A Celebration of the Academy
Ivan J. Fernandez
2007 Distinguished Maine Professor
May 12, 2007
Greetings and congratulations to the Class
of 2007!
I am excited to join you today in this
celebration of your achievements. Indeed, this is a celebration about
you, and those who have supported you that allows you to join a privileged
group of citizens who hold advanced degrees from a college or university.
In a very short time your degree will be conferred, and I will take great
pride in calling you fellow alumni of the University of Maine.
I am charged with making my comments very
brief, so let me get right to my point.
First,
I was thrilled to know I would be here at the podium on this important
occasion. You see, for nearly a quarter of a century I have taught a
large lecture class about soil science at 8 AM during our "spring
semester".
Now, you all know that "spring semester"
here in Orono is really a euphemism for the dark, cold days of winter
followed by mud season! Shall we say, attendance at 8 AM in January is
inconsistent! So the first treat for me today is to look out on a sea of
students with almost no empty seats!
Second,
on a more serious note, I am truly honored and humbled to be selected as
the 2007 Distinguished Maine Professor. It is a privilege to be a
professor at our great institution. Indeed, it is more like a passion
than a job to report to campus every day and work with you, the students,
our staff and our faculty.
As I leave the podium in a few minutes I
anticipate that you will politely applaud, and for that I am grateful.
However, I know that for most of you when someone says 'distinguished
Maine professor'
you immediately think of those particular professors who have made a
special contribution to your college experience. They are your
distinguished University of Maine professors. I know I have mine. They
have had a profound influence on your college experience, and thus
your life. In a couple of minutes let's applaud in celebration for all
our distinguished Maine professors, many of whom are with us today.
And third,
I want to leave you with a message about the importance of actively
making decisions in life. Your experience here at college has given you a
lot of new knowledge, but as you have often heard, the most important
thing we learn is how to think. And my message to you today is to
engage that thought process often.
Each generation enters a world that is
different from that of their parents. However, I submit to you that the
world you are entering is perhaps more exciting and more challenging than
for any generation that has gone before you. We live in a world where we
are bombarded with information from cell phones, blogs, headline news, i-pods,
streaming video, the web, pda's, XM radio, and You Tube and yet we often
really know very little about even the most important issues of today.
We live in a world where a pop star can
change their hair color at night and a billion people on this planet
somehow know about that trivia the next morning. We live more hectic
lives than most of the developed nations of the world and too often have
little time to really think. Major environmental crises used to be
pollution events that affected a whole town, and today we realize that we
are changing the chemical and physical climate of our entire planet.
My message to you is that your choices and
decisions matter...a lot! I submit to you we all need to make our
decisions, both the big and the small, more thoughtfully. Be careful of
the influence of our hectic pace on how well we truly think about
the choices we make every day. Your generation will indeed make America
the "superpower" of the 21st century, not by armaments, but by
solving the problems of today and leading the world by example for
a future that offers sustainable prosperity, environmental quality, clean
energy and social justice.
That takes
careful decisions.
That will
often mean decisions that are not business as usual.
Perhaps the best metaphor to capture this
message can be taken from my favorite poet and a fellow New Englander, the
late Robert Frost. In his now famous poem "The Road Not Taken" he ends
with...
|
Two roads diverged
in a wood, and I— |
|
I took the one less
traveled by, |
|
And that has made
all the difference." |
Class of 2007, I congratulate you!....MAKE A DIFFERENCE!!!!!
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