the 418 members of the Class of 2009.
"That is the world that all of you are about to inhabit. A society in many ways in anguish, and an economy in crisis. And I invite you to embrace it, because crisis is a platform for change."
"I ask you, from out of this crisis, to make a change," he said. "Make an economy that expands opportunity out to the marginalized, not just up to the well connected. Make schools that ignite a love of learning in every child and that honor and support teachers. Make accessible and affordable health care a public good. Make streets and homes free from violence and a community that helps feed, clothe and house our most fragile neighbors. Heal the planet. No challenge is beyond your capacity to care about or to solve, so long as you are pragmatic idealists, can imagine a better tomorrow, and then reach for it."
"What I am asking of you, what I am hoping for and counting on from you, is not easy. But it is simpler than you might think, because I believe that Americans are ready, even in the unexpected corners of our country, to serve and to sacrifice."
Governor Patrick made history as the Commonwealth's first African American Governor when he was elected in November of 2006. Prior to being governor, he was appointed by President Bill Clinton to be assistant attorney general for civil rights, the nation's top civil rights post, in 1994.
At the U.S. Department of Justice, his work included the prosecution of hate crimes, abortion clinic violence, employment discrimination, and the enforcement of fair lending laws and the Americans with Disabilities Act. During his tenure, he led the largest criminal investigation prior to the September 11 terrorist bombings, coordinating state, local and federal agencies to investigate church burnings in the South.
Patrick also has worked as a lawyer and executive at Coca-Cola and Texaco and has served on numerous charitable and corporate boards, as well as the Federal Election Reform Commission under Presidents Carter and Ford.
In his address, Patrick said spoke of growing up on welfare on the south side of Chicago in his grandparents' two-bedroom tenement. He shared a room and set of bunk beds with his mother and his sister. Although he loved to read, he said he didn't own a book until he got a break and came to a Massachusetts boarding school on a scholarship. In contrast, his daughter always had her own room in a nice house outside of Boston. By the time she was in high school she had traveled to four continents and had shaken hands in the White House with the President of the United States.
"One generation. One generation. And the circumstances of my life and my family's have profoundly changed. Now, that story isn't told as often as we'd like in this country, but it is told more often in this country than any other place on earth. That is the American story. That is who we are: the simple idea that through hard work, tenacity, preparation and faith each of us has a chance at the American story."
That American story is at risk and needs to be renewed, he told the graduates.
"Here at Wheaton you have been intentionally exposed to differences in thought and culture, to new ideas and new ways of looking at old ones; to wise and maybe sometimes odd professors and classmates alike, whose wisdom and oddities you may only come to appreciate on the eve of this graduation. You have been trained to value honor and integrity in others and to maintain your own above all. You have been encouraged to imagine better tomorrows, and then to work for them, to become what I call pragmatic idealists.
"The world needs pragmatic idealists today, in spite of the crisis around us, and perhaps because of it... With your training and credentials you could, if you wanted to, spend your whole lives averting your eyes from the daily calamity of less fortunate souls and circumstances, focused exclusively on your own achievement or survival, or just lost, like so many impractical idealists that I have known, in that existential turmoil over why bad things happen to good people. Or, you could look clearly at what's wrong, as pragmatic idealists, and set yourselves to make it right."
The Governor already knows Wheaton well. He spoke in classes and participated in panel discussions as a Wheaton Distinguished Fellow in 1998. He also spoke here as a gubernatorial candidate in 2006.
During Commencement, he was presented with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. Honorary degrees also were presented to Donna Hurd Drohan'69, Sandra Ohrn Moose,'63 and Anne J. Neilson'49. Drohan is an independent consultant on defense transportation and logistics concepts. She has distinguished herself in the field of research and analysis applied to operations in the Federal government and private sector. Moose, a Wheaton Trustee, is a senior advisor to The Boston Consulting Group and president of Strategic Advisory Services LLC, an investment advisory and management consulting firm. Neilson, also a Wheaton Trustee emerita, has built a reputation in the field of taste chemistry. She worked for Arthur D. Little for more than 40 years, beginning as a taste tester, advancing to chemist and later, senior chemist. Currently she is an independent consultant to the company.
