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Commencement
'03
On the wettest May 26th ever recorded in New Haven, in a month made
strange and memorable by a bomb, 1,346
Yale College seniors and 1,651 graduate and professional school
students accepted their rights and responsibilities. Yale Alumni
Magazine intern Darrell Hartman '03 gives us a senior's-eye
view of the events—both the officially sanctioned and the definitely
not.
Summer
2003
by Darrell Hartman '03
Friday,
May 9. Today I turned in my final assignment as
a Yale undergrad: an 18-page paper for my seminar, "Doomed Love
in the Western World." It may be the last schoolwork I will ever
do, making it a perfect occasion for celebration—except that
I wrote the essay from my home in Maine and e-mailed it to a friend,
who printed it out and dropped it off at the English department.
Computer technology squelches symbolic resonance!
Tuesday,
May 13—Friday, May 16. "Dead Week" begins. As usual, most seniors are going
to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where they will party all night
and lie on the beach all afternoon. Twelve of us, however, are spending
the week camping on Cumberland Island, a national seashore off the
coast of southern Georgia. Sleeping in tents is sweaty and uncomfortable,
especially on a back tender from a day of exposure to the hot Georgia
sun. But one evening, we are sitting on a beach we have entirely
to ourselves when a herd of wild horses meanders by—right in
the middle of a lunar eclipse. Distant lightning makes the night
sky flash pink. It is a once-in-a-lifetime natural spectacle.
Saturday,
May 17. We finally pull into New Haven at 8 p.m. A week
ago, students were making beelines all over campus, and you could
feel the suppressed energy of final exam period behind library doors
and college gates. Now everything seems to have slowed down. On
the drive up from Georgia, the Maryland roadside claimed my cell
phone from the roof of our moving car (I blame physics, not myself),
making me feel even more disconnected as I unload my backpack in
my room in Berkeley.
Sunday,
May 18—Thursday, May 22. Wait a minute, there actually are some people around. It's Senior Week. A series of events,
from pub crawls to a midday picnic at East Rock, has been organized
to encourage 2003-ers to cram in the kind of fun that makes for
fond memories—in the way that, say, a class trip to Six Flags
did in high school. I'm definitely not complaining, though. The
bomb in the law school—nobody hurt and
not much damage, but no explanation, either—plus the impending
end of life as seniors have known it makes unwinding welcome. Enjoyed
to its fullest, the mainstream (i.e., Bacchanalian) version of Senior
Week involves so much drinking that the smell begins to cling to
your clothes. But alcohol is more than just an intoxicant: Even
the most teetotaling college student knows that free or even cheap
booze facilitates casual social intercourse, as well as other types
of casual intercourse, better than anything else. By far, the most
anticipated and inclusive event of the week is Thursday's Last Chance
Dance. After submitting a list of ten very "special" friends, acquaintances,
or complete strangers via a Web site, hook-up hopefuls wait for
a computer-generated report that will notify them of any matches.
As it turns out, though, even the combination of an automated go-between,
a dance floor, an open bar, and a vague sense of the apocalypse
is still not quite enough to get Yalies between the sheets on a
mass scale. Maybe we should have added Jell-O wrestling?
Saturday,
May 24. This
morning, I glance out the window and see seniors in cap and gown
marching along Rose Walk. My response is panic tempered by curiosity.
These are Trumbullites; Berkeley's baccalaureate service isn't until
tomorrow. Later on, I run into a friend in JE whose outfit tells
me where she's been. "How is it?" I ask. She's flip: "Pretty boring."
Brodhead was good but all he did was read poetry, Levin recycled
the speech from his welcome address of freshman year, and the whole
thing was just pretty square. My parents and brother arrive in the
afternoon, and we go to dinner with my roommate's family. Part of
me thinks this could be just another Parents' Weekend.
Sunday,
May 25. Today feels different. The four hours of sleep
I got last night have become standard, but this time I get a chipper
reveille from my dad, who phones to say he is enjoying the morning
sun on Cross Campus. Am I ready, he asks, for the 11 a.m. service?
My roommate is up, along with the other two guys on the floor, friends
so close that we basically form a quartet. But we've never been
as united as we are now—no one wants to put on the cap and gown.
Still uncloaked, we look out our windows and see our Berkeley friends
assembling early in the courtyard below. With a sad grin, someone
says, "I'm dying here," in the tone of mild complaint we reserve
for situations like this. To my friends and me, sentimentality is
easier to bear if you sprinkle a little salt on it. If there's to
be sugar coating, let someone else do it—like Dean Brodhead,
whose choice of poetry at the service seems just right; like progress-minded President Levin, who struggles
but in his own way succeeds in communicating his high hopes for
my future despite (but maybe because of) his constant references
to things such as "information technology"; and like the Glee Club,
whose anthem from the upper balcony of Woolsey Hall sends hope and
sadness floating down to graduates. I feel for a moment as though
I'm sitting below angels. We regular old humans in the audience
also get to sing two hymns, and this feels good, too. Asking God
to "fill all our lives with love and grace divine" makes me feel
less like a graduate of the Class of 2003 and more like a member
of the human race.
Class Day on Old Campus
brings us back to the here and now. While the baccalaureate service
could have taken place 50 years ago, it is impossible to listen
to this year's guest
speaker, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, without
thinking about how much the world has changed since we entered Yale
in 1999. A long event with many presentations and buoyed by variety,
wit, and the occasional outbreak of flat-out goofiness, Class Day
is without a doubt a day for the students, who don
ridiculous
headwear:
silly
wigs, plush lobsters, an empty bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The student performances are a joy to see and hear. Read in Sinhala
(a language spoken in Sri Lanka), the class poem is one of the most
beautiful things I have ever heard.
Monday,
May 26. Today is "The Big C," and we're back to mortarboards.
As predicted, it is pouring out. The one-block march from Cross
Campus to the Old Campus takes about an hour, and I think to myself
that those forlorn-looking flower dealers lining George Street would
have done better to sell galoshes. Berkeley has been assigned to
the back of the student section, where three friends and I halfheartedly
attempt to convince 1,400 graduating seniors to put down their umbrellas
so we can see what's going on. More concerned with our own soggy
condition than with this prestigious event, most of us are happy
when it is cut short. Berkeley holds its college ceremony at Center
Church on the Green, a welcome downsizing of venue and emotion.
The announcing of honors adds some excitement, and Master John Rogers
sends the Berkeley Class of 2003 off with advice on how to deal
with what is "both an expulsion and a liberation": Expulsion because
tomorrow, our key cards will no longer open any doors on campus.
Liberation because now we have new doors to open anyway.  |
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