Commencement 2003

Minerva San Juan's Senior Luncheon Remarks
May 16, 2003

Good Afternoon President McGuire, Vice-president Preston, Dean Oyewole, Faculty Colleagues, and members of the class of 2003. It is an honor once again to address you as you move closer and closer to your commencement. It has been quite a time, these past four years.

We have talked with one another over time and in spaces that often have failed to contain us.

We have talked with one another over time divided into courses that have sometimes expanded us.

We have talked with one another, raising questions, giving answers, creating comfort for one another's sufferings, celebrating one another's joys, experiencing one another's losses, one another's gains.

And all the while you have worked, full of effort, to learn what there is to learn.

You have read Darwin and Galileo and Aristotle and Kant, short stories about Mendel, novels by major authors, the gospels and genesis and the Q'oran. You have read the dead white men and the living voices of the women who insistently and consistently rename and revision the experience of being human.

You have written and analyzed and calculated and computed; you have photographed and painted and sculpted your imagination; you have reflected and argued and revised your understanding; you have stood alone and spoken to an audience of your peers, willing them to hear more than your words have said.

You have looked at the stars and perceived patterns. You have looked at the stars and understood beauty. You have looked inside yourselves and given form to moral judgments and applied the principles of ethics to cases in business, in medicine, in assessing the demands of keeping our earth safe and beautiful and living, and in your lived concern for honor and integrity.

You have camped in tents and walked through woods, visited the library and navigated the web. You have researched the empirical world and explored the conceptual world. You have learned to critically distinguish between theory and practice, and have theorized the practical and practiced the theoretical.

You have become.

And now we celebrate your education, a gift of women long ago and men and women now to you, received and owned, achieved by you.

Congratulations.

Minerva San Juan. Associate Professor of Philosophy
Class Advisor