Graduation Celebrates End of Youth, Beginning of Rest of Life
Of course, everyone is called on to sacrifice in these awful times, but it is funny what you can really miss.
For an unrepentant old academic like me, I’ll miss the annual celebration of students which most universities don’t even have any more: the all-school spring graduation.
Remember? The auditorium packed with moms and dads and kids and grandparents. Eddie Butler at the organ pounded out the first bars of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” and the entire faculty began marching in wearing their academic regalia (and feeling hot as blazes under the gowns and hoods). Arts and Business and Nursing. Then Law and Dentistry and Pharmacy and Medicine, followed by the Graduate School and all the administrators with their self-administered gold chains.
And the graduates. Several hundred of them. Some with white tape on their caps spelling out, “Thanks Mom and Dad.” The lawyers and physicians with bottles of champagne hidden under their gowns, or horns, or silly string and confetti. Kids whose folks or siblings had been to Creighton over the years like the McCulloughs of Sac City, or the Cullans of Hemingford, Nebraska, and the Spellmans of Perry, Iowa.
The faculty wore hoods identifying their own alma maters, including the Ivy League, the University of Paris, Johns Hopkins, Nebraska, Iowa, Chicago, Michigan and Berkeley.
Every grad would be called out by name and walk across the stage and the families would shout out (though they were told not to). There used to be a speaker, though that started to take forever. One time an old Congressman was being given a Distinguished Alum award and he grabbed the microphone away from Fr. Carl Reinert, much to the horror of the stage party, which knew a politician couldn’t resist making a speech.
A thousand pictures were taken by proud families, and a thousand hugs given by dads and moms and grandparents. The ceremony celebrated the end of youth and the beginning of the rest of life.
It was the one and only day in the year when the university was a whole university, and we old duffers will miss it, especially this spring.
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