ELEPHANTS, BERMUDA SHORTS, BEACH BALLS, AND POLS

A HUNDRED YEARS OF NORTHEASTERN COMMENCEMENTS

By Karen Feldscher

WIt was 1902. “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” was a hit song. The nation’s first automatic food-vending restaurant opened in Philadelphia. The Woman Suffrage Alliance was founded. Shopgirls in Boston were earning, on average, $5 to $6 a week.

And Northeastern held its first commencement. Not that you would have realized it if you were a less-than-diligent newspaper reader back then.

A quick scan of the June 24, 1902, Boston Globe reveals a prominent account of Wellesley College’s commencement exercises. Even a sneak preview of Harvard’s upcoming grand commencement.

But Northeastern? A three-paragraph item entitled “Law School Graduates” lies buried on a jam-packed page 14, in the middle of the third column. Paragraph one mentions the platform decorations for the ceremony, which was held at the YMCA. Paragraph two notes the speakers, who included Josiah H. Quincy, member of the famous New England family and mayor of Boston in the late 1890s. Paragraph three—the longest—lists the names of the graduates. All twenty-two of them.

What a difference a century makes.

This year, Northeastern’s one-hundredth commencement will feature a graduating cast of thousands. The event will be covered in newspapers and on local television news broadcasts. Graduates, parents, relatives, and friends will clog the streets around the FleetCenter—commencement’s venue since 1996—clutching bouquets, posing for pictures, adjusting mortarboards, spilling out of nearby restaurants.

For sheer size, Northeastern’s June commencement has long taken top honors in the Boston area. The 1951 commencement was the first at Northeastern to graduate more than 1,000 students. Eight years later, over 2,000 graduated. More than 3,000 graduated in 1967, and through the 1970s and 1980s some commencements topped 5,000.

Since 1969, the university has held a fall commencement to accommodate students who complete their degrees later in the year. The law school started holding a separate May ceremony in 1976. And by 1972, the sheer number of June graduates led Northeastern to begin holding two commencements in one day—a morning ceremony for undergraduates, and an afternoon ceremony for graduate and part-time students.

Though the numbers of graduates are fewer than in decades past—about 3,700 students are expected to graduate this June—a Northeastern commencement is still a huge spectacle, with throngs filling a cavernous sports arena, banners in the bleachers shouting congratulations, flashbulbs popping, and cheers and whoops echoing off the rafters.

To organize such an event? Those who do it assure you it’s no small feat. The planning goes on year-round, says registrar and commencement committee chair Linda Allen, who has twenty years of experience in coordinating Northeastern commencements.

She sighs a bit just thinking about it, then ticks off some of what has to be attended to three times a year: invitations, tickets, floral arrangements, food for the trustees and the honorary degree recipients, diploma jackets, diploma calligraphy, music, printed programs, caps and gowns, event security. And so on. “After September commencement, there’s a little bit of downtime,” Allen concedes.

May and September commencements take planning, to be sure, but June is the one people really fret about. For a small stipend, hundreds of university employees—from faculty members to food-service workers, photographers to bus drivers—contribute their time and efforts that day. “I’m in awe of it,” says history professor Gerald Herman. “Even after doing it all these years, I find it amazing how all the pieces fit together.”

Herman, who holds the impressive title senior associate marshal, spends most of commencement day telling people where to go, “herding” students, and checking in with other marshals. Before cell phones, all this was accomplished by walkie-talkies, hand signals, even jumping up and down, if necessary.

History professor Raymond Robinson has served as chief marshal, a sort of master of ceremonies, for twenty years. He’s the one who, university mace in hand (a holdover from twelfth-century Europe, when it was a good idea for officials to carry weapons to big events), leads the academic procession to the stage in a dignified manner. Yet Robinson calls himself a mere “figurehead.” When it comes to running the show, he gives Herman all the credit. “I don’t know all the things he does,” Robinson says. “But I know if he didn’t do it, the whole thing would fall apart.”

Another longtime commencement marshal, biology professor Charles Ellis, marvels that students are actually handed their own diplomas onstage. He explains how it works. As groups of students line up in alphabetical order to enter the arena, file marshals check against a copy of the commencement program and cross out the names of those who aren’t there. After the students are seated, the amended program gets turned over to the folks manning the boxes of diplomas, so they can pull out the ones that aren’t needed.

“It’s so unique,” says Ellis. “Most colleges and universities don’t do it this way. And we have an incredibly high rate of success in getting the right diploma to the right person—without any rehearsal.”

Herman, for his part, knows the difference between lead marshals, special marshals, procession marshals, file marshals, and the indispensable stair marshals, who literally guard the steps up to the stage to keep people from falling or getting their gowns caught. He reminds faculty members to keep moving when they stop to chat with students. He tries to control what he calls “the beach ball and champagne bottle phenomenon” without being “obstreperous” about it.

“We let them bounce the ball around, but when one heads toward a lead marshal, we try to kick it to the back of the room,” Herman explains. “The same with popping corks. But you try not to make a scene.”

