Quotes & Sayings About Welcome Address In College

Nora Ephron explained in a 1996 commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College, about her own graduating class of 1962: "We weren't meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren't meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect." Both — Rebecca Traister

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

From "A Left-Handed Commencement Address," Mills College 1983 — Ursula K. Le Guin

ON JUNE 25, 1890, W. E. B. Du Bois spoke at his Harvard graduation ceremony. He had now excelled, and had graduated from the most prestigious historically Black college and the most prestigious historically White college in the United States. He felt he was showing off the capability of his race. Du Bois's "brilliant and eloquent address," as judged by the reporters, was on "Jefferson Davis as Representative of Civilization." In Du Bois's rendering, Jefferson Davis, who had died the year before, represented the rugged individualism and domineering European civilization, in contrast to the rugged "submission" and selflessness of African civilization. The European "met civilization and crushed it," Du Bois concluded. "The Negro met civilization and was crushed by it." According to Du Bois's biographer, the Harvard graduate contrasted the civilized European "Strong Man" to the civilized African "Submissive Man."5 — Ibram X. Kendi

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty - and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima. — Kurt Vonnegut

Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance. — William James

Dr. Brainard Keyes Bullard, President of Wyandotte College, said in an address tonight that most of the worlds ills can be traced to the fact that Mans knowledge of himself has not kept pace with his knowledge of the physical world. — Kurt Vonnegut

I wanted to double-check with you that your mailing address is still the same as the one you sent us back in April? If you're a college student I know address changes are really common at this time of year! — Marilynne Robinson

Take for example the commencement address he [James Garfield] delivered at his alma mater Hiram College in the summer of 1880 ... The only thing stopping this address from turning into a slacker parable is the absence of the word 'dude'. — Sarah Vowell

Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.
[Commencement Address, Wellesley College, 1996] — Nora Ephron

Looking out the window, I wondered how many of those kids had parents who were losing it, or parents who were gone, taken off without a forwarding address, or parents who had buried themselves alive, who could argue and chop wood and make asses of themselves without being fully conscious. How many of them believed what they were saying when they blathered on about what college they'd go to and what they'd major in and how much they'd earn and what car they'd buy. They repeated that stuff over and over like an incantation that, if pronounced exactly right, would open the door to the life of their dreams. If they looked at their parents, at their crankiness and their therapy and their prescriptions and their ragged collections of kids, step-kids, half-kids, quarter-kids, and the habits that had started in secret but now owned them, body and soul, then they might curse that spell. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

This year, we must address the Colorado Paradox. We have more college degrees per capita than any state. Yet we lag the nation in the percentage of students who go on to higher education. — Bill Owens

It is interesting to note that during the last ten years Washington's 'Farewell Address' has begun to reappear in college textbooks - minus the four religious warnings. — David Barton

In the power of my newfound strength, I saw clearly - even though I'd been empowered to have my old college finally address my "horrific trauma," make me finally feel heard, this event would never have happened had I not first given myself my own voice, the permission to call my rape rape and not shame. In telling, I forced the school that silenced me, that minimized my trauma, that blamed me for the rape, to finally respect my voice and give me the platform they should have given me in the first place. I did not need the school to call it by its name; I did it myself, and they listened. I was the powerful party that brought the closure and empowerment I'd hoped, in first finding their invitation, that Colorado College would bring. — Aspen Matis

Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them. Curricula are designed to give coherence to the educational experience and to challenge students to develop a strong degree of moral awareness. Professors, deeply involved with the enterprise of undergraduate instruction, are committed to their students' intellectual growth and insist on maintaining the highest standards of academic rigor. Career services keep themselves informed about the broad range of postgraduate options and make a point of steering students away from conventional choices. A policy of noncooperation with U.S. News has taken hold, depriving the magazine of the data requisite to calculate its rankings. Rather than squandering money on luxurious amenities and exorbitant administrative salaries, schools have rededicated themselves to their core missions of teaching and the liberal arts.
I'm kidding, of course. — William Deresiewicz