James F. Jones, Jr. Convocation Address Trinity College August 30, 2007 (print version)

Trinity College in 3D

“They followed Professor McGonagall across the flagged stone floor.  Harry could hear the drone of hundreds of voices from a doorway to the right—the rest of the school must already be here—but Professor McGonagall showed the first years into a small, empty chamber off the hall.  They crowded in, standing rather closer together than they would usually have done, peering about nervously” (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, 1997, pp. 113-114).

            Thus begins the story of Harry Potter’s remarkable life at Hogwarts.

            And today, each of you in the Class of 2011 begins to write your own Trinity story, and we are here to congratulate you and to welcome you to what lies before you on this historic milestone in your respective lives.  I hope the rest of you in the audience today will allow me to direct my remarks primarily to the newest members of our College community; this moment, after all, is theirs.  The members of the Class of 2011 have finally arrived at this signal moment of their lives:  the beginning of their College education.

Beginnings of school years have always been privileged moments for all of us who love schools, who love the very idea of schools, the majesty of our Quad, the smell of books in the Raether Library, the life-long camaraderie that speaks to the best in all of us. Truth be told, the first day of the school year each fall has been my most favorite day since I wandered into kindergarten another lifetime ago.  There is something wondrous about that first day of school each fall.  And while those of us blessed to serve on the faculty and staff of Trinity get older every year, there is still something magical when we encounter these eager eighteen-year-olds, fresh out of high school, adrenalin flowing, in J.K. Rowling’s turn-of-phrase, as the newest “crowded in, standing rather closer together than they would usually have done, peering about nervously.”

This is a far, far more important moment in your lives than you now realize.  You are here, as summer wanes, sitting in this beautiful quadrangle this warm afternoon with your class flag waving from the flagpole.  You are going to be sitting here in a scant four years’ time, your class flag flying from the flagpole again, at your Commencement in May of 2011, which is not really much farther off than next week or so, trying to figure out where your four undergraduate years have gone.  A couple of years back, one of our graduating seniors sent me an e-mail the day before her Commencement that read simply, “Please don’t make me leave.” You see: she had suddenly realized that four years had sped by, having disappeared somewhere, wherever it is that past times flee at such a steady pace.  When I said something to her about her e-mail on Commencement morning, she replied simply, “I just did not see it coming, that I would have to leave Trinity so soon.”  And she had been here for the previous four years.

Trinity is all about tradition: the tradition of the liberal arts college, “distinctively American,” as an edition of Daedelus once called us some years ago, about the traditions of Convocation, Matriculation, the Long Walk behind you undergoing a massive renovation project that will dazzle us all when completed, about that most intricate of traditions between the faculty member and the student.  I think most of us believe at root that there is something sacred about schools, about the imparting of learning from one generation to a younger generation, and I think of that primordial fact each fall as I labor over this annual address:  that there is something truly sacred about schools.  The very notion of convocation harkens back to the earliest days of the academy in Western Civilization, when the entering scholars would gather in front of their bishop in the great cathedral schools of Oxford, Paris, and Bologna, as far back as the thirteenth century in medieval Europe.  The academic robes worn by the faculty on ceremonial occasions such as Convocation, Matriculation, and Commencement here at Trinity find their ancestors in the clerical vestments worn by our faculty forebears in times medieval.  And we even have our own Bishop, standing authoritatively behind me facing the Class of 2011, Bishop Brownell, who founded Trinity and who served as our first president.  You might do as I sometimes do when faced with a particularly difficult matter and come out here alone, in the quiet, to commune with his spirit.  A very wise and visionary fellow indeed, our Bishop Brownell.

            A few months ago, there was an intriguing article in The New York Times (May 22, 2007, pp. E1, E8) about 3-D movies coming back into fashion.  Those of us of a certain age will surely recall “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” which one could watch in the mid-1950s only by putting on those bizarre looking plastic glasses that enabled one to see the images on the movie theater screen.  Without the glasses, the picture was too blurred to make any visual sense whatsoever.  According to The Times article, now even Bono and the other members of U2 have ventured out into 3D land with “U2 3D.”  Now, I’ll bet that you did not imagine that Professor Dumbledore and I even know who Bono and U2 are.  To show a bit of pertinent Trinity trivia, in 1983, U2 was the spring weekend band!  We all should have bought shares in their future I suppose, had we only known how famous the band would become.

            I wish that, with Harry Potter’s magic wand, I could all at once provide each of the members of the Class of 2011 with a pair of special 3D glasses, but I have not found Ollivander’s Wand Shop in Diagon Alley just yet.  If I could, I would take you through Trinity’s history so that each one of you could have a clear idea of the traditions you yourselves are following today, the Trinity stories that you are going to both write and live out, not just for the next four years but also for the rest of your lives.  I have always thought that there were two significant learning periods in one’s life: from birth to five years of age as a child’s universe expands exponentially day to day and even, according to child experts, from hour to hour, and the corresponding period of evolution, from eighteen to twenty-two, those critically transformative years when universes once again expand exponentially for those fortunate young women and men who have the distinct privilege of attending a school such as Trinity.  Your Trinity stories of your own transformations are now beginning as you sit here at your opening Convocation, more so than you could conceivably imagine at this moment on this historic and beautiful Quad.

