Graduations

Two of my three daughters graduated this May. One got her Bachelors from Hofstra and the other her J.D. from Seton Hall Law. It’s funny how my expenses don’t seem to have gone down any though. As a matter of fact, they may have gone up, as I had to stake the job hunting Hofstra grad to a car.

That’s not what I want to talk about though. I want to talk about the graduations themselves.

The Hofstra commencement was held in the football stadium. Luckily the rain stopped before things got underway and we ended up with a fairly pleasant sunny day. The speaker was Eileen Futter, President of the Museum of Natural History, but Senator Charles Schumer of New York also showed to speak although he wasn’t on the program. I guess you don’t turn down a U.S. Senator.

Schumer’s speech was a well worn entertaining piece of fluff that he was apparently giving at commencements around the state. I suspect this because a couple in back of us was predicting what he would say based upon his appearance the day before at a SUNY school commencement. Futter was more to the point, and focused upon changes the graduates could expect to see over their lifetime, such as the changes the current generation has seen. The graduates pretty much ignored most of what was occurring on the podium.

After the speeches we got some 2,000 graduate names run off as each kid got the opportunity to walk across the platform. The only organization was in the school of graduation which didn’t do me much good as my daughter graduated from the school of Liberal Arts (duh!). Hofstra did have an interesting process however, since the kids were coming up in totally random order, each handed the announcer his or her name on a card, which was read off as the graduate moved on to shake hands with the President of the College, and Dean of the School from which they graduated. The poor college president looked like his arm was going to fall off by the time he was done. The kids got nothing as their final grades weren’t even in so it’s possible that some of them didn’t actually graduate.

The Seton Hall Law graduation was held in the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) in Newark. The featured dignitary and speaker was Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito but the Archbishop of Newark was there to read the invocation and there was also a 3rd U.S. Circuit judge to introduce Alito.

I expected stuffy from Seton Hall, especially with a statue of Mother Seton keeping an eye on the whole process, but instead got some rock music as well as a student band, also doing rock, as part of the ceremony. While it sort of seemed a little out of phase, given all the caps and gowns, it certainly made the whole thing a bit more lively.

Alito’s commencement speech, I thought, was pretty good. He started with a joke about finally making it to the stage of the NJPAC and thus providing his mother some return on ten years of piano lessons. He followed that up with an observation that only a lawyer could make such a statement as, while it was completely accurate, it was also totally misleading.

The main part of his speech revolved around how one could apply the lessons of the U.S. Constitution to ones personal life and career. While it’s dangerous to read much into a commencement speech, Alito did focus on two interesting points. The first was the principle of Stare Decisis which he defined as the necessity to recognize, and respect, previous rulings even if one doesn’t agree with them personally. Something that might fit this category for Alito would be Roe v. Wade. Maybe Sam can’t be relied upon to overturn a woman’s right to choose?

The other focus was on Freedom of Religion. He expressed support for the Constitution’s prohibition against a religious qualification for public office, (no big surprise there), and support for the separation of church and state where he specifically called out the choice NOT to have a religion as equivalent to Freedom of Religion. I felt a lot better about the future of the Republic after listening to Alito’s speech.

While Schumer left right after speaking and avoided the seemingly endless parade of graduates, Alito was there for the entire exercise. He marched in with the faculty at the beginning and marched out with them at the end.

The role call at Seton Hall was in alphabetical order and each graduate got his actual diploma on the stage. During the role call of graduates, Alito took a photo, along with the law school dean, with each and every graduate. I have to admit that impressed me. Here’s a man who has lots of very important things to do, and would probably like to spend any free time he can scrounge up with his family or doing things for himself, yet he stayed through the whole deal.

A while back I started to ask where have all the heroes gone? Where are the John Kennedy’s, the Robert Kennedy’s, the Martin Luther Kings, the Muhammed Ali’s and the Malcom X’s of this generation? Perhaps I was seeing one of them at the NJPAC the other day.