More than 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students, joined by family members and friends and university faculty, staff and administrators, celebrated the university’s 110th spring commencement.
Texas Tech University President Jon Whitmore, who earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree at WSU, reminisced about his first campus experiences during his morning address to liberal arts graduates.
“Let me take you back 43 years to September 1963,” Whitmore said. “I was a nervous, excited,
“From this timid beginning, filled with anticipation and apprehension,
The Texas Tech president said graduates should strive to prosper, both financially and, even more important, by giving time to their community, their nation and their family and friends.
He also urged graduates to “help fix things.”
“Along your march through life, each of you will see and hear about things that are broken or in need of repair. You may witness mistreatment, unfairness, inequity, injustice, cruelty, even. Don’t, like the ostrich, bury your head in the sand. And don’t think for one minute that you cannot make a difference. The world advances by individual decisions by individual people,” Whitmore said.
WSU Regent Joe King, a former state legislator who owns Joe King and Associates, a public affairs firm, talked to graduates from the colleges of education and business at the midday ceremony. He told how a decision about education made by his mother changed her life and that of her family as well.
“When she was 13 years old, my mother’s father, a sheepherder, died. The family was forced to move and she started high school in a large, new school,” King said. “One day, a teacher asked my mom what she was going to do about college. This was during the Depression. My mother and her mother were taking in laundry, baby sitting for 15 cents an hour. They were a lot more concerned about survival and putting food on the table than about college.
“My mom replied that she had never thought of going to college. The teacher replied, ‘Why not?’ ‘Why not?’ Two simple words to fire the imagination of a scared, desperately poor young woman. It took her a while, but she got her degree, the same year I graduated from high school. And she spent 30 some years as an elementary school teacher inspiring hope in countless young lives.”
King talked of the important role that teachers play by instilling hope in their students. He said the world of business can be an important source of hope as well.
“Business is a lot more than selling goods and services, more than making a profit, more than making widgets. Businesses and the people who run them offer hope: hope to a world where half the inhabitants nearly three billion people live on less than two dollars a day. Hope to a world where children die of diseases they shouldn’t die of. Hope to a world where poverty and ignorance result in unspeakable brutality to one another.”
Edmund O. Schweitzer III, founder and president of Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories in
“In formal education, there are standards, things you had to accomplish, based on your field and degree. There is some conformity in all of this. You can even see it in the robes, caps, gowns, colors we wear today. You’ve mastered the discipline that you came here to study that will be so important in your professional lives, the ability to remember and process and use information,” Schweitzer said.
“Now, it’s time to create and to innovate. In a world driven by international competition and business, our success may lie in creativity and innovation.”
Schweitzer developed a digital relay as his WSU doctoral project. In 1982, this led to the creation of Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories.
“Innovation is the process of making changes to something that already exists, by introducing something new. Innovation includes getting it done, getting it to work. Creativity and innovation are different. You can’t have innovation without creativity, but there are plenty of creations that never cross the chasm to become innovations,” said Schweitzer, who spoke to graduates in agricultural, human, and natural resource sciences, engineering and architecture, pharmacy, nursing, sciences and veterinary medicine.
“Be creative and use your organizational and social skills and your knowledge to get your creations out of their shells. Work hard to make them come alive as innovations and inventions which solve the problems of today and the future,” he said.
WSU President V. Lane Rawlins presided at all three ceremonies. ASWSU President Issac Wells, Vice President Michael King and DaVina Hoyt, president of the Graduate and Professional Students Association, also addressed the graduates.
