chancellor@ku.edu
Since 1924, the year this stadium was built, KU has been inviting graduates to walk Down the Hill to celebrate graduation.
And all that time, it's been pretty much the same. In fact, if you brought back a graduate of 1924 to commencement today he or she would easily recognize it. Students in gowns and mortarboards processing down the Hill. Happy. Thinking about the future. Families looking on. Happy, thinking about the money they will save.
It is the most time-honored and well-observed tradition at Kansas University. But why are we so captured by this walk down the hill, this old ceremony, this traditional ritual of the KU tribe? We know the academic gown and mortarboard go back to the beginning of the university in Medieval times, so we know there is a connection to academic history. But every school has caps and gowns and hoods, academic regalia. Only KU has the walk.
I say it every year, the walk is the ceremony. And we don't just walk down the hill, we walk down the hill the same way each year.
A. We gather on Memorial Drive.
B. We wait for the signal to move forward.
C. We surge through the Campanile.
D. We process down the hill through a friendly corridor of friends and family and spectators.
E. We enter the stadium.
F. We march through the faculty, without them, some of you might have
walked down the hill sooner.
G. We find our seats.
H. We listen to the commencement speaker, praying for a short speech.
Occasionally, there have been surprises. One year Gov. John Carlin, in the face of a visibly approaching thunderstorm, got the speech length just right. He stood up, announced that everyone was a graduate and led the crowd in an evacuation.
We also added some new stops in the walk over the years. The blue plastic trashcans, for the deposit of beverage containers, were placed at the bottom of the hill just a few years ago. They have had, shall we say, a positive sobering effect on the festivities.
It's not like we've never experimented with something different. In 1996, to shorten the length of the ceremony, we tried to direct students around the Campanile, rather than through it. This would not seem to qualify as a revolutionary change, or at least it didn't seem so to university efficiency experts. Yet the resistance was powerful. It became a hilarious debacle. The Marshals who tried to block the Campanile entrance were gently, but firmly, pushed aside.
This was an interesting episode in the history of the walk. Apparently we did not know about the superstition that said a student should not go through the Campanile while studying for a degree. You should wait until graduation to go through. If you violated the Campanile's internal space, you never graduate. Marching through the Campanile is a right you have earned.
So the university's attempt to make a change for efficiency ran head on into a Jayhawk tribal superstition. The tribe won.
Other changes have been proposed. This year UDK columnist Ben Tater (who is graduating today‹where are you Ben?) made a suggestion for change in his final column of the year by publicly offering the Chancellor, "a list of possible graduation speakers other than the Chancellor and the Provost." I asked Ben for that list, and it isn't bad: Roy Williams, Carrot Top or Tom Green. His most inspired suggestion was Don Kearns, the Director of KU Parking. According to Ben, Mr. Kearns should speak on the subject, "Who wants to be a millionaire?"
Why in the world do KU graduates want to walk down the hill? I asked students this question and I got some interesting answers: Amy Bettis said, "It is the closing of one part of my life and the beginning of another."
Ryan Butts called the walk "a sense of closure." When I asked E.J. Reedy why we walked down the hill, he responded, "Because it's easier than rolling down the hill." E.J. is a smart aleck.
Brandon Haberman said he walked the hill for his parents.
Lawralin Evanhoe said, "I am a scientist. It is the most direct route from the Campanile to the stadium."
Holly Krebs called the walk a "rite of passage."
Most responses I got were like Holly's. Students feel something deeply satisfying about the walk down the hill. It is deeply satisfying to know we do what others have done before. There is something reassuring in knowing that Jayhawks have always marked this change in their lives by taking the walk.
So where does that leave us? Anthropologists studying primitive cultures look precisely for this kind of value-laden, repeated, behavioral ritual. They say the values of a culture are embedded in such ceremonies.
If that is so, then what are the values we express in our walk? This ceremony connects us to the history of knowledge. By wearing academic regalia we honor all that has been discovered, taught and learned over thousands of years. We symbolically say, we believe universities and their learning are good for human society, indispensable to a better future, and we are proud to demonstrate that value.
This walk also expresses another value. It connects us to our families‹our personal past, present and future. Our families are the source of the personal values that will stay with us all our lives. No one walks this hill alone. Stephanie McCabe today walked down the hill with her five-week old daughter, Cavin. Henry Bloch walked the hill with his grandson, Brian.
I believe that the spirit and memory of Shannon Martin walks with us today as well.
As Amy Bettis put it, "I am walking the hill, to be with those friends I found along the way and the family that never left my side."
I can relate to that. Our son, Matt, walked the hill today. I know this will change his life. Matt, we will miss you as you go off to your Ph.D. program. We may even learn to miss the sound of the refrigerator door waking us up at 3:00 in the morning.
To sum up, this commencement ceremony formally acknowledges your rite of passage into a special tribe called the Jayhawks.
The problem is that you can't use the word "tribe" in this day of survivor TV shows, without thinking about winning or losing, thinking about who stays in the tribe and who gets thrown out. If you manipulate long enough, with sufficient cunning, these shows say, you can walk away with a million dollars.
In the end, maybe that's the best way to understand walking down the hill. You are walking away from Mt. Oread, not with a million dollars, but with something pretty valuable, a University of Kansas degree.
It may be worth a million over your lifetime, but it will only be valuable to you if you use it to help others as well as help yourself.
So look at it this way, "The KU Tribal Council Has Spoken." Everyone who walks down the hill is a winner. No one leaves this tribe. It just gets bigger and more powerful every year.
Congratulations, Jayhawks. Godspeed.