At the end of a long day of two commencements, some of the faculty marshals celebrate with one another or with students. But not Herman. “It’s an incredible experience, but exhausting,” he says. “I just go home and collapse.”

Despite the excitement around Northeastern’s commencements today, quite a few went by before they became more than a blip on Boston’s radar screen.

By 1921, commencement had been relocated to a bigger site, Jordan Hall. In addition to law graduates, Northeastern was by then also graduating students from its Schools of Commerce and Finance, the Evening Polytechnic School, and the brand-new School of Engineering. Although the Globe’s Northeastern commencement article had been moved up to page 4, it was still tiny.

Skip to 1939. Dartmouth’s graduation is featured on page 1, but Northeastern has finally made it to page 2. And there’s a headline you can read without the benefit of a magnifying glass: “335 Northeastern Graduates Warned Against Mob Hysteria.”

A lengthy article about keynoter Ralph Washington Sockman follows. Sockman, described as “the famous radio speaker of Christ Church, New York,” warned graduates to watch out for “racial antipathies” in the United States, in light of the hysteria then gripping Europe. His speech came during a tense time in America, which was struggling to stay out of the European conflict. Just three months later, Germany would invade Poland, and Great Britain and France would declare war on Germany.

Throughout the 1940s and beyond, Northeastern’s commencement was no longer relegated to the back pages of the newspapers. And as the numbers of graduates swelled, the ceremonies would move from Jordan Hall to the Opera House, then to the Boston Arena, the Boston Garden, and finally the FleetCenter.

Some things remained constant. Commencement addresses, like Sockman’s, often touched on the politics of the day. In 1943—as Allied forces fought the Axis powers in Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa; Americans dealt with food rationing, and price and wage freezes; and the jitterbug and the Lindy hop animated dance halls—U.S. senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts reminded graduates of the need to “win this terrible war” and to address “the postwar problems of unemployment, inflation, and effective international collaboration.”

Lodge’s words are troublingly familiar in the aftermath of September 11. In fact, much of the rhetoric heard at Northeastern commencements during World War II and the decades that followed still seems relevant today. In 1951, as the Cold War moved into full swing, John Christian Warner, Carnegie Institute of Technology president, told his audience, “To preserve our freedom, we must pay whatever price is required.” Margaret Chase Smith, U.S. senator from Maine (and Northeastern’s first woman commencement speaker), said in 1964, “Without the United States military forces, there would be no collective security for the free world—there would be no free world.”

Former astronaut Michael Collins asked his audience in 1970 to picture what the Earth looks like from space—“the tiny blue-and-white sphere, a fragile voyager through the black expanse of space. . . . No longer does it seem large enough to allow people on one side of it to ignore those on the other.”

Coretta Scott King (1971) and Jesse Jackson (1978) each spoke of the necessity of eradicating racism in the United States. In his speech, Jackson called improving race relations “the major unfinished business of American democracy,” an assessment many would find equally true today.

Northeastern’s impressive list of June commencement speakers—a roster of politicians, educators, celebrities, sports figures, and artists—has also included John F. Kennedy (1956), Edward M. Kennedy (1965 and 1977), Edmund Muskie (1969), Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. (1982), Michael Dukakis (1984), Elizabeth Dole (1986), Erma Bombeck (1988), Barbara Bush (1991), Bill Clinton (1993), William Weld (1995), and Mikhail Gorbachev (1998).

For all of commencement’s solemn pageantry and rhetoric, there’s been plenty to chuckle about.

June commencements in the Boston Garden are remembered in large part for how beastly hot they were. With no air-conditioning or discernible air circulation, the swelter pushed desperate students to wear as little as possible underneath academic robes. Graduates and guests used their programs for fanning, frantically. Bottled water became a necessity, either for drinking or, for some, pouring over a perspiring head.

Sometimes people fainted and were carried off by EMTs. One year, a dean wore Bermuda shorts under his black robe, then fell asleep in the heat with his legs spread wide open. Unfortunately, he was seated onstage in the front row. “The student body was fascinated,” recalls Herman dryly.

Then there was the elephant smell. For many years, commencement was held just after the circus wrapped up its annual engagement at the Garden, leaving behind a pungent aroma of dung and disinfectant. In 1995, when Northeastern was poised to leave the soon-to-be-demolished Garden for the sleek, new FleetCenter, former financial aid dean and longtime commencement committee co-chair Charles Devlin could finally speak freely about the elephant days. “It stunk,” he said bluntly.

Others remember when Thailand’s Princess Chulabhorn Mahidol, an honorary degree recipient, entered the Garden’s Blades and Boards room and her thirty-person entourage instantly fell flat on the floor to honor her, startling the unsuspecting onlookers around them.

There was Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who, on receiving an honorary degree in 1986, insisted on saying a few words to the graduates, even though she wasn’t supposed to speak. What did the seventy-nine-year-old inventor of the COBOL computer language, and at the time the oldest Navy officer on active duty, want to tell graduates? “If it’s a good idea, go ahead and do it. It’s much easier to apologize than it is to get permission,” the rear admiral declared.

