Convocation Speech 2006

Katherine Haley Will

Convocation Address

August 23, 2006

Welcome Gettysburg College faculty and staff-and our very warmest welcome to the Class of 2010 and parents. Today not only marks the beginning of your years as a student at Gettysburg College-it also marks the beginning of Gettysburg's 175^th year as an institution of higher learning. 

These two milestones are tightly connected, and I want to spend some time today exploring the significance of that connection-what it says about the College and what it means for you as a student.

But first, congratulations are in order.  Congratulations on your choice of a liberal arts education. Congratulations for deciding to embark on an educational journey that will open your minds to ideas and perspectives and possibilities in ways other kinds of learning cannot.

And you didn't choose just any liberal arts college for your journey-you chose Gettysburg College, a unique and distinguished institution.

There is a distinctive idea of Gettysburg College, a sense of place and a sense of purpose that is hard to find on any other campus anywhere. That sense of place and purpose grows from the fertile ground of our past.  A past that, this year, covers 175 years!

So today, as we come together to launch you into your college education, I want you to know something about that past-how this college, here in Gettysburg, came to be. It will bestow a clearer sense of where we are today, where you, by virtue of being a Gettysburg student, are today, and most importantly, where you are headed.

Gettysburg College was founded in 1832-just 56 years after the founding of our nation. Our founder-theologian Samuel S. Schmucker-proposed to create a college that " promises to exert a salutary influence in advancing the cause of liberal education." What's a "salutary" influence? Something of value, something constructive, something...."healthy" and "good for you".  Something.....liberating.

We were known at that time as Pennsylvania College-we wouldn't become Gettysburg College until 1921.  Opening enrollment at Pennsylvania College?   63 students. Tuition-brace yourselves- $24.

Questions soon arose, however, as to whether the College would be able to survive for five years....... let alone 175. Pennsylvania College opened in four rooms of a building at the corner of High and Washington Streets.  The trustees needed money to build the great College Reverend Schmucker envisioned, so they decided to apply to the Pennsylvania legislature for funding.

A champion of the College emerged. Nearly six feet tall with chestnut hair, Thaddeus Stevens was a powerful and rambunctious local attorney turned controversial politician and congressman.  Though popular, Stevens had many political enemies, and they included, at the time of his election to Pennsylvania's lower house, most of the resident trustees of the College.

In championing a bill to provide funding for the college, Stevens placed himself at political risk.  The majority of his constituents were against the bill. In addressing the legislature, Stevens did something we seldom    see     politicians do today-he offered himself up in political sacrifice in the name of a greater cause. They could hate him-but they must fund the College.

The bill granting $18,000 passed.

What did that $18,000 buy? It bought the building you see before you. It bought the land on which you sit. You can reach down, touch the grass, and literally grasp your connection to the events of 175 years ago. That $18,000 bought Gettysburg's future, and, by extension, yours.

More significant than Thaddeus Stevens' contributions to Gettysburg College, however, were his contributions to the nation. In 1850 he represented Pennsylvania in Congress where the debate over slavery was heating up.

As new states were added to the Union, they were added in pairs-slave and free-to uphold the delicate balance Congress had sought to maintain since the end of the War of 1812. The anticipated entry of California as a free state threatened to upset that balance. In response, Congress approved the Compromise of 1850, which kept the balance but opened the door to slavery in new territories.

The compromise also initiated the stinging Fugitive Slave Act, which called for the punishment of individuals who helped slaves escape. The Underground Railroad was its primary target.  The act also allowed slave owners and others to hunt fugitive slaves in the north.

Less than 10 miles south of here, the Mason-Dixon line marked that critical border between slave and free states.  Here on that border is where the deep conflicts of the nation began to work themselves out.

Emboldened by the Fugitive Slave Act, on September 11, 1851, just before dawn, a Maryland slave owner named Edward Gorsuch and several others rode over the Mason-Dixon Line into Christiana, Pennsylvania, to retrieve four slaves whom Gorsuch believed were hiding in the home of William Parker, a runaway slave himself.

Parker-and others-armed with guns, pickaxes, and scythes-were waiting for Gorsuch and his men. The confrontation escalated into a bloody battle that left Gorsuch dead and several others wounded. By nightfall, Parker, along with Gorsuch's slaves, was on his way to Canada.

Along the way, Parker stopped at the New York home of Frederick Douglass, former slave and outspoken abolitionist. Douglass helped the fugitives get on a steamer headed for Canada.

The U.S. charged one of the men who had refused to come to the slaveowner Gorsuch's aid with treason. Thaddeus Stevens was one of the attorneys who defended him. He secured a not-guilty verdict-and a rebuke to the Fugitive Slave Act.

Frederick Douglass called the incident "Freedom's Battle at Christiana." Upon hearing the verdict, he wrote: "I have but one lesson for my people; it is this: Count your lives utterly worthless, unless coupled with the inestimable blessing of liberty."

Thaddeus Stevens fought for that freedom and liberty for all people. And that is why he supported education and fought for the funding for our college as well. Because while law is necessary to free each person, education frees your mind. And education empowers us all to live fully and freely.

The battle for freedom continued.

On July 1, 1863, an event was unfolding less than a mile from campus that would become what many consider a defining moment in the nation's history. The Battle of Gettysburg had begun.

It was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, and arguably the most decisive. By the time the battle ended on July 3, the Union Army had successfully turned back attacks from the Confederate Army. Over the next several days, this very building became a hospital for wounded soldiers from both the north and the south.

