By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Princeton University graduates on Tuesday sat through a rainy commencement ceremony on a day when the school awarded honorary degrees to retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and entertainer Harry Belafonte.
The school said it had awarded 2,156 degrees to undergraduate and graduate students, as the university kept the ceremony outdoors, at its traditional spot on the lawn in front of Nassau Hall, rather than move it indoors. It was the 268th commencement in school history.
University President Christopher L. Eisgruber, in a nod toward speeding things up, condensed his speech to three paragraphs — to the delight of the crowd. In his remarks, Mr. Eisgruber urged graduates to “dream audaciously” as they embark on the next phase of their lives.
“America has since its birth been a land of diversity and a land of audacious dreamers,” he said to an audience huddled under umbrellas or wearing see-through plastic rain ponchos that the school had distributed before the ceremony began.
“It has benefited again and again from men and women who shared, against all odds, the dream that we might yet be one people,” he said. “It has benefited, too, from individuals who dared to believe that scholarship and education could generate the progress, the discoveries and the leaders who will help to solve our most difficult problems in our darkest hours.”
In past speeches, Mr. Eisgruber has defended the value of a college education, despite many young Americans out of work, buried under college debt and holding a degree that does not translate into a career. He returned to that theme, albeit, briefly, in his remarks.
“We hear a great deal these days about the need for what is practical, functional and utilitarian. I understand that. You do have to find apartments and you do have to pay the rent,” he said.
“But I hope,” he continued, “you will also find time to pursue ideals that are beautiful and profound, not just for their own sake but because the beautiful and the profound are sometimes more powerful and more beneficial than all the things that the conventional world praises in the name of pragmatic utility.”
Earlier in the ceremony, senior valedictorian Misha Semenov said he and the other graduates had left a part of themselves at Princeton. “And Princeton is now a part of us,” he said.
They left by taking the customary walk out FitzRandolph Gate, a rite of passage that has been a tradition for years.
In all, the school also awarded honorary degrees to retired Army Gen. Ann Dunwoody, the first woman to rise to the rank of four star general; retired Princeton engineering professor David P. Billington; former New Jersey attorney general and state Supreme Court Chief Justice Deborah Poritz; and author Mario Vargas Llosa.
The award to Mr. Stevens had a personal connection for Mr. Eisgruber. As a recent graduate of the University of Chicago law school, he clerked Mr. Stevens for a year starting in August 1989 at the nation’s high court.
