AMHERST — Professor Loretta Ross told students at Hampshire College’s commencement ceremony Saturday morning they are part of a “human rights movement,” and to cherish the day’s ceremony, coincidentally on the same day as Malcolm X’s birthday.
“We teach you the power of critical thinking, something that is being denied to many other students who are brainwashing into becoming robots in the system, rather than the grit in the gears,” Ross told 300 graduates and hundreds of their loved ones during her keynote address.
It started to rain as the ceremony began with cheers and introductory remarks by Board of Trustees chairwoman Gaye Hill, who encouraged students to challenge conventional wisdom and form their own conclusions on issues important to them as they enter the next phase in their lives.
“You will have many more beginnings exploring new areas of interest, finding meaning with your communities, your work and your families creating, promoting, and supporting positive change,” Hill said.
“It doesn’t matter if it is pouring rain, it can’t dampen this glorious day,” said outgoing Hampshire College president Jonathan Lash during his farewell address.
The sixth president in Hampshire College’s history, Lash served for seven years. During his address he shared his fondness for Hampshire’s student inquiry driven curriculum, and the ceremonious bell rung by graduating students, which did the night prior.
“For me it’s a sweet sound; it punctuates the tempo of each Hampshire spring,” Lash said. “It affirms the near miraculous courage, creativity and independence with which you, like nearly five decades of Div threes before you, have channeled your passion, harnessed your curiosity and set off independently to explore something you cared deeply about and in the process discovered how and where and why to learn, which is the most precious discovery of all.”
Celebrating the college’s self-starters, Lash boasted that 70 percent of Hampshire College graduates will enter jobs not yet created, or will create their own. As tribute to Lash’s retirement, the Board of Trustees established an endowment to fund a permanent professorship teaching environmental education, raising over $2.5 million to date from more than 100 donors.
Animation professor Chris Perry took a shot at the podium — he was asked to deliver the faculty toast — before introducing the student moderator, Nyk Lifson, a marine biologist, queer activist and author, who wore a beard made of glitter.
“I, like many of you, came to Hampshire because I wanted a school that would talk about the injustices in the world and take action, and I feel like I learned I can survive here through my chosen family and close-knit community of friends,” Lifson said, introducing the student speaker. “I saw people with multi-colored hair climbing trees and thought, this is home.”
When student speaker Saumya Joshi spoke, it started to pour.
She explained her frustration with her classmates for their lack of awareness and apathy surrounding issues international issues of social justice. She asked the audience who in attendance keeps up with international affairs in Yemen, Venezuela, Myanmar or her home country of India to prove her point.
“The Hampshire community does care about other events happening outside the U.S., but only when it is related to them or when it’s directly or indirectly related to this country, or some sort of festival,” Joshi said. “We need to come to the realization there is a world outside of the west, and outside of this bubble.”
Despite her disappointment, Joshi found she could still cherish her academic achievements at Hampshire College, and said Hampshire’s biggest strength is that the school gives students the ability to be free thinkers. She encouraged students to “never find an answer that makes you happy” and always follow their curiosity, “decolonize” their minds and use their education for positive change.
Hampshire “has made me who I am. It has built me; it has made me stronger,” Joshi said. “It has given me a critical lense and a will to change, to blossom into the person I am today, a person I am proud of.”
Joshi also criticized campus culture, saying she had to walk on eggshells more at the school than anywhere else in her life. Ross too warned students of “cult-like” behavior, told them to avoid moral posturing, and said that people with a diversity of ideas working together is what makes a movement.
“We are not organizing a cult, we are organizing a human rights movement,” Ross said. “We have to become the frontline defenders of democracy.”
A lifelong civil rights activist, Ross launched the Women of Color Program for the National Organization for Women in the 1980s and led the 2004 March for Women’s Lives protest. She is a visiting professor at Hampshire College who taught “White Supremacy in the Age of Trump” this year, and is currently working on a new book inspired by her time in the Pioneer Valley titled “Calling In the Calling Out Culture.”
“Stop acting like you’re as woke as you think you are,” Ross said. “We give you all radical politics without the radical skills to handle them.”
Sarah Robertson can be reached at srobertson@gazettenet.com.