Sent forth
Wesleyan University graduated more than 800 students Sunday amid warnings of climate change, broken political systems and mountains of debt.
MIDDLETOWN — Wesleyan University graduated more 840 students Sunday, sending the newly-minted alumni into a world described by commencement speakers as beset by climate change, broken politics and college debt.
The graduates at the Middletown school’s 187th commencement were cheered on by about 3,000 family members, friends and others who gathered under a hot sun and sought shade under a large tent, under trees and next to campus buildings.
“A campus is the place to have one’s ways of thinking tested, not just protected,” Wesleyan President Michael Roth told the crowd. “If we are to repair our public life, we must develop habits of mind and spirit that allow us not just to celebrate diversity, but learn from difference.”
Samuel J. Morreale, senior class speaker, expressed some surprise that he and his classmates made it through four years at Wesleyan.
“We really did this, huh,” he said. “I think that for me and many others, Wesleyan has been a place of refuge and respite. It has been a place of escape.”
Jonathan Oh of Avon, 21, clad in Wesleyan’s crimson graduation gown, said he’s headed to Boston with a degree in economics and in search of a job in financial analysis. Crossing the large field used for the ceremony, he said he intends to return to Connecticut and is not saddled by debt, thanks to a scholarship.
However, he said, “It’s way too hot to enjoy the whole day.”
Erin Angell of Berkeley, Calif., also is headed to Boston after landing a job as a consultant in economics.
“I’m ready and sentimental,” she said.
Pat and Jerry Kaplan of Chatham, N.J., were cheering on their granddaughter. It was their third graduation, and the first they attended together, in this year’s commencement season. They traveled separately to graduation ceremonies scheduled on the same day in Washington, D.C., and Colorado.
“I’m very proud and very warm,” Pat Kaplan said.
Jerry Kaplan, a retired math professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, took a shot at a system that often leads students into accumulating excessive school debt.
“I’m not big on elite colleges that are overcharging,” he said.
Saidiya Hartman, an alumnus of Wesleyan and professor of English and comparative literature and women’s and gender studies at Columbia University, referred to student loan burdens in her speech.
“At the moment you arrive at what you wanted to be: a graduate, an educated person, a diploma-bearing debtor,” she said.
“Every accomplishment points toward what has yet to be done,” Hartman said. “Having arrived at the goal, you are lost again, needing to find your way to the next stage of things, forced to leave this self, this incarnation of you to enter anew.”
Hazel V. Carby, who taught English at Wesleyan from 1982 to 1989 and received an honorary doctor of letters, warned the audience that the planet’s health is deteriorating “more rapidly than ever.”
“We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide,” she said.
The commencement coincided with the 50th anni
versary of the school’s founding of an African American studies program.
Edwin Sanders, a graduate of the class of 1969 and founder of an interdenominational church in Nashville, Tenn., said he was “honored to represent this era.”
“And I pray that it will not be your 50th reunion before you see many of the other things” that will more fully advance justice, he said.
Stephen Singer can be reached at ssinger@courant.com.