On Sunday last Princeton University held its two hundred and seventy-fourth Commencement ceremonies, which included a couple of minutes of personal fame for me as one of six recipients of honorary degrees. Neither the honor of the event nor my sincere appreciation of it was tempered by the somewhat peculiar circumstances under which the ceremony was conducted. Under the conditions imposed by the pandemic many colleges and universities have this year once again cancelled any large “in person” events of this sort at all, as Princeton itself had done in the spring of 2020. The suppression of college Commencements is a serious deprivation imposed both upon students who have worked long and hard toward a challenging goal and for the parents and other well-wishers who have invested so heavily in their enterprise. There are things for which Zoom approaches some kind of minimal adequacy, but an American college commencement ceremony is probably not one of them.
The improving medical landscape and the imaginative repurposing of our football stadium allowed our institution to pull off what I thought was a pretty remarkable feat. Some large number of people—I shall not hazard even an approximate count—were able to participate in a kind of no-frills, pared down, socially distanced, in-person ceremony that, in my admittedly biased opinion, still retained sufficient elements of both its necessary dignity and its desirable leaven of light-heartedness. The traditional venue for our Commencements is “Front Campus.” That is the name for the lawn, over which are scattered several large trees, between Nassau Hall, the oldest building on campus, and Nassau Street, the town’s main drag. This is a setting that nicely links Town and Gown, as Nassau Street is a state highway, indeed a segment of the old Lincoln Highway, if anybody still remembers the name of our first intercontinental “interstate” of 1913. Front Campus used to be a very suitable venue for Commencements—when there were considerably fewer students in the college. In recent years, between the cramped seating for the graduates and the packed bleachers set up for the spectators, the metaphor of the sardine can naturally comes to mind. Or perhaps in the present circumstance, the petrie dish. A less “distanced” communal space would be hard to imagine—perhaps a beehive or a bat cave. I suspect that the projected increase in the size of the undergraduate body, though fairly modest, may mean the end of Front Campus Commencements altogether.
I think that the “back yard” of Nassau Hall, a large open grassy space called Cannon Green, might offer long-term possibilities. It is a big area with fewer trees, and another large-scale event of the Commencement period is already held there. To accommodate the numbers for Commencement itself would at the very least require some architectural imagination and the probable acquisition of considerably more banked bleachers. For a variety of reasons I hope that the football stadium does not become a permanent Commencement site, but it worked surprisingly well last Sunday. A football field with its margins is a lot of space, and the large number of graduates, even conspicuously “distanced,” were far from exhausting it. Out of precaution each graduate was provided with only two tickets for guests, most of whom were parents. I chose my spouse and my daughter, the more senior and proximate of the two professors among our offspring. The spectators, scattered in widely separated pairs around the huge, high horseshoe stands, gave something of the impression of the Greek front line at the Battle of Marathon as I imagined it as a child. The principals donned their academic garb in the locker room of the football team and marched solemnly into the arena through the tunnel from which our gridiron gladiators are wont to rush forth to thunderous applause. The “interpersonals” were ostentatiously chaste: the ethos of safe sex adopted to ancient academic ritual, There was no shaking hands, let alone the normative back-slapping, hugs, and kisses. The praxis of hooding of the honorary degree recipients—normally their big moment in the ceremony—was omitted altogether for the sake of medical prophylaxis. When we got back to the locker room we were presented with bags containing our hoods along with our elegant diplomas. All in all, the event was one of the more brilliant triumphs of improvisation that I have ever experienced.
The degree is “Doctor of Humane Letters,” a most pleasing title and one that closely corresponds to what I have been trying to do for all of my professional life. It also has an explicit connection to Oxford University where, sixty years ago now, I completed three transformative years of study as a Rhodes Scholar. “Humane Letters” is the English version of Literae Humaniores, the intensive honors course in classical literature, history, and philosophy at Oxford. It was generally called “Greats” by its students—whether in reference to its content, its ambition, or the exertions required to follow it successfully I cannot say. I should make clear that I myself did not pursue this course. I was “reading” (as they say in England) English literature, and my literary interests were at the time of my arrival mainly modern, even contemporary. But the curriculum of the Oxford English course forced its students into serious philological study and the reading of important works in Old and Middle English, subjects I had pretty well avoided in my earlier undergraduate career at Sewanee.
Literae Humaniores is probably also the eventual source of our most common use of “humanities” or “the humanities” in English today. The Latin phrase, which means roughly “the more human branches of literature” clearly implies a contrast with something that is “less human,” namely theology or “study in the sacred page” as they called it in the Middle Age. This phrase emphasized that the basis of “theology” was not free-wheeling speculation but literary study, biblical interpretation. Theology was the “Queen of the Sciences”, but humane studies, that is the Liberal Arts, were its worthy ancillaries. There was a fine pre-Christian exemplar of this way of thinking in the Latin phrase for the totality of human thought: “all things human and divine.”
The humanities, or “humane studies,” are founded in tradition—that is, in the appreciation and critical assessment of the legacy of cultural inheritance. The informed appreciation of human experience has a vertical as well as a horizontal axis. We strive mightily to understand the variety (or if you prefer “diversity’) of human experience in the world of our own day; but we also study with intellectual sympathy and honesty the vast cultural deposit of ages and peoples past. The human race has existed for a very long time and in nearly unimaginable variety. Our striving for perfection in our own times is not advanced by the cancellation, erasure, or willful neglect of the human experience of the past. Humane practice has had a special home in our institutions of higher education—some evidences of which, trivial but not insignificant, are the funny vestments and Latin phrases one encounters in academic ceremonies. In a moment in which the sustaining power of humane studies is being noisily called into question, to be honored for pursuing them over a long career is, well, a real honor.
