We hosted opening convocation yesterday, welcoming 624 new students and their families to Susquehanna. Below is the message I shared with them.
Convocation Remarks
Convocation means to be called together – from vocare meaning voice. We are called together to signal your entry into the life of this university and to celebrate the beginning of your matriculation. It is an opportunity to declare a new beginning for all of us, to be drawn together with one voice to affirm what we are called to do.
Students you are beginning an extraordinary chapter in your lives, but in addition to your excitement, I know you are experiencing cognitive overload. This is a moment in your lives when you are likely experiencing the most concurrent change: a new community; a new role; soon to be new classmates, neighbors, and friends; will they like you, will you like them; a new academic experience with a different kind of faculty (you’ll soon discover how great they are) and a different set of academic responsibilities. For most of you, for the first time, home has just become a place different from where your family lives.
You are all hitting your limits of newness. You are probably also reaching your thresholds for the unfamiliar and different, and here I am in a pink velvet robe acting as if you will remember anything I say to you today.
In addition to formally welcoming you and signaling the beginning of Susquehanna’s 165th academic year, I believe that this is an important occasion to affirm why you are here and to give you some basic, but critical advice on how to make the most of your college experience.
As many of you already know, Susquehanna’s mission statement is: We educate students for productive, creative, and reflective lives of achievement, leadership, and service in a diverse, dynamic, and interdependent world.
More succinctly, we help students to become better neighbors and better citizens. We are here to help you discover your best selves and to prepare you to live your lives most fully. Those are lofty goals, but I have the privilege seeing them fulfilled every day. The greatest rewards are reaped by the students who dive in deepest and are most present.
Every spring, seniors lament that their four years went by much too fast, and they scramble to make every possible remaining connection.
Life goes by faster and faster, and your college years especially will go by in the blink of an eye. It is an experience much like how almost 1300 years ago, the Venerable Bede described the passing of our lives in the kingdom of God. He wrote:
The present life of people here on earth (as a comparison to our uncertain lifetimes) is like a sparrow entering the house, and flying through swiftly, it enters one window and straightway flies out another, while we sit at dinner in wintertime…the room made warm by the fire kindled in our midst while all places outside are troubled by the raging tempests of winter rain and snow. For that moment, the sparrow feels not the winter storm, but after a brief moment in passes again from winter to winter and escapes our sight. So, our lives appear here for a brief season, and what precedes and follows we surely know not. [1]
You have the wonderful privilege to savor the comfort and luxury of that metaphorical warm banquet room. My fear is that you will miss out on truly life-changing relationships because of your own fear of missing out on superficial virtual engagements. You are all vastly interesting people, which means you are surrounded by vastly interesting people. You are in a beautiful place brimming over with opportunities. Put down your phones and revel in being here with each other. Dive in and make the most of your time here, because we need you to be enlightened and able leaders prepared and eager to steer our weary world to better times.
We are here because deeply engaging in the life of the mind and opening ourselves up to the holistic world view that is the core of a liberal arts education prepare us to make good and often difficult decisions.
Each of us hopes to seek the truth, and we find our calling, our vocation in advancing what we believe to be in our own, and hopefully our collective best interest. This is what it means to have a life well lived.
This is why you are here. This is why we are all here.
The faculty and staff at Susquehanna are here because they share a commitment not to tell you what to think, but they will prepare you to discern what is true, what is good, and what is just.
They will prepare you to figure out what matters and why, and more importantly, they will help you to develop the skills to be advocates for the causes that become your passions.
As a living learning community, we must always strive to be better. We must commit to being a community where all members feel welcome, respected, loved, and able to flourish.
This is what we are called to do. This is our one voice, our vocare.
We must be an example for our neighbors. This is what is means to achieve, lead, and serve. This is what it means to be Susquehannans.
At the laying of the cornerstone of Selinsgrove Hall in 1858, which was the founding of this great university, Joseph Casey stated, “Education, in its legitimate sense, includes not only the cultivation of the mental powers, but the proper training and development of the moral sentiments and faculties, and its true object is to ‘make us not only wiser but better…’”[2]
Today, I invite you to your graduation in May of 2026. Each year, I give this charge to the graduates. Today, I challenge you to commit to doing all you can during your time at Susquehanna to meet this charge to your fullest.
Achieve all you can for good,
Lead with honor and humility,
Serve with love and pride,
And always strive to be not only wiser, but better.
Welcome home!
[1] Adapted from Bede: Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, translated by J.E. King, 283-285. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press—Loeb Classical Library, 1930
[2] Joseph Casey, Esq.: “Remarks delivered at the laying of the corner-stone of the Missionary Institute at Selin’s Grove, PA, September 1, 1858.”
