Pomp & Circumstance

My son Austin graduated from San Francisco State with a BS in Geosciences yesterday. I’m a proud dad, feeling older, and happy for Austin. The gold cord drooped over his shoulders is an “honor cord,” awarded to one grad in each department, selected by his peers.

Austin probably got a better education at SF State than his dad did at Princeton. His graduating class is amazingly diverse. They come from 119 countries! One woman was a former New York model, now a single mom with two kids, and she’s graduating summa cum laude at the age of 51! Another woman worked her way through school and won a variety of awards, and she’s the single mother of five children. You simply cannot imagine a more diverse group of people in a learning community.

In contrast, my graduating class at Princeton was 100% male and nearly 100% ages 20-25. A little over half the class came from public schools, the first time in hundreds of years preppies weren’t in the majority. Princeton did not offer a single course in business, presumably because true gentlemen don’t engage in “trade.” The only guy I knew who smoked weed got it from Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso in the Village.
My graduation ceremony was party in Latin; Austin’s school awarded honorary doctorates to Neil Young and his wife (for the pioneering school for physically challenged kids they founded , for not great rock and roll.) Neil to the Class of 2006: Peace.
Sometimes I wonder, “Where was I when they passed out the brains?” I hadn’t thought about the origin of academic regalia until Uta read it to me from SFSU’s Honors Convocation program booklet. Caps and gowns = church vestments. From medieval days when all universities were religious schools. Harvard, after all, began as a school for preachers, and that has warped the American public school curriculum for the last two centuries. (High school prepares people to study at college to be preachers.)

I enjoyed chatting with several professors. They were generally supportive of my thinking on informal learning. One had just changed the configuration of his classroom from rows to discussion tables. Acceptance fell short of giving up on useless metrics. Grades are essentially meaningless in the real world (except for grad school admission.) Even profs who grudgingly agree that grades are invalid as measures of learning can’t imagine school without them. Maybe some institutions could go gradeless but not theirs.

Austin invited friends to join us for a celebratory dinner at Greens, which has to be the best vegetarian restaurant in the country.

All hail the Class of 2006!