Writer Julia Alvarez paid tribute
to all the people at Union College
– visible and invisible, past and present – who have helped students to find
and reach their goals.
Speaking Thursday at the Founders Day
convocation in observance of the 209th anniversary of the College, Alvarez opened her remarks with a Native American story about a woman
who reaches the sky: Father Sky asks, “How did you get to be so tall?” And she
replies, “I'm standing on a lot of shoulders,” Alvarez said.
“Today we honor all those
shoulders offered to all those students past and present who come here trying
to reach their goals. Or more likely, students who haven't yet seen that full
sky of possibility, who don't yet know what to reach for.”
Alvarez, an award-winning
novelist, essayist and poet, teaches English at Middlebury
College. She received an honorary
doctor of letters degree from President Roger Hull. She was introduced by
College Marshall and Professor of English Ruth Stevenson, who taught Alvarez at
Abbott Academy
in Andover, Mass.,
and recalled her former student as a “meteor blazing over Andover's
often gray landscape.”
Alvarez grew up in the Dominican
Republic during a 1950's dictatorship when reading was not encouraged and considered politically dangerous. After
she fled with her family to New York City,
she “struggled for seven years with a language and a culture I did not
understand.”
Honoring Prof. Stevenson
With a scholarship to Abbott, which
she said had a reputation for “taming wild girls,” the 14-year-old found herself
in a classroom with Stevenson, “who closed the classroom door and said, 'Ladies,
let's have ourselves a hell of a good time.' And we did, reading
Austin, Dickinson, Elliot … until
we understood that we'd come to train, not tame, the wild girls into the women
that would run the world.
“That's why I'm here today – Ruth Stevenson
– and I don't mean at this podium,” Alvarez said. “I mean as a writer.
“Professor of English here at Union
College, lucky you, [Stevenson] was
my beloved English teacher. She offered me a pair of shoulders and much more.
She taught me by her passion for literature and her generosity of spirit to
fall in love with books.
“Today I honor Ruth Stevenson and
through her all the teachers who have offered their shoulders to those of use
who needed a leg up. Without you we could never have become ourselves.”
Behind the scenes
Alvarez said she often considers “how
much goes on behind the scenes to make any institution run smoothly.
“Early and late here on this
campus there is a crew of helpers, I bet, from staff people in offices to
cleaning crews and grounds crews who work behind the scenes to allow for the
magic of Union College to happen.”
Alvarez said it is incumbent on “those
of us who have received the privilege of shoulders, the amazing privilege of
attending the best institutions of learning this world has to offer … to pass
this privilege on.”
Citing U.N. statistics that
portray Americans as huge consumers of energy relative to other populations,
she noted that “we represent such a miniscule percentage of the population of this
planet.
“'Many times a day,' Albert Einstein
wrote, 'I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors
of others both living and dead and how earnestly I must exert myself to give and
return as much as I have received and am still receiving.'
“Toni Morrison put it another way:
'the function of freedom is to free someone else.'”
Alvarez closed by urging the
audience “to give back, to pass it on, to make places like Union College available
and accessible to the many for whom the skies have no star.”