A character in some obscure British film I watched once said something that really stuck with me: the best way to forget something, he said, is to commemorate it.
What does it mean to go out into the world with the experiences of four years at Amherst — and what does it mean to hold an Amherst degree? Graduation should be a time where that question presses against us with all its weight and force; where the implications of that question burn within us with constant, raw, energy. Graduation is a time where the meaning of our place in the world must unsettle us — not just personally, but collectively, as a graduating class, as a body of students representative of Amherst and its supposed values. Graduation is a time to ask ourselves what these four years have meant to us, how they have changed us, broken us, questioned us and made us question Amherst; how much our education may have coopted us in structures of power, and how much it has enabled us to challenge these structures when we face “the real world.” (And what does that mean, too? Why is Amherst unreal, isolated, distant? Why is it that our education and experiences here must count for nothing except a degree credential and a leg up to the capitalist job network?)
Yet, too often, we let the institution answer this question for us — we let these answers be foreclosed, predetermined. What does graduation from Amherst mean? Easy. We’re all in this together. Best four years of our lives. Lives of consequences, investment banking jobs, the ability to talk about Plato over drinks in a meeting with a client or at a dinner party, to rave about your “diverse” classmates and “free curriculum,” terras irradiant. We’ve won. We did it.