2021 Commencement Address
May 27, 2021
It is now my privilege to address the Class of 2021 on the occasion of your commencement. You and I arrived together, in 2017. We have shared four memorable years, including the last 15 months, which have been beyond our wildest imagination. And that makes it a special joy to be with you here, live and in person, on this day that marks your passage from students to graduates of Washington and Lee.
Our first recorded athletic event took place right here on Wilson Field in 1872. It was a semblance of football between W&L and VMI. There were few rules and many injuries. There was no seating for spectators, just an open patch of grass. Over the ensuing century and a half, Wilson Field has undergone minor cosmetic fixes and complete makeovers. It has been the site of thousands of events — football and baseball, lacrosse and track and field, and an annual game of something called “Pushball” that was a fierce staple of intramurals in the early 1900s.
But this is a first.
We have never celebrated undergraduate commencement on these grounds. We have held this event in Lee Chapel, in the gymnasium, outside the president’s house, inside VMI’s Cameron Hall, and, beginning in 2003, on the lawn in front of the Colonnade. The fact that we are here on Wilson Field this morning is one more reminder of the many ways in which our lives have been disrupted by the pandemic. But the fact that we are here this morning is also a testament to your perseverance.
A year ago, I stood alone on front campus and delivered my commencement address into the lens of a camera. I noted that 100,000 Americans had died. Since then, another half a million have lost their lives in this country. 30 million have been infected. Many of you experienced infection or quarantine. All of you missed out on many of the normal routines and pleasures of senior year.
In the long history of this university, not many classes have lived through anything like what you have experienced. But there have been a few.
Consider the class of 1918, whose four years at Washington and Lee coincided with World War I. Only 55 seniors received diplomas that year, during a somber ceremony in Lee Chapel, where empty spaces were left for classmates who were fighting in the trenches in Europe.
Similar scenes were repeated during World War II. As students left school to serve their country, W&L’s total enrollment fell to just 60 by 1944. It was the smallest number of students at the institution since the Civil War. But commencements were held even in those terrible years. In April 1944, the university held its 195th commencement in Lee Chapel for 13 seniors. 35 other members of that class received their diplomas by mail, like the class of 2020 did last year.
One member of the Class of 1944 who did not graduate with his classmates was Richard L. Duchossois. His name is familiar to you. Wilson Field is part of the Duchossois Outdoor Athletics Complex. The Duchossois Indoor Tennis Center is up beyond the Village by the baseball field. And our brand new Duchossois Athletic and Recreation Center is on the other side of the footbridge.
You know his name. But you might not know his story.
Dick Duchossois, known to many simply as Mr. D, came to Washington and Lee from Chicago in the fall of 1940. As sophomore in December 1941, he was walking with some classmates up the hill from their fraternity house, when they heard the news that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. None of them knew where Pearl Harbor was, so they consulted a map at the library. As Mr. Duchossois recalled some years later, war was the furthest thing from their minds as they studied for their fall term exams on that December morning.
A month later, with school having resumed after the holiday break, Mr. Duchossois was in a P.E. class in Doremus Gym when a messenger delivered a note summoning him immediately to a meeting with the Dean of Students. Terrified, and desperately trying to imagine what he had done wrong, he rushed home to change into a coat and tie. When he arrived at Dean Gilliam’s office, he was told the President wanted to see him. Mr. D was shaking by the time he introduced himself to the imposing figure of Dr. Frances Pendleton Gaines.
The president got straight to the point: “Mr. Duchossois, I have your resignation from the school. Congratulations, you’re in the Army.”
That very same night, Dick Duchossois boarded a train at the Lexington station in what is now the Omicron Delta Kappa headquarters on Mclaughlin Street. He reported for duty at Camp Robinson in Little Rock, Arkansas, the following week. It must have felt very far away from gym class in Doremus.
Mr. D went on to become Major D, and he commanded the 610th Tank Destroyer Battalion under General George Patton. He survived life-threatening wounds on the battlefield and was awarded two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.
After the war, Mr. Duchossois returned to Chicago and joined his father-in-law’s business repairing secondhand freight cars. He always wanted to complete his college education at W&L, but never got that opportunity. He had a family, and responsibilities, and he needed a job.
Dick Duchossois is now 99 years old. His 100th birthday will be in October. The pandemic kept him from traveling to Lexington last summer for the opening of the athletic center, but he still hopes to visit and see it for himself. Mr. D has never forgotten the relatively brief time he spent at Washington and Lee. Indeed, he credits his year and a half at W&L, and especially the abiding impact of the Honor System, for his personal development and his professional success in building the family business into a manufacturing empire. He has said that at Washington and Lee, “Without knowing it, you’re building a way of life.”
Without knowing it.
College is sneaky that way. It molds you when you’re not even looking. You arrive fresh from high school and meet complete strangers who become your lifelong friends. You spend four years going about your business: taking classes; sharing meals; singing, dancing, and acting; practicing and competing; working in the community; exploring Rockbridge County; basking in the sun on front campus.
