Commence!

I'm a sucker for pomp and circumstance, I admit it... but that doesn't mean I watched our university commencement live: it's available for posterity here. There were many heartening and inspiring words, and many acnowledgments of the many-layered challenges of the last year. I particularly loved the Parsons student speaker, whose talk begins at 1:06:48 and beautifully captures what The New School does as a learning community, likening the student experience to the deep dives of the narwals, the "unicorn of the sea" which is our mascot. New School narwals dive deeper than any other marine mammal, we learn, and when they resurface, in many and distant places, have learned "to embrace the unexplored ocean rather than to swim away to the safe shore." But the sweetest moment may have come during the conferral of honorary degrees, which went to the President of Ford Foundation, theater director Ping Chong, and - en Español - two people from Colombia, José Alberto and Luz Mery Gutierrez, a sanitation worker who started retrieving discarded books and, with his wife, set up what became a network of community libraries; the first book was a copy of Anna Karenina. In the midst of the rubble of recent years, their story is particularly poignant and hopeful.