Congratulations to the Class of 2024!
On Sunday, June 16, the Department of English awarded 36 bachelor’s and 2 master’s degrees. Additionally, 7 doctoral degrees were awarded, 2 of which were from the Modern Thought and Literature program.
Message from our Chair:
Welcome to the English Department’s degree conferral ceremony. This is an opportunity for us all to come together and celebrate the achievements of this year’s graduating English majors, coterminal masters students, and PhD students.
When I was seeking inspiration for this year’s graduation speech, I stumbled upon an article in the New York Times on the rise of radical and countercultural bookstores across the nation that began during the Pandemic and continues today. Perhaps some of you saw the article too. It was called “The Rise of Bookstores with a Social Mission,” and it describes a movement of sorts – the emergence, from Los Angeles to Baltimore, of cooperative bookstores that have become indispensable anchors in neighborhoods suffering from widening wealth gaps, housing insecurity, and racial violence. These bookstores provide a kind of mutual aid to the marginalized and the poor in these ever-more-troubled times by offering essential resources and core educational programs calling for collective change.
According to one historian cited in the article, these bookstores prioritize their cause over their bank balance – they promote social movements through the books they sell – they create safe spaces for the curious to congregate – and they model their businesses after the goals of liberation and equality.
The article struck me as timely and poignant because I wanted to leave you with a concrete image, something you might remember amid the swirl of congratulations and advice that inevitably surrounds us at graduation time.
The question you are facing now, however, with your lives stretching ahead, is What to Do With your English Major – or in the case of our graduate students, With an English MA or PhD? I’m sure many of you already have great plans – others may have some interim solutions. But whatever you are planning to do, I want you to keep in mind that image, that idea of opening a Bookstore with a Social Mission – as an ideal and an aspiration.
Think of how prepared you would be, having surrounded yourselves with books these years, having immersed yourselves in the resonant relativism of the literary imagination, having carefully curated your personal canons, having struggled with creativity itself.
Think of your commitment to the poet’s truth in this world of post-truth. Think of your dedication to artful intelligence in a world of artificial intelligence.
Never have we been more in need of education as an ongoing pursuit in a divided world; For acceptance and understanding; For kindness and tolerance; For all those values would have encountered in your reading and your writing.
Think of your Bookstore as a threshold, a way to keep alive your passion for knowledge and understanding, for the sanctity and power of the creative imagination – think of it as a space to engage with different views and to make education a communal and continuing urge.
Keep your doors open and your shelves full in your Bookstore with a Social Mission. Of course there may be obstacles to this ideal. Your Gen-X parents probably wouldn’t fund it (here I speak with some authority) – though your Baby Boomer grandparents just might! The important point is to keep this ideal alive.
So that when your children go to college and their engineer friends ask them What Can You Do With an English Major, your child will look them in the eye and say:
"Oh, I’m following in the family business, I’m opening a Bookstore with a Social Mission."
Gavin Jones
Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of Humanities
Professor of English
Chair, Department of English