A bittersweet Commencement ceremony for the Class of 2008

The seventy-fifth St. Andrew’s Commencement ceremony was blessed with brilliantly sunny but temperate weather. Colorful dresses and smiling faces studded the front lawn, and the proud applause of parents, grandparents, siblings, friends and teachers filled the air as the Class of 2008 took their seats in a flurry of buttonhole carnations and white dresses. The ceremony began with an invocation from the Reverend Jay Hutchinson, followed by opening remarks from Headmaster Tad Roach, who bid grateful adieus to departing faculty members Charles Jocelyne, Heidi Pierce, Andrew DeSalvo, Carolyn Shank and Heather Casteel.

School co-president Martha Pemberton Heath then took the podium to give an incredibly moving and powerful speech, commemorating her time at St. Andrew’s and assuring her classmates that, while they were leaving their high school careers behind, their experiences at St. Andrew’s would remain with them forever, as “an inner compass,” a “core foundation,” a “home” inside themselves. Pem eloquently described both her sense of wanting to stop time to avert the pending separation, and her confidence in a deep and durable bond with her peers and with the home they had shared for years. She finished her speech with a beautiful and well-chosen quote, about memory, identity and solidarity, from Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth”:

“In whatever form a slowly accumulated past lives in the blood – whether in the concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories, or in the conception of the house not built with hands, but made up of inherited passions and loyalties – it has the same power of broadening and deepening the individual existence, of attaching it by mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum of human striving.”

Co-President Pemberton Heath brought tears to many eyes with her heartfelt address.

Pem’s speech was followed by that of her co-president, Justin Burton Weidner, whose address was as wordy, witty and eccentrically entertaining as all who had come to know his character could have expected. His humor gave way, in the end, to an earnest appeal to the underformers, whom he urged to undertake the responsibility of embodying the core principles and culture of the School he had come to cherish so passionately and serve so well.

Co-President Justin Weidner pulled on a charactersitic colorful polo mid-speech.

After Academic Dean John Austin presented awards recognizing outstanding work in the arts, academics, sports and service at St. Andrew’s, Commencement speaker Darra Goldstein rose to deliver her address. Goldstein is a Professor of Russian at Williams College, as well as the proud mother of a member of the graduating class. In her speech, Goldstein made a compelling argument for the value of “not being too quick to make up one’s mind.” As an example of the error of crediting first impressions, the speaker related her first encounter with St. Andrew’s. Many years ago, she had judged a former St. Andrean, newly arrived in one of her classes at Williams, as a “football jock” unprepared for high-level academic work. Her prejudgment was soon utterly overthrown, as the young man became one of her most impressive and beloved students, going on to achieve great things in Slavic and middle eastern studies.

To support her assertion of the benefits of ambivalence, Goldstein reminded the audience of Keats’ coinage of the term “negative capability” to describe the ability to “hold two conflicting ideas in the mind simultaneously.” Keats credited Shakespeare with this talent, suggesting its indispensability to the writer or artist. But Goldstein asserted the universal value of a state of intentional openmindedness as an important and often overlooked entryway to revelation.

Goldstein concluded her address with a quote adapted from Hemingway, and a message that echoed co-president Pem’s: "If you are lucky enough to have lived at St. Andrew’s as a young person, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for St. Andrew’s is a moveable feast."

Commencement speaker Darra Goldstein is a Professor of Russian at Williams.

Dean of Faculty Will Speers soon rose to read the names of the graduating students, and family members rushed closer to the stage with their cameras to capture their loved ones in the shining moment of embracing Headmaster Roach and receiving their diplomas. The ceremony concluded with the national anthem and a benediction from the Reverend Joy Walton. Guests and graduates then joined students, staff and faculty for a luncheon on the lawn. The sunny weather and excitement was mingled with some sadness as members of the Class of 2008 said their (temporary) goodbyes to teachers and underform friends.