To the Parents: Your Children are Good People
Baccalaureate remarks by Mary Hanna, Professor of Politics

	"We had a two-hour conversation about the book, talking about our responsibilities to others." -Mary Hanna

When I graduated from college 40 years ago, our commencement speaker was John F. Kennedy. You know something, I cannot remember a single word President Kennedy said. So if at my graduation I was so full of excitement and joy I can't remember a word spoken by one of the most eloquent men ever to sit in the White House, why would any senior here remember what Mary Hanna said, even tomorrow, let alone 40 years from now?

So I'm not going to talk to the graduates at all. I'm going to talk about them to you, their parents, and grandparents, and aunts and uncles. This is a sort of love letter. In September, walking into a freshman class is like going into an airport hanger full of little helicopters. They're buzzing. Rising right out of the chairs with energy and excitement. "Wow, look at us. We're in college. Made it to the big time."

Most Whitman students are a joy to teach because they never lose that energy and excitement. And look at your children. They're beautiful. If ever in your life you're going to be beautiful, you're beautiful at 20. Men and women both. They glow with their youth and spirit and hope. Teaching here is like spending four years standing in a garden.

We talk a lot about how Whitman is a community and your children help to make that real. During our comprehensive exams, the halls are crowded because each shivering senior arrives in a cluster of friends who wait outside during the hour-long oral exam to hug and comfort a student who's failed or cheer and celebrate with a winner.

Your children are good people. When my husband was dying, I would open my office in the morning and find the floor covered with little notes students had shoved under the door. "Professor Hanna, we're thinking of you." "My father died, so I know what you're going through." "Our section said a prayer for you last night." I've kept every one of those notes, although it's hard to read them now because they're stained with my own grateful tears.

I, like most professors, wake up every morning excited, wondering what's going to happen that day because teaching college students you never know.

We encourage student participation and discussion in all our classes. From Freshman Core onward, we professors do everything but stand on our heads to get students to volunteer their opinions and arguments.

"Thank you for lending us your precious, intelligent, good children."

But any professor who's being honest will tell you that waving hand is always a kind of crap shoot. Because the student waving that hand has an IDEA.

And that idea can lift the whole discussion to a new level, leave the professor at the end of class exultant, walking back to her office thinking, "And Socrates thought he knew how to teach!" But that idea can also open a pit under your feet the size of the Grand Canyon.

In my class on political culture, we examine the basic values and norms underlying our society and nation. And one day a young man got so excited he was waving both arms. I knew this wasn't just a crap shoot. It was the BIG CASINO. He gave me and the class a long peroration, comparing the comic strip hero, Superman, and Moses. "Superman," he said, "is an obvious recreation of the Exodus story in the Bible. Moses was put as a baby in a basket and floated down the Nile to safety. Superman's parents, knowing that Krypton was going to blow up, put him in a high tech version of a basket, a rocket, and they rocketed him out into space to safety. And where did that high tech basket, that rocket land" he asked rhetorically. "Out of all the planets in the universe, and out of all the nations on the planet earth, it landed in America, showing that America was another version of the Promised Land and Americans a new chosen people."

	English major Carol Heinz, left, and Sarah Gilroy, sociology.

Another example: Several years ago in senior colloquium we read a book which was suggested to us by Professor Henry. It was about a French Protestant community which took enormous risks to save Jews from the Nazis. We had a two-hour conversation about the book talking about our responsibilities to others, what it means to be human. Then the students left for Thanksgiving vacation. One student, Joanna, lived in Spokane and as she was driving along the highway she was stopped by an accident. A pickup truck had turned over and the driver was caught inside the cab. There was no way to get him out until the fire trucks with the jaws of life arrived. He had been hurt, he was in pain, he was frightened. And a crowd of people had gathered around the edges of the highway, waiting for the fire trucks. Joanna said, "I heard him crying. And I thought about what our class had discussed - about what we as people owe each other. And I got out of my car and got down on my stomach and crawled as far as I could into the cab. I held his hand and talked to him, trying to comfort him, just be near him, for almost twenty minutes. Until the fire trucks and ambulance came."

Thank you for lending us your precious, intelligent, good children for four years. To the graduates I say, may God continue to nourish you all your lives. And to the parents and families - when you congratulate your children tomorrow, pat yourselves on the back too. The apple never falls far from the tree.