Opening Convocation, August 25, 2005

Members of the Board of Trustees; members of the faculty, current and emeriti; transfer students and members of the Class of 2009; families of our incoming students; returning students; alumni; staff; and other valued members of the Lewis & Clark College community:

Greetings and welcome to the opening of the 138th academic year of Lewis & Clark College. The Reverend Mark Duntley, who has just led us in our invocation, serves the College as our Dean of the Chapel, and I want to take a moment to acknowledge Mark and his colleague Sister Loretta Schaff and to thank them for all that they do for us. Lewis & Clark is a varied and diverse community of learners and seekers, and for many, learning and seeking have a spiritual as well as a material dimension. I for one am grateful that Mark and Sister Loretta are members of our community and that they make themselves available for everyone who, regardless of creed or even lack of creed, feels the need for the guidance and counseling that they provide every day. Thank you Mark, and thank you Sister Loretta.

I am Tom Hochstettler, and it is my honor and privilege to serve as the president of Lewis & Clark College. Also seated upon this dais, in addition to Mark Duntley and several other individuals whom you will be hearing from shortly, are two/three distinguished members of our Board of Trustees, our Chair John Bates, and James Richardson and Ken Novak. There are in the course of the academic year few moments when it is appropriate to acknowledge the members of our Board, who labor tirelessly on behalf of the College, but I want to make this moment one of them. I would like to ask these gentlemen please to stand and receive our applause.

I want to reflect with you parents briefly on the singularity of this moment. You moms and dads here today have been building up to this occasion for the better part of two decades, if not longer. You have, on behalf of your sons and daughters, made tremendous sacrifices of time and treasure to bring this day about. You probably changed thousands of diapers—yes, thousands of diapers; you do the math. You sent your son or daughter off to school mornings, if they lived at home, over 2,400 times by my reckoning. You alone know how many soccer, football, volleyball games, band and orchestra concerts, debate tournaments, you have attended or chaperoned over the last decade and a half. You alone know how many sleepless nights your child has caused you, either when they were very young and croupy and could not get out of bed, or later when as teenagers they had the keys to the car and did not seem to have the good sense to know when it was time to come home and get into bed. You alone know how much sleep you lost worrying about their SAT and ACT scores, about their GPA, and about getting all those college admission forms and reference letters in on time. Do the mental calculation of your sacrifices on behalf of your child, and then pat yourself on the back. You have done one terrific job.

For our part, we at Lewis & Clark have been preparing a long time for the arrival of you new and transfer students here today. We have been working for 137 years so as to be at precisely the point where we are right now. We have been garnering treasure in specie and stone upon this hill, and we have been stockpiling books in the library so that you will have the resources you need to succeed here and in life. We have networked the classrooms and dormitories, and we have tended the gardens and polished the floors to make this a fitting setting for you to learn in. But most of all, we have worked tirelessly to create a distinguished program of instruction and scholarship that will, in the best way we know how, prepare you, our students, for a lifetime of fulfillment and never ending exploration.

Surrounded by parents and family members up there in the bleachers in front of me are arrayed the faculty of this great institution. Turn around, students, and take a good look at them. There in a single location is assembled the collective intellectual capital of Lewis & Clark College, a faculty who are second to none in accomplishment, in high intelligence, and in their dedication to providing their students with the finest education available in the world today. They shine in the classroom, as you students will soon learn, but they also shine outside the classroom. They will individually and collectively become an important part of your life, and if you let them, some of them will become your lifelong friends. One of the tremendous advantages that we as a small college have at Lewis & Clark is our ability to foster within our community, between students and teachers, the close personal relationships that add luster to the academic experience.

Moments such as this, moments of unabashed celebration of who we are and what we represent, are far too few in our lives today. I especially enjoy Opening Convocation, because it is an opportunity for us faculty, administrators, and Board members to honor academic tradition by putting on our caps and gowns and parading around a bit, even in this heat. The wonderful march that we use to enter the stadium on this occasion adds to the thrill of this day, at least for me. That march, first published in 1906, was written by the British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams and bears the enigmatic title “Sine Nomine,” the “March that Has No Name.” Many of you may recognize the melody and associate it with the old Anglican hymn “For All the Saints,” the words for which were written by William W. How in 1864. Although it is most decidedly a Christian hymn, there is one stanza in that hymn that I find nonetheless appropriate on this decidedly secular occasion, the opening of the school year. It is a phrase that can still uplift and renew us as we set forth once again on the great enterprise of expanding our horizons and of learning together:

And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,

[There] steals on the ear the distant triumph song,

And hearts are brave, again, and arms are strong.

For the Reverend William W. How in the context of his hymn, “the distant triumph song,” that which serves to renew one’s sagging spirit, was nothing less than the prospect of heaven itself. For you our new students, the “distant triumph song” might be said to be something a bit less sublime, namely, your far off graduation day. But it might also be said to be the attainment of profound knowledge, even of wisdom, which in the final analysis is the best product of any education. And that is something that in its own way is also sublime.

So I encourage you, our newest students, to be brave of heart and strong in arm and spirit in testing yourselves within the new environment that you are now entering. So long as you put forth the effort to succeed, your time among us will be richly rewarded, I promise you. I welcome you all, parents, family members, and students, to the Lewis & Clark community, and I thank you very much for your attention.