Remarks by Jill Gold Wright - Ph.D. '03

Good morning, President Upham, Board Members, Faculty, Administrators, Fellow Students and Guests,

On behalf of the graduating students here today, I would like to welcome you to the end of the race; indeed, you all have great seats at the finish line. I believe I speak for all CGU graduates when I say that, today, we look back on the last few years with great pride: not only in what we have accomplished academically, but in how much we have grown in other ways. We are stronger and more resolute than we ever knew we would become when we first began our journey into graduate study.

You see, in the beginning, students seem to believe that graduate school is utterly separate from real life, and, in a way, it is. We spend leisurely days, sitting in comfortable chairs for hours at a time. We spend long afternoons listening to and challenging each others' arguments, and, although we never have all the answers, we always leave the classroom with original ideas to consider and new ways to learn.

We are fortunate not to share the frustrations of our non-grad-school friends, the nine-to-fivers who have only a few stolen minutes at the water cooler in which to reach out to their colleagues, trying to understand and solve the complexities of life, before their Styrofoam cups are empty. We have the great privilege-even if it doesn't always feel like one-of spending hours in the library, poring over more books than we will ever reallyhave time to read, delving deeper into the fields we love.

But at some point soon, our utopia is blindsided by real life concerns. These are not always negative, but they are always enormous demands on our time. We have jobs, and bosses who expect us to be great. We are adjunct professors, freeway flying to every college in a 100-mile radius, scurrying from one class to the next. We are full-time professors, struggling to meet the demands of our five classes and our tenure committees while still trying to complete our coursework, our qualifying exams and our dissertations. We are husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, wanting so much to meet the needs of our families, while we secretly struggle with the reality that after dinner, or story-time, or bedtime, we will have more to read and prepare before tomorrow morning's seminar.

We become stressed out; we are tired, we look for shortcuts, and people around us say that we're crazy to try to do it all. Our work colleagues look at us knowingly and tell us that we'll drop out, the way they did. Our pay scales tell us that this additional degree won't make much of a difference anyhow. Our friends wonder why we don't return their calls like we used to. And our families miss us, asking us to take just one afternoon off to enjoy a picnic instead.

These pressures become colossal stumbling blocks that can nearly cripple us. In my own race, the obstacle came very early on. When I began graduate school, my dad was in the hospital with cancer. I became my own kind of freeway flyer; I would leaveClaremont the moment class was over to visit him, bringing along my reading assignments so I could try to get through a chapter while Dad took a nap. The day my dad slipped into a coma was the one non-school day I was not there. With my new Claremont friends, I was attending a conference about King Lear. I listened to paper after paper about the relationship between fathers and daughters. I couldn't have imagined that by the end of the day, I would become the Lear figure in Act Five, howling myself, mourning the death of my partner.

I was only six weeks into my master's program, and I had a choice. I had barely begun; it was not too late to turn back onto the path of least resistance. But I knew what my dad would have wanted me to do; I needed to continue on.

In this race, we all learn how to balance our obstacles and stay on track. We become long-distance, endurance runners.

Today, we celebrate that determination and stamina-the motivation we all found somewhere inside of us to stay in the race. We ran and we ran, and now, we sit here at the finish line, only barely having caught our breath-and our hearts begin to slow their pace at last.

We made it-and we are proud, but we are not done. Henry David Thoreau writes, "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." This day may mark the completion of our celestial castles, but their foundations have yet to be built.

Jewish liturgy charges, "You and I can change the world," and we must start immediately. In everything we do, direct and indirect, we must help to improve our world. We must tell of everything we have learned in these halls. We must disseminate our knowledge to every corner of the globe. With that knowledge, we must eradicate ignorance and injustice. We must use our skills, our ideas and our motivation-everything that our presence here proves that we have-to change this world today. Together, we must design, build and reinforce that foundation under the castle of dreams, so that it can stand as a stronghold in pride and in peace. Not one of us is free from this responsibility. Not one of us.

Tonight, go out and enjoy this well-deserved celebration. Tonight, sleep more easily and deeply than you have in the last few years of your life. Tonight, rest long and dream big. The saving of the world starts tomorrow.