‘Your Story Matters’
During baccalaureate, members of the Class of 2025 are challenged to navigate a changing world with grace, compassion, and a commitment to community
Even the drizzle that fell intermittently on Miller Lawn for Colby’s 204th Baccalaureate on Saturday, May 24, could not dampen the hope or sense of celebration felt by the Class of 2025 and the families, friends, faculty, and staff who came to applaud their achievements and send them off joyfully into the future.
President David A. Greene saluted the 612 members of the Class of 2025, who came from 48 states and 60 countries to make up the largest graduating class in the College’s history, describing it as “an extraordinary class in every single way.”
The students who are leaving Mayflower Hill, diplomas in hand, are emerging into the world in an unusual moment, one that can feel a little upside down, with too much violence, vitriol, inequities, and injustices, he said.
“We seem to be in a moment where intelligence is artificial. Fact is fiction. Breaking is better than building. Sometimes, cruelty eclipses caring,” the president said. “Yet at the same time, we live in a world that is filled with goodness and beauty and people routinely doing good and important things. … How do you navigate this world? How do you create clarity out of chaos? How do we identify and hold on to the threads that will stitch our lives together and guide us through the most vexing moments?”
Some of the answers, and threads, will come from their time at Colby, he said, encouraging the students to hold the friendships they have made here close throughout their lives. Those friendships, along with what they have learned about their values and principles, will help them “cut through the noise” of the world and follow their own path.
“The more that you’re present for that journey and paying attention to it and enjoying the ride, and not just the end point, the more meaningful your life will be,” Greene said. “There’s so much joy in the unexpected. Don’t think of your life as linear. Think about it as a joyful ride that you get to author yourself. You get to decide what this looks like. There are all kinds of things that are happening in the world, but be a person who offers their own story.”
Lessons of hope, resilience and faith
Those words ring true for baccalaureate speaker Eric Motley, memoirist and deputy director of the National Gallery of Art, who grew up in Madison Park, a small community in Montgomery, Ala., founded in 1880 by a group of formerly enslaved people. His life has been shaped by the lessons of hope, self-determination, and faith that he learned there, he told the “radiant and resilient” students arrayed before him on Miller Lawn, explaining that the story lives inside of him like a heartbeat. He wrote about it in his memoir Madison Park: A Place of Hope.
“They cleared the land. They raised homes with their bare hands. And then listen to this—in their first month of living in that community together, they built not one but two buildings. A church and a school,” Motley said. “The church said they could affirm their gratitude to a God who had delivered them to a place and the possibility of a future. And the school, because while they knew that chains can be broken by emancipation, true freedom only comes through education.”
He spoke with warmth and humor about what happened in Madison Park when, as a first grader, he was demoted from a scholastic level called “rabbits” to one called “turtles.”
“My grandmother, though deeply spiritual, was also deeply practical,” Motley said. “She knew, not with a formal education, enough about biology to know that turtles are much, much slower than rabbits. And so she launched a full educational intervention.”
His grandmother asked the one woman in the community who had a college degree to help this “academically endangered child,” Motley recalled. The woman, known as Aunt Shine because “everywhere she went, light followed,” started by asking the people in the community to bring any reading material they had on hand to Motley’s house because she was going to build him a library.
Almost everyone did, Motley said. One person delivered a 1945 weather almanac. Another brought Volume N of the Encyclopedia Britannica. “Whatever you want to know about anything that begins with an N, I’m your guy,” he told the crowd with a laugh. Someone else brought a worn and wonderful volume of English verse, featuring writers like William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and William Wordsworth, one of whose poems Motley memorized and read out loud during his speech.
Aunt Shine didn’t stop there. She also asked four retired teachers to tutor him, which they did five days a week for two years. All those acts of service left an indelible impression, Motley said.
“Everywhere I go, I carry Madison Park with me. It is my compass. Here’s what I want you to know, Colby graduates: your story matters. The stories you have lived, the ones you have inherited, and most of all, the ones that you’re soon to create,” he said. “We live in a world that often tells us to be quick and clever, to be loud and bold, to go viral, to build platforms and personal brands. But the deeper call, the more enduring call, is to build community, not just careers. And you’ve done that here.”
Music and poetry to mark the occasion
Bibatshu Thapa Chhetri ’25 gave the welcome, telling his classmates that for him, the celebratory occasion nevertheless was tinged with bittersweetness because the Class of 2025 will not be together for much longer.
“We have shown that through hard work, we can find and be the good in this world. This resilience, this active spirit shines in the community of thinkers, activists, artists, scientists, athletes, innovators, and designers we see in each other, all driven to make a profound impact. That’s what makes our class so special,” he said. “As we look forward, the world might feel uncertain, but let’s find confidence in how we navigated the last four years together, united. We built that here at Colby, and we can and must continue to do so beyond this familiar ground.”
In Greene’s address, he spoke about individual students who have made an impact during their time on campus, including athletes, designers, journalists, and others. He also gave special recognition to members of sports teams competing for national championships, including the track and field, tennis, and the Women’s Lacrosse teams. The lacrosse athletes competed in the NCAA Division III Final Four for the first time in the history of the program.
“We just set the bar for excellence,” the president said.
Class Marshal Yutong “Tony” Yan ’25 gave a reading from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.
“His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings,” he said, quoting Joyce. “A world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf, and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other.”
Musical performances added pizzazz to the proceedings. Primo Cubano played during the processional and recessional, and Aleksandra Avramenko ’26, Benjamin Clifford ’25, and Samuel Xue ’25 played a jazzy rendition of My Romance, by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Later in the ceremony, Ainsley Bonang ’25, Benjamin Clifford ’25, Justin Ivanov ’25, and Mason McKee ’25 performed a heartfelt rendition of the song Maine by Noah Kahan, which brought an enthusiastic response from the audience.
Finally, Samara Gunter, associate professor of economics, gave the closing, telling the students about a saying that her family relied on when she was growing up: “If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.” She offered it to the Class of 2025 to use as they can.
“When you see something broken, fix it. When you see something done badly, take over. Do it better. If you want something done right, do it yourself. …You have all the tools we think you’ll need. Your intellect, your empathy, your friendships,” she said. “And if someone doesn’t like how you’re doing it, well, you know what to tell them. We have faith in you—go forth.”
Colby’s 204th Commencement begins at 10 a.m. Sunday, May 25, on Miller Lawn, with seniors and invited guests. Charlie Baker, former Massachusetts governor and the current president of the NCAA, will deliver the commencement address.
During commencement, Colby will give honorary degrees to Baker, Motley, David Brancaccio, host and senior editor of Marketplace Morning Report, Judy Glickman Lauder, photographer, humanitarian, and philanthropist, and Lois Lowry, award-winning novelist.
