The University’s Grand Marshal, Ronald Bosco, leading the procession.

By Christine McKnight

iriam Snow Mathes, B.A.’26, remembers her Commencement at the New York State College for Teachers as simple, traditional and formal. She wore a cap and gown borrowed from a sorority sister, and still recalls gazing up at the stained-glass windows in the College auditorium — now the Dewey Graduate Library — as the speaker droned through his address.

“He was somebody from Texas, but I haven’t the remotest idea what he said,” admits Mrs. Mathes, who became a school librarian and now lives in retirement in Lacey, Wash.

argaret Yager Middleton, who graduated three years after Mrs. Mathes, says that Commence-ment exercises for her class were held on the lawn in front of what is now Draper Hall on the Rockefeller College campus. The Class of ’29 was considered so large — about 250 — that President Abram Brubacher ordered the diplomas distributed by rows to the graduates, who were seated alphabetically. “They didn’t want us to walk across the stage because we were so many, so they passed the diplomas down the rows in bundles of six or seven,” said Mrs. Middleton, a retired high school business teacher now living in Pompano Beach, Fla.

Right: Commencement procession, 1926, leading into the auditorium (now Hawley Library). Center: Leather-covered program for 1929. Right, below: Commencement, 1948

urtis Pfaff, B.A.’48, M.A.’50, of Hackettstown, N.J., says his Commencement was in Page Hall. The returning World War II veteran stood with his classmates to have his degree conferred en masse.

Commencement for Marjorie Ferrugio Delmar, B.A.’58, M.A.’63, took place on Alumni Quadrangle. She remembers ascending the platform and receiving her diploma individually after her name was called out. Joan Ludke, B.A.’65, says it started to rain about halfway through her Commencement, one of the last held on the old Teachers College Campus. “You were kind of grabbing your diploma and running for cover,” recalls Ludke, who now lives in northern New Jersey.

he rain also fell — in torrents — in 1972, the year Juliette Zivic of Rye, N.H., graduated. The ceremony, which by then was being held on the football field on UAlbany’s main campus, was hastily moved to the gymnasium of the Physical Education Building — the only problem being that the gym wasn’t big enough to accommodate everyone. Some parents and graduates watched the proceedings in other parts of the building on closed-circuit television.

University President Karen R. Hitchcock takes the podium during Commencement 2001.

Every UAlbany alumnus, it seems, has a special memory about Commence-ment. While each experience was unique, Mathes, Middleton, Pfaff, Delmar, Ludke and Zivic all agree on one thing: “Things were much more serious than (Commencements) you see now,”says Ludke.

That lack of dignity bothered Ronald Bosco, a Distinguished Service Professor of English and American Literature. A veteran of countless Commencements, Bosco is also the University’s Grand Marshal, charged with carrying the ceremonial mace at the head of all of UAlbany’s academic processions. Along with many of his faculty colleagues and administrators, he had repeatedly voiced his concern that the ceremony had become, well, a little too celebratory in recent years, especially during the decade when the event was staged at the cavernous Pepsi Arena in downtown Albany. In response, President Karen R. Hitchcock, who had also felt it was time for a thorough review of Commencement, asked Bosco to help fix the problem.

She named him to lead a 17-member Task Force on Commencement and charged the group with rethinking the entire event. The committee of senior faculty members and professional staff met weekly throughout the summer of 2000. They surveyed dozens of colleges and universities coast to coast to determine how those institutions conducted their Commencement exercises, and to establish what worked and what didn’t. They found that there were no pat formulas, and that each campus had to determine for itself the best
way to do things.

The Task Force recommended a series of sweeping changes that were implemented last May to near-unanimous praise from students, parents and faculty. This May, with a little fine-tuning, the University will reprise that effort as it prepares to graduate its 150,000th student. How have things changed?

Commencement now features an entire weekend of events that includes a family picnic, fireworks, and individual recognition of graduates during ceremonies organized by some two dozen schools, colleges and departments within the University. The campus has also revived Torch Night, the annual ceremony in which the senior class passes a torch to the juniors, and which had languished for a decade.

Those events, mostly on Saturday, will be followed Sunday morning by the degree conferral ceremony for 1,800 undergraduates, along with their families and friends. That event — now back on campus — will be held on the lawn south of the new science library. It will be brief — about an hour — formal and dignified. In all, about 12,000 are expected to attend. Saturday morning, a separate ceremony for graduate students will be held at the Recreation and Convocation Center (RACC). About 4,000 are expected to attend that.

“We wanted to develop an event that would be both celebratory and dignified — and one that would be an appropriate culmination of all of the work that’s associated with earning a degree. And I think we succeeded. It was a real rush to see all of those students and parents having such a good time,” said Linda Wheeler, the University’s Commencement coordinator, who oversees a battalion of faculty and staff volunteers, police, food service workers and bus drivers to make the big event run smoothly.

Phyllis and Riley Snell, whose daughter Brandy graduated with honors last year, arrived on Friday evening from their home in Argyle, N.Y., about an hour north of campus.

“We enjoyed it very, very much. Because we knew ahead of time that there were all of these things going on, we just opted to make a weekend of it,” said Phyllis Snell. On Saturday afternoon, the Snells went to a smaller ceremony for Brandy and 200 or so other psychology majors and their families. Organized by the Department of Psychology, it was held in the RACC, and offered students the opportunity for individual recognition. “I got to walk up on stage, and Mom got a picture,” said Brandy Snell, now a program counselor at a psychiatric hospital in Knoxville, Tenn. Afterwards, she and her parents attended the picnic on the podium and experienced Torch Night.

About an hour after the conclusion of last year’s undergraduate ceremony, Bosco returned to the expanse of campus lawn where it had been held. What he witnessed was a first in his experience: although the ceremony was long over, as many as 7,000 students, parents and friends were still milling about, savoring the event on a superb spring afternoon.

“Students were introducing their parents to friends, parents were being introduced to the faculty, and everyone was taking pictures. I never saw that before, and I just knew we had turned a major corner,” he said.

“To me, it’s evidence that we have changed the campus culture. Over the last decade, people had lost sight of the dignity that ought to have been associated with the event. There was a feeling that Commencement was not significant, or that it was okay to treat it as just a big bash. Now, rather than looking at something that’s pure celebration, we’ve restored dignity to Commencement.”

As for the weather, Bosco says that the committee’s consultations with UAlbany’s Department of Atmospheric Science suggest that the University should expect rain on Commencement weekend about 20 percent of the time, or once every five years. He’s willing to live with that, he says. “If it rains, I’ll be out there with the rest of them. The only thing I’ll need is an umbrella for the mace.”

That’s one of the keys strategies Linda Wheeler uses to maintain her sanity as the University’s Commencement coordinator.

Unflappable even in a crisis, Wheeler also offers this nugget of wisdom:

“Rely on lots of excellent, smart people to advise you. Nobody ever lets me down.” And finally: “You have to be a perfectionist, but don’t be obsessive about it.”

Wheeler, who assumed responsibilities for making Commencement run smoothly two years ago, grapples with both the big issues (What if it rains?) and the nitty-gritty (Where does the American flag go at the conclusion of the academic procession?). Her reward is seeing the smiling faces of students and their families.

“In the end, it’s always very gratifying,” says Wheeler, who even belongs to a fledgling professional organization called the North American Association of Commencement Officers. About 110 campuses across the country are members. “Everybody is trying to find ways to make it more personal for the students and their families. That’s the key to a successful event,” she says.

— CM