About 500 alumnae/i participated in Commencement/Reunion Weekend. Among them was Dorothy Dempsey Steele from the oldest class represented--1934. Four members from the Class of 1939 celebrated their 70th reunion--Mildred Poland Lewis, Muriel Garney Nash, Lois Leonard Ryder and Dorothy Green Smith.
This academic year Wheaton students and graduates won seven prestigious national scholarship, including a total of four Fulbrights, a Watson Fellowship and a Truman Scholarship.
Kelly Maby '09 of Woodhaven (Queens), N.Y., won a $28,000 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study the informal waste collection systems that have developed in Egypt, Australia, Guatemala, Ecuador and Brazil. Maby, a double major in Hispanic studies and sociology, is the fourth Wheaton student to win a Watson in the past two years. The Thomas J. Watson Foundation awards fellowships to college seniors of unusual promise for a year of independent exploration and travel outside the United States.
Four members of the Class of 2009 won Fulbright scholarships: Scott Clark, an English and Hispanic studies major from East Longmeadow, Mass., was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to be an English teaching assistant at a teacher-training college in Argentina. Physics major Megan O'Sadnick of Evergreen, Colo., will join a research team at the Norwegian Polar Institute. The team has been studying glaciers located on Spitsbergen, the largest island of the Svalbard. Biochemistry major Blair Rossetti of Plymouth, Mass., will go to the Netherlands to research the self-renewal of stem cells and their differentiation into progenitor cells at Utrecht University, under the guidance of Dr. Sander van den Heuvel, one of the world's premier scientists in the area of cell division research. Anthropology major Chelsey Taylor of Rockford, Ill., will teach English in South Korea and plans to explore ancient cultural sites throughout the country while investigating how Korean artifacts are displayed to convey the Korean past.
Gabriel Amo '10, of Pawtucket, R.I., was named a Truman Scholar. A political science major, he is one of 60 college students in the nation to win the prestigious 2009 Truman Scholarship in public service. Each Scholarship provides up to $30,000 for graduate study. Amo plans to use the scholarship to further his work in education policy.
Julia Bolt '08 of Cambridge, Mass., has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Sofia, Bulgaria. She plans to analyze the progress being made in the area of desegregation of the public school system in Bulgaria and explore how this has affected opportunities for Roma children to receive quality education.
Other major awards were won as well.
Matthew Kuch '11 and Caroline Cornwall '09 each won a Kathryn Wasserman Davis 100 Projects for Peace award. The award provides each with $10,000 to promote world peace through projects to be undertaken this summer. Kuch of Kampala, Uganda, plans to introduce a new type of cooking stove that he helped design to make life easier and healthier for families living in northern Uganda. Cornwall of Rahway, N.J., plans to start an after school program in Santiago, Chile where she spent her junior year abroad.
Lily Mulcahy '09, an anthropology major from Norwell, Mass., took first prize in the undergraduate student paper competition at the 6th Annual Greater Boston Anthropology Consortium Student Conference for her paper, "I'm Too Young for This: Multivocality in Young Cancer Advocacy.
After a rigorous admissions process, Sarah Mielbye '09 of Attleboro, Mass., and Kristine Vilagie '09 of Carver, Mass., have been chosen to participate in Teach for America, a select corps of college graduates who commit to teaching for two years in low-income communities across the nation. Mielbye, an international relations major, will teach in Connecticut, while Vilagie '09, a political science major, will head to Phoenix, Arizona. Both will teach in elementary schools.
Wheaton students have won more than 60 prestigious academic awards since 2001, including three Rhodes Scholarships.
Located in Norton, Mass., Wheaton is a highly selective college of the liberal arts and sciences with a student body of 1,500. It is a member of the Twelve College Exchange, which also includes Amherst, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Mount Holyoke, Trinity, Wellesley and Wesleyan.