Later that year, in November, students from the College walked to town to hear President Abraham Lincoln deliver a speech to dedicate a portion of the battlefield as a cemetery for dead soldiers. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address lasted only two minutes, but it was one of the most eloquent expressions of the ideals of freedom, liberty, and equality ever spoken. Tomorrow evening, you will take part in a college tradition called the First-Year Walk, following the route your predecessors took to that cemetery to hear those same words spoken.

Lincoln invoked the founding fathers who "brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."  In winning the Civil War, the nation triumphed in its first great test of whether, again in his words, a "nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

After the war, Thaddeus Stevens was one of the most powerful men in Congress and a driving force behind the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which mandated equal protection and due process under the law. The true significance of the 14^th Amendment wouldn't be realized for three generations.

In 1954 it provided the legal underpinning for the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. the Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in the nation's public schools. It was the watershed legal victory of the Civil Rights Movement, opening the door for equality not just in education, but in employment, housing, and other areas of life. It was a vital step in the nation's ongoing effort to determine what "the proposition that all men are created equal" should mean in practice.

So why are we taking this lengthy venture into America's past when your decision to go to college is all about your future? Because your decision to become a Gettysburg student connects you to that past. Because this is more than just another college campus-it is an iconic setting for learning, evoking the struggle for and triumph of liberty, freedom, and equality.

There's an old saying that history is just one darn thing after another. Well that sequence of one thing after another has led from a tiny college in four rooms through many of our country's defining moments to where you sit today. That history gives meaning and purpose to the educational journey you are about to begin.

Because this college is so deeply intertwined with the struggle for this ideal of freedom, we are uniquely suited to providing a liberal, liberating education. With that education comes a legacy of engaged, enlightened citizenship. Consider how this legacy has played itself out in the lives of some more recent Gettysburgians.

J. Michael Bishop, a chemistry major in the class of 1957, went on from Gettysburg to launch a career in scientific research that led to the discovery of a gene that can mutate and cause normal cells to become cancer cells. He was a co-winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for that work.

Fred Fielding, class of 1961, went into law and then public service, serving as associate counsel for the Nixon Administration and White House Counsel for President Ronald Reagan. More recently, he served on the acclaimed National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, more commonly known as the 9/11 commission.

Carol Bellamy, class of 1963, served for 10 years as executive director of UNICEF, overseeing work in more than 150 countries to help children overcome poverty, violence, disease, and discrimination.

Katherine Wolford, class of 1976, heads Lutheran World Relief, an international organization that provides emergency relief and promotes development in more than 40 countries around the globe.

Bruce Gordon, class of 1968, came out of retirement a year ago from a career as a highly successful executive at Verizon Communications to become president and CEO of the NAACP, the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization.

Bruce delivered our commencement speech last May. And he talked about the transformation that occurred while he was a student at Gettysburg. He came to get a degree, which he considered the ticket to the good life, he said, but he left with a passion to make the world a better place for all people.

He continues to do that. President Bush recently attended the NAACP national convention, after an absence of five years. He attributed his appearance to Bruce Gordon and his tenacious efforts to build a bridge to the White House. "We have resolved to work together," the president said. "I admire the man. I want to work with him, and that's why I'm here."

Our alumni are people like Bruce Gordon, Carol Bellamy and thousands of others. They are people leading lives of purpose in science, law, public service, social justice, business, and human rights. Their common ground is Gettysburg-their lives illuminated with the spirit of the place.  

And lest you think that the only manifestations of this spirit are from your parents' generation, let me assure you that it is alive and well in your generation. 

Leanne Tyler, who begins her senior year at Gettysburg this week, traveled to Mexico and El Salvador to learn about ways to help marginalized groups, she volunteers to help migrant women launch businesses, and she has set her sights on a career in human rights law.

Luke Norris, who graduated in May, started an international organization to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, worked on behalf of AIDS victims in New York, and helped orphans in Argentina.  Last spring Luke became the third Gettysburg student to be selected as a Rhodes Scholar.

Shortly after graduating in 2003, Archana Patel went to India on a Fulbright grant, and while there she walked for 26 days and 241 miles, following a route taken three-quarters of a century earlier by Mahatma Gandhi and 78 followers on their historic Salt March, a non-violent protest against British rule of India.  Her reason?  She wanted, she said, to look outside herself.

Looking outside of yourself-a remarkable concept that goes right to the heart of a liberal arts education, pumping life into such concepts as ethical intelligence, compassionate leadership, and action on behalf of others.

Thaddeus Stevens died on August 11, 1868. And though you may never have heard of him before today, the public outpouring of grief in Washington after his death was second only to the grieving that followed Lincoln's death three years earlier. He was buried in Shreiner-Concord Cemetery in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a site he chose because it was a place where people of all races could be buried. Twenty thousand people attended his funeral, half of them free blacks.

He wrote the epitaph for his headstone, and it reads: "I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race, by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life, equality of man before his Creator."

Today you stand on the threshold of an educational experience that will give you the opportunity of a lifetime to explore the dizzying array of possibilities open to you. A liberal arts education helps you put things together, to connect the dots.

One sequence you should connect is the one that begins with the college's founding, connecting to Thaddeus Stevens, to the Civil War, to Abraham Lincoln and the words he spoke here, to Frederick Douglass and his search for liberty, to the Brown decision, to the Civil Rights movement, to the very core of the struggle for liberty and freedom in this country.

A Gettysburg education is not something you get. It's something you do. The liberal arts ask you to look outside yourself. This college's history takes it a step further, calling on you to do something greater than yourself.

In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln said it was for "us the living ... to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced." The job of improving the world, making it a better, healthier, safer, more just, and more humane place for all people is never completed. But it is important work, it is your work, and it begins today.