BRYN ATHYN COLLEGE GRADUATION BANQUET ADDRESS
Purposefulness
Dr. Allen J. Bedford, Dean of Academics
G
raduates, tomorrow morning you will complete the final step in achieving
a goal you set for yourselves many years ago: you will receive your college
degree. The graduation ceremony actually includes two symbolic moments
of degree completion. The first is individual, when you receive your degree
from the President. The second is communal, when all of you baccalaureate
graduates stand together and move your tassels from the right to the left side
of your caps. With these symbolic acts you will be crossing a key threshold in
your life’s journey.
It is fitting that the ceremony includes both individual and group moments.
Your achieving this goal most definitely required your individual work. No
one can learn on your behalf. No peer, friend, family or faculty member can do
for you the work necessary to gain your own insight and skill. Only you can do
that. And so there’s a moment in the ceremony when you, alone, walk across
the stage and receive your degree.
Equally true, though, is that no one can achieve a goal like this by working
entirely in isolation. In the most obvious senses this is clear. You cannot give
birth to yourself, and you cannot yourself be accredited, be authorized by the
state to confer degrees, and then confer upon yourself your education and your
degree. It takes your parents, society, government, accrediting bodies and an
academic institution and its faculty and staff to do that. Standing together and
moving your tassels as a group symbolizes the joint efforts making possible
your achievement.
In the ceremony tomorrow you will hear this declaration: “You have
fulfilled the requirements prescribed by the faculty of the College, and thus
the Board of Trustees of the Academy, under the power granted by the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, has conferred upon you the Associate in
Arts, Bachelor of Arts, or Bachelor of Science degree in testification of your
graduation in this year of our Lord Two Thousand Sixteen.”
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