The Bates Class of 2024, whose college experience reflected great tests and greater perseverance, heard three pieces of life advice from one of the nation’s foremost journalists at Commencement this morning: Be wary of when success becomes a non-stop treadmill, remember much of life depends on what we choose to see, and hold tight to those lifelong friendships forged at Bates.
“The friendships you have made at Bates — the real ones — will matter to you,” said Mary Louise Kelly, host of NPR’s evening news program All Things Considered, in her Commencement address. “They will enrich your life for all the years ahead. Cherish them. Fight for them.”
Complete 2024 Bates Commencement Video
- Welcome by President Garry W. Jenkins: 52:30
- Senior Address by Yun Zhang: 1:09
- Presentation of Honorands: 1:19
- Commencement Address by Mary Louise Kelly: 1:31
- Conferral of Baccalaureate Degrees: 1:48:30
At today’s 158th Bates Commencement on the Historic Quad, 437 members of the Class of 2024 took the iconic walk across the Coram Library stage to accept congratulations and diplomas from President Garry W. Jenkins in his first Commencement since taking the helm on July 1, 2023.
Kelly received an honorary degree along with two other honorands. Poet Richard Blanco, who served as the presidential poet at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration, received a Doctor of Letters degree along with Kelly, and President Emerita Clayton Spencer received a Doctor of Humane Letters degree.
The Class of 2024 represented 36 states and the District of Columbia and 19 countries, including 51 students who were the first in their family to graduate from college. As many as 48 percent of the graduating class studied abroad and 43 percent participated in varsity sports — big numbers that were proudly shared by Jenkins as he welcomed the class.
“The Bates Class of 2024 has been tested, and they have persevered. And in so doing, they have found joy and strength in one another, in connections, in relationships.”
President Garry W. Jenkins
“All of this you have achieved while giving back, especially here in Lewiston, giving thousands of hours to community-engaged learning and research, volunteering, community work-study, and other forms of informed civic action,” Jenkins said.
The newly inaugurated president greeted the graduating class by noting how their time at Bates was bookended by the COVID-19 pandemic during their first year and the horrific Oct. 25 mass shooting in Lewiston — yet the challenges in these unsettling events made them stronger.
“The Bates Class of 2024 has been tested, and they have persevered,” Jenkins said. “They have taken on everything that has come their way and they also have thought deeply about their personal relationships to local, national, and global events. And in so doing, they have found joy and strength in one another, in connections, in relationships.”
Jenkins praised the seniors in how they “turned outward, not inward,” and demonstrated grit. And Jenkins added: “I love grit.”
He called it a “secret, powerful weapon,” and, in fact, a critical piece to success.
“To discover the undiscovered or produce something of beauty, you have to have grit. It takes grit to remove stubborn institutional and structural barriers that undermine equality and belonging,” Jenkins said “I want professionals with a relentless push for improvement and excellence and the ability to find the means to transcend the inevitable roadblocks that one encounters in life and inside organizations. All of that takes grit.”
“Stay committed to a lifetime of learning, stay healthy, and tend to your well-being. Stay engaged in the issues that matter to you most.”
President Garry W. Jenkins
Jenkins suggested the Class of 2024 lean into their steely grit and think of it as a muscle, something that can be strengthened. Use it, he advised, to get back up after getting knocked down, to make the best of a less-than-ideal situation — to persevere.
Then he reminded them: “You are forever a part of the Bates community, and Bates is forever a part of you.”
“Each of you has the capacity to contribute to organizations, communities, disciplines, and industries. And to do that, stay on your path — the one that’s right for you, not someone else,” Jenkins advised. “Stay committed to a lifetime of learning, stay healthy, and tend to your well-being. Stay engaged in the issues that matter to you most.”
Kelly was described in her Doctor of Letters degree citation as having “provided the highest degree of service as an award-winning journalist: seeking authenticity over artifice, sharing well-researched facts, and informing the public about the forces at work in our society and their impact on our lives.”
As she took the lectern for her address, Kelly enthusiastically said she now considers herself “a Bates alum from here on out.” She also spoke about responsibility, how in a democracy that protects free speech and a free press and offers rights and freedoms, citizens are obligated to educate themselves on history, geography, literature, and art, and to stay informed about world and national events.
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, did on Commencement on May 26, 2024. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)
Only from shared facts can productive discussion flow, she said. “I believe we are capable of celebrating strong and honest differences of opinion even as we respect a common set of facts. And I congratulate you here at Bates for finding ways to do that.”
In doing so, she said, that knowledge equips us with the ability to celebrate “strong and honest differences of opinion even as we respect a common set of facts.” With that, Kelly pivoted to the advice she brought Sunday for the graduates, and shared it through three personal stories.
The first was about the college-visit trip she took with her oldest son, James, to the University of Chicago, where her son noted how the acceptance rate of the students applying to the nation’s top 15 law schools is a whopping 83 to 93 percent.
Kelly said that made her think about the rat wheel of success her son already saw himself on: good college, then good grad school, and so on. She said that she wanted to whisper to her son: “Just enjoy this moment. This one. Stop thinking about the next step and the one after that.’”
Kelly advised the graduates to consider, instead, the perspective offered by author George Saunders, who wrote: “Success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it. There is the very real danger that succeeding will take up your whole life while the big questions go untended.”
“Success can be like a treadmill,” Kelly said. “It can obscure the actual living of life. Try not to let it.”
Her second piece of advice also came from her experience as a parent, from the time she took an extended leave from NPR to help her other son, Alexander, when he had speech delay in early childhood. But when Kelly ran into a fellow journalist one day on the way to the park, the encounter made her question her choice. The successful colleague also had just had a child, but chose, instead, to return to work.
