chancellor@ku.edu
This is a special night. KU’s Hawk Week rituals designate this to be a time for special care and feeding for fledgling Jayhawks. As you begin your university career, we want to map out what is ahead of you. However, universities are complex places. Sometimes it is hard to keep things straight.
For example, you have already learned that KU has many traditions, ritual moments designed to help you track your way through KU from this opening enrollment of August 2007 to graduation in May 2011. You have been given T-shirts which say “Class of 2011,” meaning, in 2011 you will walk down Campanile Hill, enter the football stadium and celebrate your graduation with 30,000 or so of your intimate friends and family. It might be a good idea to begin praying that it will be cooler in 2011 than it was in 2007. We know KU is a hot campus, but this is ridiculous.
I stress the coupling of tonight’s convocation of beginning with the graduation ceremony of 2011 because it is easy to get confused. There are really two classes of 2007. There is the class entering in 2007 (you), usually called the graduating class of 2011. But just three months ago, the graduating class of 2007 had their walk down the hill. They started in 2003.
Is everyone following?
A time honored part of these matching ceremonies is that the chancellor gives a welcoming speech to the new students each fall and each spring a departing speech to grizzled Jayhawk veterans of four years of a KU education. The two occasions are closely coupled in time, only three months apart, and the chancellor is supposed to offer words of wisdom on both occasions to both classes.
I sometimes wonder what your graduating colleagues might really say if they were invited to offer you their 2007 words of wisdom. It could be many things, such as ask your mother not to call your cell phone on Friday night or on any weekday prior to noon. Also, do not give her the Wheel’s phone number as an emergency number. Remember that a false I.D. can get you arrested. Don’t choose a roommate who both buys firecrackers and smokes. Be ready to explain how the person claiming to be you on Facebook is obviously an imposter.
This year, in thinking about these matching speeches only three months apart, I realized that I could share that 2007 graduation experience with you and give you a sense of what awaits you. Why not simply tell you what three months ago I told your graduating colleagues? They are Jayhawks, the same as you, only four years older, and veterans of many more personal crises than you have faced.
So that is what I am going to do tonight. I’m going to share with you what I told KU’s graduating class of 2007 three months ago. It might surprise you how relevant the two ceremonies are to each other.
Before beginning, I must offer apologies to some of my faculty colleagues who attended the class of 2007 commencement in May. They may have heard these thoughts before. But then again, maybe they haven’t. May 20th was a warm spring day and it may have set minds to wandering. I am always startled at what people claim they heard at last spring’s graduation speech.
The graduating class of 2007, designated as the entering class of 2003, and you, the entering class of 2007, meaning the graduating class of 2011, are yoked together in Jayhawk history. Are you tracking? Whether you are graduating or enrolling, you identify yourself today as one who has both chosen, and earned, a life-long identity as a University of Kansas student.
What does this mean?
It means that for the rest of your life, you are someone willing to explain to hotel registration clerks across the world, that “No, that bird with the yellow beak on my credit card is not a cute little chicken. It is a glorious and proud mythical bird called a Jayhawk. Be forewarned, it has the potential to soar.”
It is worth dwelling for a moment on this Jayhawk identity. It is clear cut and unambiguous. After this evening, you are a Jayhawk; know how unique this makes you.
Other universities have pondered their chances for such a clear and unequivocal identity for their graduates, but let’s be honest, they have failed. Compare the Jayhawk to other identities. Who are the real wildcats? Do they come from Kentucky, Northwestern, Arizona or could it be some place called Kansas State? You see a Jayhawk you know what you’re dealing with and where it came from. You see a wildcat, they could come from anywhere.
How do you distinguish between a Clemson tiger and a Missouri tiger? The Clemson tiger never heard of Quantrilll’s Raid. What is there about this animal identity? Eleven universities want their students to be known as bear cats, 23 as bears, 14 as bobcats and 12 as broncos. What confusion! How unimaginative. These other universities apparently lack the creativity and innovation that gives you possession of a whole animal called a Jayhawk. Other schools settle for part of a bird, like a hawk’s eye or the mere long horns of a Texas steer, or sometimes only part of a human body, like a heel covered by tar. At least one university celebrates its students for their ability to husk sweet corn.
You get the point.
Jayhawks are unique. They are totally owned and operated by the students, faculty and staff of the University of Kansas. No one will be able to compare you with an animal version because there is no zoological, anatomically correct version of a Jayhawk.
Walking the hills of Mount Oread also means that you have lifetime access to the Jayhawk mutual protection society. You can be in Beijing or Heathrow or Tokyo or Melbourne and if you hear the shout “Rock Chalk,” you immediately reply “Jayhawk.” You do this automatically, before you know if the person reaching out to shake your hand wants to sell you a watch or remember 1988, the year the Jayhawks won the NCAA tournament. Rock Chalk!
This universal Jayhawk identity demonstrates why this walk down the hill that you will take in four years is so important. As we say every year, “The walk is the ceremony.” It is what you will spend four, five or six years preparing for.
A Jayhawk graduation walk empowers you to look both ways at once, looking back at Mount Oread and forward to the world beyond the stadium and the campanile. You can savor the past and your Mount Oread memories, while simultaneously looking to the horizon and the special opportunities you see in your future.
In Roman mythology there was a special god which captured this duality. Janus was the Roman god of beginnings. He was the guardian deity of gates and doors. Artistically Janus is represented with two opposite facing heads, placed back to back so Janus could look in two directions at once: one side looking forward, the other side looking back. That is what we do tonight. You prepare for the future. In a few years you will be graduating and remembering a Jayhawk experience.
Both enrollment and graduation are Janus intersections in your life. You are going forward, but you know that you did not arrive at this gate on your own. No one gets to KU by themselves. As you know well, parents, family, friends and teachers all walk with you.
You know the investments that have been made in you. Your family has cared about you to a greater extent than you fully realize. Honor their commitment. Be true to their hopes for you.
Yes, your mother will keep the cell phone humming and produce some awkward moments with the timing of her call, but she does so because she cares.
Those recently graduated 2007 Jayhawks would tell you, I think, that there is not a faculty conspiracy to keep you here longer than you intended. KU faculty take pride in your achievement, and they will welcome the opportunity to write reference letters about your dedication and intelligence, sliding over that sleepwalking you did in that 8 o’clock English class.
More than anything else, you are fast approaching a jumping off day for Jayhawk flight. Classes begin tomorrow! Be there! Know that you are part of something much bigger than your personal story. 190,000 Jayhawks have preceded you and have shown you how the gates of the future are yours to open.
The best way to think about this jumping off day as a Jayhawk student comes from a popular TV ad which many of you have seen. It is an ad for a Suzuki Vitara.
The commercial opens in the living room of a suburban home with a husband kissing his wife goodbye as he sets off for work. He nonchalantly walks out the front door and down the sidewalk as the camera follows him on his way to work. As he gets to his front gate, the camera dramatically pulls back to reveal him stepping off the edge of a cliff in a free-falling parachute jump, which lands him next to his Suzuki Grand Vitara. He gets in the car and demonstrates its off-road capabilities, zipping around the countryside. The car finally accelerates through an intersection and disappears into the distance. A final voiceover asks, “You want more out of life? We’re giving you the green light. Go.”
As you pass through the gate as green freshmen on the way to a Jayhawk future, take a moment and think about what the future holds for you — both in four years, 2011, when you walk the hill, and tomorrow, 2007, when you begin a great educational experience called the University of Kansas.
Think about it. What will be the future you create? You’ve got the green light. Go Jayhawks, go Class of 2011. Soar!
