Welcome
Members of the Faculty, Students, Administrators, Staff, House Fellows, Reverend Speers, Professor Kumar, Vassar Student Association President Ballard, and President Bradley, Good afternoon and welcome to this beautiful chapel. Welcome also to the incredible and record-breaking Class of 2022. And a very special welcome to the transformative class of 2019. I am excited to convene this amazing group of peers, students, staff, and administrators to mark the opening of the academic year.
I am especially excited to be here for the first time in my role as interim Dean of the College. As always, I am most thankful for the people who have made this gathering possible including members of our facilities teams but also Dean Terry Quinn, Professor Leslie Offutt, and Mr. Wesley Dixon for working out the many details that have made today possible.
Most consider convocation an important occasion that marks various beginnings. For first year students it is the beginning of your four years at the College while for our seniors it marks an important beginning to what will arguably be one of the most memorable years in your young adult lives.
But there is more to this gathering than just various student beginnings. The story of our new seniors and first year students also marks an important exchange in the repository of our institutional memory and the important role you all will play in changing this place as much as it changes you but also in retaining and transmitting that history. As a sociologist, I often talk to students about the importance of history. But institutional history and its reach is oftenhard to talk to students about in convincing ways given that a high percentage of you are only here for four years. Graduating over the course of four years is certainly a good thing. But this four-year cycle of students, arriving and departing also presents challenges to the institution, as it works to foster a cohesive, continuous, and deeply inclusive community and how we try to hold on to memory. Critique and change are not simple. They are hard fought truths and crucial measures of our institutional worth and adaptability. Change, and our collective adaptability to it, are not unique to Vassar—our world and those who live in it, both past and present, have had to grapple with (and often critique) change.
In his book “A Matter of Rats,” Professor Amitava Kumar, today’s faculty speaker, reflects on memory, history, and the many changes he encounters in his home city of Patna. In one part he describes a gathering of his old schoolmates from 30 years earlier brought together by the magic of the internet. At the gathering, Professor Kumar notes how struck he was by the “differences, not least in income, among the people sitting in that room but that they weren’t highlighted in any way and I was grateful for that. I was aware of how successful those around me were: bureaucrats, lawyers, leaders in nongovernmental work, entrepreneurs associated with multinational corporations (not to mention a Vassar professor). These were people who had left Patna behind, but Patna had not left them” (60). It is incredible to see a vision of community defined by so much difference that has survived for so long. More than thinking about the ways in which academic institutions stay with us in ways that we may not always anticipate, Professor Kumar’s biography of place also implores us to think about the relationship between place and possibility and the terms and circumstances that will determine and inform how our presence catalyzes the beauty and dynamism of a particular space and the memories they generate.
The classes in this room are important links in the history and future of this place and I welcome and am eager to witness the necessary and beautiful changes you inspire in our world and how you will celebrate this community together in a distant future.
Welcome again to our outstanding faculty and to the classes of 2019 and 2022. Welcome all to the start of an incredible and meaningful year where we will work together, deal with challenges together, and begin another exploration of the endless possibilities of how this place will always remain with each of us.
About the Speaker
Carlos Alamo-Pastrana, interim Dean of the College and associate professor of sociology, received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His teaching interests focus on comparative racial formations, Latino/a Studies, Afro-Latina/o intellectual history, popular culture, and prison studies. The Dean of the College area oversees and coordinates the activities of the Dean of Studies, the Dean of Students, administrative services that directly impact the quality of student life, and offices that support and facilitate extracurricular activities.