However, years later, the woman told Kelly that on that day, she regretted her choice of returning to work, and saw Kelly as a radiant, happy mom who made the right choice to be at home with her son. It made Kelly realize: Too often we see only our shortcomings. We beat ourselves up.
Instead, Kelly told her audience, we should choose to see something else about ourselves. “So much of life depends on what we choose to see,” Kelly said, and then shared with the Class of 2024 her last bit of wisdom: Guard the friendships that are dear to them. “Hold on to the friendships you have made these last four years.”
She shared how her own college friends are part of a tight group of loyal, supportive girlfriends dubbed “the Forces of Nature.”
“Today we live all over the country. But we gather, in person, all of us, at least once a year,” Kelly said. “These women’s faces, their voices are as familiar to me as my own. We were the maids of honor at each other’s weddings. We are godmothers to each other’s children. These women would drop everything and get on a plane to help me if I needed them to. And I know this — because they have done it.”
For senior speaker Yun Zhang of Anhui, China, it was a good Samaritan at the Walmart in Auburn who provided a great example of the reverberating power of kindness, community, and generosity.
“As Lewiston embraced me with its unexpected warmth, I realized that these moments of kindness are the true essence of community, transforming an unfamiliar place into a haven of belonging.”
Senior Speaker Yun Zhang of Anhui, China
Zhang shared the story of how last Thanksgiving, which she spent alone as an international student 7,500 miles from her hometown, she decided to find strength in making a feast for one. But when her credit card momentarily wouldn’t work at Walmart and a woman stepped to the register and “offered to cover the gap,” Zhang realized from this simple act of kindness that she was not alone.
“As Lewiston embraced me with its unexpected warmth, I realized that these moments of kindness are the true essence of community, transforming an unfamiliar place into a haven of belonging,” Zhang said.
As did Jenkins, Zhang referenced the dark nights following the Oct. 25 shootings — and echoed the president’s assertion that Bates came through the fear and uncertainty of those subsequent dark days ever closer. The experience, Zhang said, proved they were “a community undeterred, united in the conviction that together, we could weather any storm and stay — Lewiston Strong.”
To which the audience stretched across the Historic Quad erupted in a rousing round of applause.
That horrific tragedy, Zhang continued, lent a larger, lasting lesson.
“Bates taught us that caring for the community means engaging with the world at large, with communities rooted in differences yet bound by the shared human experience,” Zhang said. “Our journey from the gates of Bates into the vast expanse of the world is a transition from one form of community to another, with the mission to spread the ethos of understanding, support, and unity that Bates has so deeply ingrained in us.”
The honorary degree citations for Kelly, Richard Blanco, and Clayton Spencer were offered by Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.
Blanco, whose poetry has won a number of prestigious awards, including the 2021 National Humanities Medal, emerged from his undergraduate experience initially as an engineer. He was introduced by Hill as an expansive example of possibility.
“For all those in the audience who graduate as dance majors planning to go to medical school, or religion and physics double majors — for anyone who has embraced the myriad ways of knowing the world that the liberal arts present — we offer you our first honorand: the poet engineer,” said Hill.
Blanco read the poem “One Today” at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration, becoming the youngest and the first gay and Latino poet to read his work at a U.S. presidential inauguration. “His poem celebrated unity amid discord and commonality amid difference,” said Hill, who noted that Blanco’s “central theme is the idea of home. Sometimes, he says, the poem — the art itself — is the home.”
Spencer, who served as president of Bates from 2012 to 2023, is perhaps “best remembered for her frequent exhortation, borrowed from the poet E.E. Cummings, to have the ‘courage to grow up and become who you really are,'” said Hill.
That advice became the nationally recognized initiative of Purposeful Work that reflected the obligation of Bates to “prepare our students for [lives] of purposeful work,” to encourage students to “wrestle actively and joyously with the world as we encounter it,” and to “model this mindset for our students as they work to construct their own lives.”
Over the years, this philosophy was nurtured and refined, becoming the driving force behind the Center for Purposeful Work, an initiative that engaged 98 percent of students and has been honored and imitated nationwide.
Following the conferral of degrees, Kevin Moore ‘93 of Hanover, Mass., president of the Bates College Alumni Association, welcomed the graduating class into the association. “You are joining a community of 24,000 engaged, dynamic, and accomplished Bobcats who are embodying our motto of ‘ardor and devotion’ around the world,” Moore said.
“You are strong navigators. You know how to appreciate challenges and wonder at wonder. You have everything you need when you lean on each other. You hold onto hope with every step. Blessings for the next trail that awaits you.”
The Rev. Brittany Longsdorf
In a new element to the graduation, Jenkins returned to the lectern to offer his charge to the graduates. “I leave you with this,” he said. “It’s a short phrase that is both my charge to you as your president and also my wish for you as someone who has grown very fond of this class: Please go out into the world and ‘do well and do good.’”
The ceremony ended with longstanding tradition, the benediction from the Rev. Brittany Longsdorf, multifaith chaplain, who used the metaphor of a determined mountain climber to describe the path the Class of 2024 took through Bates to the summit of graduation, closing with these words:
You have found yourself, almost suddenly,
at the same summit reached by thousands of Batesies before you.
Though your trail has been markedly different, you, dear graduates, with resilience have blazed something new and wondrous.
May we breathe in the expansive beauty of this moment — looking ahead to the majestic horizon before us, where something new awaits, and looking back at the trail magic of good faculty, caring staff, loving families who sustained you along the way.
You are strong navigators. You know how to appreciate challenges and wonder at wonder. You have everything you need when you lean on each other. You hold onto hope with every step.
Blessings for the next trail that awaits you.