            With your 3D glasses on, you would see Bishop Brownell work steadfastly to find the financial backing for his new College, back in the early years of the nineteenth century, which he envisioned on the hill where the state capital is now in downtown Hartford.  You would see legendary teachers transform countless lives, the predecessors of our faculty who could teach and do their scholarly research anywhere in the country but who have chosen to spend their adult lives here on this campus.  With your 3D glasses, you would see the trustees in the late 1860s send the distinguished British architect William Burges a letter, across the Atlantic by sailing ship, asking if he would design a new campus for Trinity when the decision to move to our present location was made.  Burges never once set foot in America, let alone Connecticut.  I have always wanted to show Burges the fruits of his extraordinary vision for Trinity.  The fruits of his vision are right behind the Class of 2011—the Long Walk, one of the finest examples of academic gothic architecture in the United States.  With your 3D glasses on, you would see some contractor in the early 1870s, charged with the construction of Burges’s Long Walk buildings, Jarvis and Seabury, move the cornerstone of Brownell Hall, the central building of the College’s first campus, and bury the historic cornerstone beneath the undercroft of what is now the Fuller Arch, right behind where you are sitting this very moment.  That cornerstone was lost for nearly one-hundred and forty years, only to be discovered a few weeks ago during the renovation of the basement areas, as if Jarvis and Seabury had grown out of Brownell Hall on Trinity’s first campus, which of course metaphorically they indeed had.  Finding that cornerstone this summer, buried under the buildings on the Long Walk, was one of the truly wonderful discoveries in our College’s history, and in due course, the cornerstone to Brownell Hall will take pride of place along a sight line from the good Bishop behind me across the Roosevelt plaque on the Long Walk and the center of the Fuller Arch.

            With your 3D glasses, you would see all those who have contributed their generosity of funds to this place, the wealthy and the powerful over the course of the past 184 years.  You would also see the Italian stonemasons who labored for years without any salary at the worst of the Depression in the 1930s, when the College had run out of money and when William Mather, the original donor, had gone bankrupt, to complete our stunning Chapel.  Tomorrow, in good Trinity tradition, we will hold our Matriculation Ceremony there, and in another of Trinity’s traditions, I will have the privilege of greeting each of you individually all day Saturday as you come to sign the Book of Matriculation, where thousands of Trinity alumni have preceded you.  And with your 3D glasses, you would see the nearly twenty thousand alumni who form one of the most successful alumni networks of any college or university in the nation—because the influence evinced by the Trinity alumni in all fields of human endeavor far surpasses the relatively small number of the alumni themselves.

            For all of us, being at Trinity is a privilege.  Those of you in the Class of 2011 have been chosen by the “sorting hat” that is Dean of Admissions Dow and his colleagues out of the largest number of applicants in Trinity’s long history.  You are the best credentialed class we have ever admitted.  The expectations we all have of you are high indeed, and you cannot let us down.  For if you do, you will first have let yourselves down, more than you might blithely guess at this moment, adrenalin flowing at a fast pace through your veins, as you begin this second most significant period of your young lives.

            Quintilian, arguably the most famous rhetorician of the classical Roman tradition, teaches us in his Institutio Oratoria that each properly crafted address should contain a double.  He follows his master in rhetoric Cicero in this and other essential regards.  I do not know if this particular convocation address is well crafted or not, but I have followed his advice and have employed a double.  So here is my confession.  The 3D in the title of this convocation address refers not only to those strange looking plastic glasses that we need to make any sense of the new film “U2 3D” but also to three very important words: decisions determine destiny, three d’s that will play a far greater role in your next four years than you could conceivably understand as you sit here ’neath the elms on this beautiful Quad.  Trinity has made a critical decision to admit you to this academic village of ours, one that we cherish and one that we endeavor to pass on to those who will follow us as proper stewards of our legacy and history. 

            It is now up to you to see if Trinity’s decision was a proper one.  Today, Trinity becomes your College.  You will be part of this venerable old school for the rest of your lives.  Your own decisions will determine your own destinies here, class after class, day after day, athletic contest after athletic contest, musical performance after musical performance, engagement after engagement with the city of Hartford and our global sites.  Your own decisions will determine what your Trinity destiny will be.

            If you actually had your 3D glasses on, I would now ask you to take them off and get on with it.  The hallmarks of a Trinity education are, tellingly, another set of three simple words: engagement, transformation, leadership, the three words that so characterize the Trinity stories that have been told, are now being told, and will be told, by each one of you in the Class of 2011.

            I have had for more than twenty years now my own, perhaps eccentric, tradition in every one of the Convocation addresses it has been my privilege to give.  Long before you were born, a student in one of my seminars at Washington University wrote the following lines as his final entry in the journal we all kept for the seminar itself, and I have repeated them at the close of each of the Convocation addresses I have been privileged to give because the lines comprise to my mind exactly what is happening right at this very minute, as each of you starts to write and to live your own Trinity story.

  Wrote my young student friend all those years ago now,

                        “Come to the edge,” he said.

                        But they said, “We are afraid.”

                        “Come to the edge,” he said.

                        They came, he pushed them, and

                        They flew.

            Fly high, straight to your life’s goals.  Never take your Trinity blessings for granted.  You have shown that you deserve them by being admitted, and now it is your time to show that our trust in you has been merited.  Listen to your faculty and staff mentors.  Listen to your friends.  Take time to thank your parents before they take their leave of you in a few moments.  Spend some quiet time out here on the Quad with Bishop Brownell’s spirit or with the spirits of the Italian stonemasons whose names are memorialized on the cloister wall of the Chapel when you are pondering some decision, big or small, that will determine your own destiny.  And always treasure those to whom you owe debts forever beyond recompense for who you are today and for who you are going to be tomorrow.

            Now go and write and write and write your own Trinity stories.  Welcome to your College, and good luck.