2019 Fall Convocation Remarks

September 4, 2019

Welcome to the 2019 fall Convocation.  You may be seated.

I’m pleased to be with you this evening to conduct one of the most meaningful ceremonies of the academic year.  In May we gather in this same beautiful setting for Commencement, which celebrates the achievements of our students and marks their transition to life after W&L.  Then we disperse for the summer.  Students travel, faculty immerse themselves in scholarship, and staff accomplish projects all over campus.  Each of us is grateful for the change of pace and season.  And yet there is something missing, something that impels us toward this moment, when summer transitions into fall.  Convocation is when we reassemble ourselves as a community. 

As students, as teachers, and as staff devoted to providing an environment in which teaching and learning can take place, our avocations — that which we are called to do — require our convocation – our being called together.  None of us can be most truly who we are, individually, without all of us being here, collectively.  Which is why this time of year feels so good — we are once again able to be our best selves.

Convocation emphasizes and celebrates the fact that we are an academic community.  We wear our ceremonial regalia to signify that our distinctively academic work, the fundamental work of the university, which unites us all, has commenced.  We welcome our newly arrived undergraduates and law students, and we encourage the members of the class of 2020 to make the most of their final year at Washington and Lee.

The centerpiece of this ceremony is the address that will be delivered by our distinguished speaker, Bob Strong.  He will be properly introduced momentarily, but I can’t help saying a few words myself.

I can vouch personally for Bob’s mastery of the classroom, since he and I taught a seminar together in my first year at W&L.  I learned a lot about Bob by watching him teach.  He is disciplined and dedicated.  He is earnest but funny.  He is wise but humble.  It’s an effective and endearing combination, which inspires our students and serves them well.  These same qualities have earned Bob the respect of his faculty colleagues, who have elected him to serve as one of their representatives to the university’s board of trustees.  Bob is also a prolific and highly regarded scholar of the American presidency and foreign policy.

Teacher, scholar, and university citizen, Bob Strong embodies what is at stake in our work here every day — work that never truly stops, but which officially re-commences right now.

The occasion is momentous enough that it calls for appropriate music, which we can always count on the University Singers to provide.  Their selection this evening - On Earth as it is in Heaven – is from Ennio Morricone’s Academy-Award winning score to the 1986 film The Mission, which is known for using music as a bridge to bring people together, regardless of the challenges they face.  Professor Lynch and the University Singers, please take it away.

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