A certain band leader used to show up drunk; one year he struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner” instead of “Pomp and Circumstance.”

And once a September commencement speaker was running late—very late—so Linda Allen asked William Fowler, then a history professor and commencement veteran, now the director of the Massachusetts Historical Society, if he could ad lib a speech. “My reaction,” recalls Fowler, “was one of sheer, complete terror.” The speaker finally did show up, letting Fowler off the hook. But from then on, it was understood he’d have a speech in his back pocket, just in case.

In September 2000, Fowler was chosen as a commencement speaker in his own right and awarded an honorary degree. He spoke about history and service, and the importance of giving. Was it the speech he’d carried around—undelivered—for years? “Are you kidding?” he says, chuckling. “That hackneyed old thing?”

The early 1970s weren’t an especially lighthearted time on college campuses. Northeastern students, like others across the nation, staged strikes to protest the Vietnam War and other social ills. In 1970, organizers of a campuswide strike in the wake of Kent State asked President Asa Knowles if they could speak at commencement.

Though Knowles refused, the students weren’t deterred. Edith Stein, a forty-nine-year-old University College student, walked to the podium after Michael Collins’s address to try to talk to the crowd. Knowles ordered the microphones shut off, and plainclothes police on the Garden floor started roughing up students. Disgusted, Stein discarded her robe onstage and went back to her seat.

From then until 1976, there were no speakers at Northeastern commencements. University officials cited the ceremony’s length and a lack of student interest as the reasons. But a Northeastern News editorial charged the real reason was the administration’s resistance to choosing a speaker from a student-submitted list, which included such names as Ralph Nader and William Kunstler.

Of course, many were just fine with having no speaker. Longtime faculty member and administrator Rudolph Morris, BA’32, H’80, in his 1977 book Where? On Huntington Avenue didn’t lament the absence: “[The commencement speaker’s] speech never seemed to vary from decade to decade, filled with the timeworn clichés about the future belonging to the young who keep their noses to the grindstone. . . . Alumni agree that the best commencement speech was delivered by Senator John F. Kennedy. It lasted exactly four minutes.”

The most exciting commencement speech? All agree it was when President Bill Clinton electrified a capacity crowd in 1993—though senior speaker Doug Luffborough nearly stole the show that day with a stunning rendition of “The Banana Boat Song” and a powerful address. As the Boston Globe reported: “For many, the day had begun all too early, the lines had been far too long, and the metal detectors had been the final insult. But when Clinton paid tribute to Northeastern as ‘a symbol of the American dream’ and its students as ‘the people I ran for president to help,’ the grumbles were silenced.”

Those who were there say the roar of applause and approval that greeted Clinton when he appeared on the Garden floor was unforgettable. Linda Allen says she was so overwhelmed she cried. And because the national press was there in force, Northeastern received coast-to-coast coverage. The hullabaloo was like nothing the folks on Huntington Avenue had ever seen.

Given the demands of June commencement—the long day, the crowds, the myriad possibilities for mistakes—you might wonder why some faculty members serve as marshals year after year. As Gerald Herman puts it, “Nobody’s in it for the money. It’s got to be something else.”

That something else, most say, is the special character of Northeastern commencements. Noisy and spirited, they are never staid affairs. Allen, Herman, Robinson, Fowler—all sense strong emotions from the crowd as the students are handed their diplomas, which they often raise triumphantly in the air.

“You can almost feel the pride,” says Robinson, noting that, for years, many Northeastern graduates were the first in their families to get a college degree. “Any parent has pride in his kid,” he says. “But there’s something very special about the pride that Northeastern families feel.”

Nicholas Corsano, E’26, was the first college graduate in his family. He remembers lining up in front of the YMCA and walking to the Opera House, having his picture taken with his classmates, hearing speeches from first Northeastern president Frank Palmer Speare and Maine commissioner of education Augustus Thomas.

Corsano’s mother had quit grammar school when she was thirteen so she could earn $2 a week to help support her family. But she’d always loved learning, and pushed her kids in that direction. Nick was the one who made it. “I’m so glad she insisted on my getting an education,” says the ninety-seven-year-old Corsano, who had a thirty-year career with the Boston Building Department. “I felt great when I got my degree.”

Dan Kennedy, LA’79, an award-winning Boston journalist, remembers being appalled some of his classmates weren’t going to graduation. “Some of us were the first members of our families who went to college,” he recalled in 1995. “I said, ‘By God, after five years here, I’m going to go.’ And although I was a cynical twenty-two-year-old, I really enjoyed the ceremony.”

It turns out, the excitement and joy are addictive. Ellis, with thirty years of Northeastern commencements under his belt, can’t think of a single thing he doesn’t like about the ceremonies. And Fowler, who stopped attending commencements when he left the university, says he misses them.

“I miss the backstage stuff—the conviviality, the conversation, the chance to see trustees and honorary degree recipients,” Fowler says. “And I miss the kind of energy you have at that commencement.

“In most things we do in life, there aren’t great moments,” he says. “When you get them, you really want to hold on to them.”