Trinity Commencement Address - Joanna Scott '82

It’s an honor to be standing here today celebrating you, Trinity College’s class of 2009.  I hope you’re letting yourself feel a hefty dose of pride right now.  You’ve accomplished marvelous things at Trinity.  By my estimate, you’ve taken somewhere between 30 to 40 final exams, you’ve written a dissertation’s worth of essays and research papers, you’ve gone through 20 cartridges of ink for your printer, you’ve sacrificed more than 50 hours of sleep to all-night study sessions and the occasional party, you’ve read at least 20 books you’ll never forget, you’ve made a dozen close friendships that will last for decades, and you’ve learned enough to be able to go out and design for yourself the life you want to lead.

Looking back on your time at Trinity, you probably feel that the years here have passed in a flash.  It’s a flash that will continue to cast light on everything you do in the future.  I know something about the implications of a Trinity education because I’ve sat where you’re sitting.  In my day, I pulled more than a few all-nighters and saw the sun rise over the city of Hartford.  I danced to bands on the quad and woke up early Monday mornings to work the breakfast shift at Mather.  I even had a part-time job as a physical trainer and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons I gave massages to members of the hockey team.

When I think of my experience as a student, there’s one revealing scene that comes immediately to mind:  I was on a study-abroad program at Trinity’s Barbieri Center in Rome, studying, among other things, Shakespeare’s Italian plays with Milla Riggio.  That whole semester was life-changing for me—a really rich, wonderful experience.  One beautiful breezy spring day, our class was meeting in the garden.  I remember that I was taking a stab at answering a question Milla had posed.  We were discussing Coriolanus, and I’d begun talking with stammering excitement that verged on incoherence.  Suddenly, everyone else in the class started laughing.  I thought they were laughing at some unintended joke I’d made about Shakespeare.  In fact, they were laughing because a pair of silky underwear had blown off the clothesline behind me and landed on my shoulder, and I hadn’t noticed.  That pretty much sums up what I was like as a Trinity undergraduate.

Thanks to my own experiences here, I know that while you’ve been at Trinity you’ve been challenged to take advantage of the distinctive freedom of the flexible liberal arts curriculum.  I also know that this moment, when you’ve earned your degree and you’re looking forward to the rest of your life, can seem more than a little scary.  You’re facing a new kind of freedom, one that is veiled with uncertainty.  But it’s exactly this uncertain freedom that you’ve been preparing for while at Trinity.  Whatever your major has been, however you’ve focused your studies, you’ve been learning how to design the life you want to lead.  And in order to prosper in the midst of uncertainty, you’ve been honing three essential skills:  you’ve been encouraged to form probing questions, to persist in the face of obstacles, and to imagine new possibilities.

I’m a storyteller by trade, so I’ll offer a few brief stories to illustrate the importance of these skills.  The first one involves a bored college student sitting through an interminable speech (maybe a story about an interminable speech strikes you as especially relevant right now!).  This particular young man lived many years ago.  When he was 17, he enrolled as a medical student at the University of Pisa in Italy.  He was the kind of student who would dive right into every discussion.  He had an insatiable curiosity and wouldn’t let anything go by without questioning it.  He was so argumentative that he was called “the Wrangler” by other students.  He’d think about what he was learning in relation to what he had experienced.  And then he’d pepper his professors with questions.

So one day, the Wrangler, as he was called, was sitting in the cathedral in Pisa waiting for a rather dull sermon to end.  His eyes wandered up to the chandelier.  A strong breeze had gusted through the open doors of the cathedral, and the chandelier started to swing overhead.  Now this student, the Wrangler, was in the habit of asking questions, and he asked himself whether it was true that as the arc of a pendulum shortened, the time it took to complete the swing decreased.  Since the Wrangler had nothing better to do, he started to time the swinging of the chandelier using his pulse as the measure.  And that day in the cathedral, the Wrangler discovered something:  the pendulum of the chandelier always took the same time to complete one swing, whether the arc was short or long.

The service ended, and the Wrangler left the cathedral.  But he didn’t forget his observations.  He kept pondering the question of the pendulum and its arc.  As he made his way through university and changed his studies from medicine to mathematics, he worked out the calculations, and in 1602 he conducted careful experiments and established proof that “the period of a swing of a pendulum depends only on its length, not on the weight of the pendulum nor the length of the arc.”

You’ve probably guessed that this 17th-century student sitting in the cathedral of Pisa was Galileo.  In fact it took Galileo years to devise his theories—he had to test and refine his calculations.  But what his example shows is the importance of asking probing questions.  Examine the received knowledge of the day, and some of it might be revealed to make less sense than we thought.

Learning provides an ongoing opportunity to formulate questions.  After your years at Trinity, you know how to make a habit of this opportunity.  We should all aspire to follow Galileo’s model and be wranglers.  But the opportunity to ask hard questions is not always available.  Sometimes you have to fight for it.  The journey won’t always be easy.  You have to be prepared for obstacles.