Immersed in those everyday experiences, you become young adults – women and men increasingly capable of making meaningful differences – almost by accident. As Mr. Duchossois said, you build a way of life without knowing it. That's the important business of education.
This year, of course, our ways of life have been turned on their heads. I’ll spare you a rehashing of the details. You’ve received your last code red email from me. But your education has continued. Indeed, the pandemic has taught you – has taught us all – things we otherwise would not have learned. Necessity has created opportunity.
I don’t pretend to have special insight. Scientists, scholars, and artists will spend years making sense of what has transpired and how it has changed us. But here are a few of my own reflections on what we have learned this year.
First, is the profound extent of our interconnection. And the fact that being bound to each other is both essentially human and unavoidably dangerous. The rapid and relentless spread of the virus demonstrated how tightly the world is connected. No place, however remote, was exempt from the natural forces and social behaviors that spread disease around the globe. Equally universal were fear, grief, and isolation. As the risks of being together became too great, we found ourselves increasingly alone, which impressed upon us just how deeply we need each other.
When we need what we cannot have, we must be patient. A heightened appreciation of the value of patience – along with ample opportunities to practice it – was another incidental benefit of the pandemic. The world in which you have grown up, and to which we all have become accustomed, is one of instant gratification. Most anything we desire can be delivered with a few taps on the phone: information, food, products from around the world. Prior to the pandemic, slow internet qualified as a serious inconvenience. Now we have better perspective. A year without travel, social events, proper weddings or funerals, and even hugs from our loved ones will do that. We have learned what matters and not to take it for granted. We have learned to find new ways to take pleasure in solitude. We have learned to take deep breaths and wait patiently for the world to regain some semblance of normalcy. Our patience has been rewarded today.
The interconnectedness we crave, but which also threatens our health, is nothing new. A century ago, the influenza pandemic of 1918 infected about a third of the world’s population. Then, as now, Lexington was not immune. In the fall of that year – just a few months after the sad graduation with empty benches for absent soldiers – W&L President Henry Lewis Smith reported that the flu “struck the assembled student body with the suddenness of a blow." The local hospital ran out of space. Two dorms were converted to makeshift infirmaries, as Baker was this year. The university librarian, Miss Annie Jo White, opened her own home to ailing students. Despite their best efforts, creative and determined like our own, two W&L students died.
The pandemics of 1918 and 2021 punctured the comforting illusion that we live in a bubble here in our bucolic valley. Lexington is a small town. Rockbridge is rural county. But we have seen how what happens anywhere on the planet affects us all. And we have learned that when things are difficult, we have to rely on one another more than ever. This difficult year has powerfully reinforced the importance of community and taught us that sustaining community requires our active participation.
The mission of Washington and Lee University includes preparing graduates for “engaged citizenship in a global and diverse society.” If we have succeeded, you will leave this place not merely prepared but downright eager to engage with the communities that await beyond you the confines of our nonexistent bubble.
The flexibility cultivated by your liberal arts education, and strengthened by the demands of navigating the pandemic, will serve you well in those efforts. Think back to last February. As COVID began to spread, we did our best to remain on campus while other schools closed their doors and sent their students home. But when the severity of the threat became apparent, we had no choice. On March 13, 2020, you received my email announcing the suspension of in-person classes. And everyone – students, faculty, staff – turned on a dime. The flexibility on display from that moment forward has been remarkable.
Faculty reinvented their courses. IT gave us the bandwidth and the tools for virtual school. Facilities reconfigured our buildings and created outdoor spaces. Student Affairs concocted dozens of ways to have fun in a pandemic. Dining Services hand-delivered meals to hundreds of students in quarantine. The Health Center conducted thousands of COVID tests. Coaches figured out how our athletes could practice and compete. Dancers, actors, and musicians put on socially distanced performances. Every single person on this campus, every single one of you, learned to do old things in new ways, and learned to do entirely new things that we previously could not have imagined.
I was struck by the way Greg Parker, head of the department of music, described the value of the flexibility and resilience shown by his students: “If they can deal with these challenges, they’re going to be a whole lot more equipped to deal with the curveballs that life is going to throw when they get out of W&L, and that is what’s going to make them world-changers.”
Perfectly put.
A liberal arts education, even at its best, cannot not prepare you for everything you will encounter. But it does make you the kind of person who responds well to encounters for which you are not prepared. Like a once-in-a-century pandemic. The ability to respond to the unexpected, which you have demonstrated in spades, enhances your prospects for a lifetime of learning, achievement, leadership, service, and citizenship.
As trying as these last 15 months have been, they have made you stronger and more resourceful. They have taught you to be patient, and kind, and to treasure moments of joy. In these ways, oddly enough, the pandemic has been a gift.
You will never forget this year. You will never forget your time at W&L. I will never forget you – the class with whom I entered Washington and Lee. And history will never forget you, the class that lived through the pandemic. A century from now, some future president of W&L will look out over commencement and say, “the class of 2021, they were thrown a nasty curveball, and they hit it out of the park.
I will think of you often. I will always root for your success. Please come visit us in Lexington. I wish you happiness. And I wish you good health.
Congratulations and thank you.