Commencement/Baccalaureate/Convocation Address / page 24

Kay Bailey Hutchison
categories: Commencement/Baccalaureate/Convocation Address, Speeches
Commencement Address at Southern Methodist University - May 20, 2000
May 20, 2000
Thank you very much, Dr. Turner. And congratulations to the Class of 2000. Just think how far we have come in the few generations since the Class of 1900 graduates left colleges across Texas and America. One obvious change: This great university—with its 10,000 students, hundreds of staff and faculty—was 600 acres of open prairie in 1900. There was excitement in the air on Sept 22, 1915, when the first one hundred students enrolled at the formal opening of SMU. In fact, the Morning News reported that day that the […]
Marian Wright Edelman
categories: Commencement/Baccalaureate/Convocation Address, Speeches
Commencement Address at Southern Methodist University - May 22, 1993
May 22, 1993
It is a great honor to share this day of accomplishment and celebration and transition with SMU's president and faculty and administration, trustees, the family and friends of the graduates today, with the distinguished honorees. Most importantly, I'm delighted to be here with the best graduating class in the history of SMU. Shortly before he died, my fellow South Carolinian Lee Atwater said the following in a moving essay in Life magazine: "Long before I was struck with cancer, I felt something stirring in American society. It was a sense […]
Gloria Steinem
categories: Commencement/Baccalaureate/Convocation Address, Speeches
Commencement Address at Wellesley College - May 28, 1993
May 28, 1993
I don't know about you, but I am incurably sentimental about commencements. For one thing, they are a time when hopes are set free with so much future before us that hopes can be infinite. For another, all the diverse parts of this community are together -- not just for the last time, but perhaps for the only time. I thank them all for letting me share it: President Nan Keohane, whose leadership will be so missed in the future -- and yet whose impact on her new university, so […]
Gloria Steinem
categories: Commencement/Baccalaureate/Convocation Address, Speeches
Commencement Address at Wellesley College - May 27, 1988
May 27, 1988
I am honored to share this day with all of the Class of 1988, and I will always remember it. On the other hand, you may not remember it at all. To insert a note of realism here, I don't remember one single thing about my commencement speaker, or what she said, or what he said. Instead of one theme that might exclude many people, I'm going to be diverse in the hope of coming up with a sentence or two that might be more useful to more people. Each […]
Laura Bush
categories: Commencement/Baccalaureate/Convocation Address, Speeches
Commencement Address at Southern Methodist University - May 16, 2009
May 16, 2009
Thank you, Dr. Turner, for your kind introduction. Thank you for inviting me—I'm happy to join each of you for this special day. Thank you to the distinguished faculty, members of the Board of Trustees, alumni, parents, and families for your very warm welcome. Most of all, thank you and congratulations to the SMU Class of 2009. Today we celebrate nearly 2,000 graduates from 7 schools and 173 majors—representing all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and 102 foreign countries. We congratulate your parents and families and teachers, […]
Blanche Lambert Lincoln
categories: Commencement/Baccalaureate/Convocation Address, Speeches
Commencement Address at Randolph-Macon Women's College - 2000
May 27, 2000
Good morning and thank you so much. To you graduates, this is a very awesome task that I have. As I stand here before you, but also the faculty, who carefully instructed me as I walked down in the procession that they only remembered my involvement and not my grades. I was very pleased to hear that. But it is a delightful morning, a wonderful morning for me to be here to join you. It is a great honor for me to be here today and it is also with […]
Maya Angelou
categories: Commencement/Baccalaureate/Convocation Address, Speeches
Commencement Address at Smith College - May 17, 1980
May 17, 1980
I am honored that you have asked me to participate with you in such an important rite of passage—your most important rite of passage—and certainly your first as an adult. I am honored because I know that this particular ceremony will furnish you with friends and memories that you will carry through the rest of your lives. You will be influenced later on, you will go on to get another degree and another, and many of you will be honored by kings and presidents—and queens I pray. But this one […]
Marian Wright Edelman
categories: Commencement/Baccalaureate/Convocation Address, Speeches
Commencement Address at Oberlin College - May 25, 2015
May 25, 2015
It is a great honor to share this day of accomplishment, celebration, and transition at this great college with your trustees, President, faculty, families, and most importantly with what I am sure is the best graduating class in Oberlin’s history. Oberlin’s great abolitionist history makes me wonder how much closer America’s dream would be towards becoming America’s reality today if your admissions policies for African American citizens and women had been adopted by other colleges and universities in their beginning years. We are living in a time of unbearable dissonance […]
Gwen Ifill
categories: Commencement/Baccalaureate/Convocation Address, Speeches
Commencement Address at Simmons College - May 15, 2009
May 15, 2009
Thank you. Leave it to Simmons to make me cry just before I have to speak. Both of you – than you and congratulations. I could not be more pleased to be anywhere that I am right here today. I feel such affection for you and I wish you such good things. Sending another class of Simmons graduates off into the sheer terror of the current employment market – it just fills me up. I look at you and I see excitement and anticipation and nervousness and a little bit […]
Condoleezza Rice
categories: Commencement/Baccalaureate/Convocation Address, Speeches
Commencement Address at Southern Methodist University - May 12, 2012
May 12, 2012
Thank you very, very much. Thank you, President Turner, for that wonderful introduction. Thank you to the chairman of your Board of Trustees, Caren Prothro, and to the faculty. Thank you for what you have done to prepare these young people for what lies ahead. To family and friends, and most especially to the graduates of the class of 2012, congratulations to you. It’s great to be here in Mustang country. It’s wonderful to be back in Dallas and to join you for this splendid ceremony. I do know that […]