We’re celebrating your accomplishments today.  We’re also celebrating the 40th anniversary of co-education at Trinity College.  In 1969, the college opened its doors to women.  Co-education started with a trickle of freshman women and transfer students that September.  Many of these women went on to eminent careers—today they are medical professors and university deans, lawyers and theater directors.  But they all faced obstacles.  In talking with Emeritus Dean Ron Spencer and my former professor Milla Riggio, I’ve heard about some of the challenges faced by both the new students and the first female professors.  Women on the faculty were oddities in the early 1970’s.  If they headed committees, they were called “chairleaders” by their male colleagues.  If they had an office in Seabury, they were obliged to make their way down the Long Walk to Mather, which had one of the only women’s bathrooms on campus.  Not everyone was in favor of coeducation.  There were naysayers who thought it would create, at best, a distraction, and at worst, a decrease in the quality of education.  The Trinity trustees were ahead of other schools in endorsing coeducation.  But it should be mentioned that they felt it was important to have at least 1000 male students on the campus.  They believed they needed 1000 men in order to have a winning Bantam football team.

Challenges are inevitably part of every transition, and while you might not be able to anticipate the shape they’ll take, you can prepare for their impact.  Here’s a little story about a woman who really knew how to deal with obstacles:

It was the year 1871.  The woman in question was sitting on a bench reading a newspaper while riding on a steamer across San Francisco Bay.  The steamer was moving “under full headway” when it struck a rock.  There was a loud crunching noise, and the passengers standing on deck stumbled from the strong jolt of the crash.  People erupted in desperate cries of fear.  According to a newspaper account, a woman “with four children clinging to her, fell on her knees and with uplifted hands, commenced screaming like the whistle of a steam engine….In less than thirty seconds after the crash, one man had four life preservers tied around his feet and one around his neck.”  But amidst the scene of panic, the woman who had been reading the newspaper remained unfazed.  As the article in the newspaper describes it, she did no more than raise her eyes, “glance at the situation,” and resume reading “with the utmost unconcern.”  She knew better than to panic.  And in fact the accident caused minimal damage, and the steamer moved on past the rock and went on its way.

This unconcerned woman on the steamer was Susan B. Anthony, one of this country’s most important advocates for women’s rights.  Her steadiness in the midst of the uproar around her was consistent with her manner in facing other more pernicious obstacles.  She was famous for her cool nerve in the face of resistance and ridicule.  She knew that change wouldn’t be easy. 
Change is never easy.  There are bound to be obstacles that interfere with your dreams.  The easiest option won’t always be available.  Along with satisfying achievements, there will be some disappointments.

If you’ve read some of the work of Samuel Beckett, you might be familiar with a famous sentence of his.  After losing hope and declaring that he can’t go on, a character in a novel by Beckett ends up concluding, “I’ll go on.”  All stories involve an enactment of this declaration: “I’ll go on.”  A narrative can’t help but move forward.  It doesn’t necessarily move straight ahead toward a culmination.  In fact, it usually moves sideways and backward and turns in circles.  Narrative is befuddling and unpredictable, like life.  But looking at it from a bird’s eye view, a story always leaves behind the place where it begins.

Here’s one more story.  This one involves a good friend I had at Trinity, Gail Goldbloom.  Three weeks before she was to graduate with the class of ’82, Gail was killed in a car accident, and she never had a chance to sit where you’re sitting.  Now Gail was a spirited, funny, and compassionate young woman, and she’d be really angry with me if she thought I was going to end this commencement speech on a sad note.  I’m sure she’d rather be known for the way she lived--her ability to make others howl with laughter, her habit of jumping on her dorm bed while she belted out a Steely Dan song.  She died too early, and it was a terrible, heartbreaking loss, but what I remember most about Gail is her spunk.  I’ve always liked that word—spunk—and whenever I use it I think of Gail Goldbloom.

Now I’ll jump ahead from 1982 to 2008.  I’d thought of Gail often over the years, but I’d lost touch with her family.  A few months ago, I happened to be reading through manuscripts of novels that had been submitted for a prize I’d been asked to judge.  The manuscripts had all been submitted anonymously and so I knew nothing about the writers.  And here’s where this second part of the story connects with the first.

After I’d chosen the winning manuscript (a beautiful novel set in Australia during World War II), I learned that its author was named Goldie Goldbloom.  We exchanged some emails.  Goldie knew that I’d graduated from Trinity and had been good friends with Gail.  She told me that she was married to one of Gail Goldbloom’s brothers.  She had six children, including a daughter named Gail.  “What is Gail like?” I asked her.  “Gail loves to dance and skate,” she said.  “She loves to jump on the bed.”  Goldie said of her daughter, “she’s full of spunk.”

It’s hard to describe how much it meant to hear that somewhere in the Midwest right now, a very spunky Gail Goldbloom is growing up.  When we lost the first Gail in the spring of 1982, it seemed that a beautiful story had ended with an unfair abruptness.  What I’ve been reminded of is that good stories never really end.  They fool us into thinking that we’ve reached a conclusion, but in fact the conclusion is an invitation to imagine new possibilities as we face the uncertainty that is the future.

The amazing professors I worked with at Trinity, including Milla Riggio, Hugh Ogden, Steven Minot, and Thalia Selz, helped me to figure out how to deal with uncertainties.  I know that your professors have done the same.  The world is looking rougher than ever these days, and there will be daunting challenges as you shape your own lives.  But you’ve spent your years at Trinity asking hard questions, overcoming obstacles, and dreaming of the future.  This hasn’t just been busywork to fill the time.  These are abilities you’ve perfected, and now you’re ready to begin the next chapter.