Three years after a global pandemic interrupted their normal college experience, members of Vassar’s Class of 2023 were lauded for their remarkable resiliency at the College’s 159th Commencement exercises on Sunday, May 21.
Commencement speaker Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, whose mother, Beatrix McCleary, had experienced challenges of her own as Vassar’s first openly acknowledged Black student in the 1940s, told the 621 members of Vassar’s graduating class they too had been tested by adversity. “In all your anxious thoughts about what could happen at college,” Hamburg said, “I assume that the emergence of an infectious disease that would kill millions and basically shut down the planet was not on your list. But [in 2020], the COVID pandemic abruptly sent you home and into a strange world of virtual classes.”
Hamburg, who served as New York City’s Health Commissioner during the HIV/AIDS epidemic and was Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under President Barack Obama, said she had learned to face life’s challenges by drawing on the strength she had witnessed in her mother, who was the first Black woman to graduate from Yale Medical School and went on to have a successful career as a psychiatrist. “My mother would have been so proud and excited to see me speaking here today,” she said. “I was thinking of her as I prepared this address—how her life experiences taught me about the power of perseverance, the surprising gifts that can be hidden in unexpected and unsettling events, and the importance of building communities like those you have found here at Vassar.”
Hamburg noted that she could deliver this message to any graduating class. “But I know this class has been tested in ways few others have,” she said. “Many restrictions altered your life on campus, yet you powered through. You found purpose in adversity. You discovered your own resilience, and perhaps it made you think in new, important ways about community and connectiveness,”
Hamburg told the graduates. “You are ready!”
In her remarks to the graduates, President Elizabeth H. Bradley said,“One of the many capacities that a Vassar degree confers is critical thinking, being a little suspicious about simple answers, asking incisive questions, and—let’s face it—never following instructions.”
The President warned that not all communities will embrace their ideas willingly. “These communities may not seem to be as free or as accepting of challenges as you may have experienced at Vassar,” she said. “You may become disappointed, enraged—or the opposite, withdrawn—because the vision of a just society seems simply too far away.”
But Bradley advised them to draw on words of advice by the late University of California at Berkeley Professor of Anthropology Saba Mahmood in those moments: “Critique is most powerful when it leaves open the possibility that we might also be remade in the process of engaging another’s worldview, that we might learn things that we did not already know before we undertook the engagement.”
As the graduating seniors moved on to the next phase of their lives, two notable alums, Anthony Friscia ’78 and Monica Vachher ’77, urged them to fully embrace the alum community.
Friscia, who serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees, told the graduates that they would certainly forge lifelong friendships—not only with their classmates but also with alums who came before them and those who will come after them. Vassar, he said, will always be “a place you can call home.”
Vachher, who serves as President of the Alumnae/i Association of Vassar College (AAVC), told the graduates they were joining a community of more than 41,000 alums, many of whom are ready and willing to help them make personal and career-related connections throughout their lives. “Vassar is not just a place,” she said. “Rather, it is almost a state of mind. There is something about Vassar that imbues our psyches, that becomes a part of our very beings, that helps to define us and connects us.”
Class of 2023 President Leonard Versola had his fellow graduates engage in an exercise that emphasized that connection. He noted that for the past four years, classmates had introduced themselves many times by stating their name, their hometown, and their major. Versola said he believed imparting this information helped each of them define many of their values and their connection with one another, so he asked them to do it one more time—in unison—as he ended his speech.
At the start of the ceremony, Dean of the Faculty William Hoynes paid tribute to six faculty members who are retiring this year after a combined 236 years of service to the College. They are: Professor of English Paul Kane; Associate Professor of English Peter Antelyes; James H. Merrell, Professor of History on the Lucy Maynard Salmon Chair; Miriam Rossi, Professor of Chemistry on the Mary Landon Sague Chair; Professor of Psychological Science Randy Cornelius; and John McCleary, Professor of Mathematics on the Elizabeth Stillman Williams Chair.