Each spring, for about 10 days, more than 400 names become almost as familiar to me as my own. I am the name reader at commencement.
At my small, public college in north-central Vermont, we don’t actually graduate that many at one time. But because we regard commencement as a meaningful ritual best celebrated in the company of classmates, we have a liberal policy toward participation, even if a student falls just short of having satisfied all graduation requirements.
It’s not that pronouncing the names of student “walkers” is particularly challenging, in the conventional sense. After all, my college is not especially diverse, although we do have the occasional “Drljacic,” for instance. Vermont is changing demographically; but the state is still mostly monochromatic and unicultural.
The name challenge reflects both the joys as well as the rigors of working here. Our students, two-thirds of whom are Vermonters, come from modest economic backgrounds. Straitened circumstances mean limited experiences, so college tends to stretch our students in ways barely conceived of at the point of their admission.
The mechanisms are familiar ones: undergraduate research, internships, research, study travel, service learning. Nevertheless, at the end, having inhabited a name for a couple of decades at least, many students find it difficult to imagine that it might be pronounced differently from the family preference. “It’s said the way it’s spelled, you idiot,” one can almost read between the lines of the information card we ask prospective commencement participants to fill out.
For me, however, the puzzles occupy my time in the run-up to commencement. Is the surname “Couture,” as in “haute couture,” or as in “Koo-cher”? “Edel-stine,” or "-steen”? Is a student’s first name “Tar-a” or “Tear-a”? And so on.
Often it’s a matter of identity. One of our finest and best-known students surprised me with the revelation that she had stoically endured the mispronunciation of her name through four honor-filled years. Yet, because her French-Canadian roots were so meaningful to her, she appreciated being asked about her name so that her identity might be properly expressed as she walked across the platform.
That example could be multiplied many times. So I e-mail students and faculty, request voicemails, check with advisers, corner folks in the dining hall. I make phonetic notes on alphabetical lists of possible attendees and transpose them to the “walker” cards that students hand me before crossing the stage. Technology? Using it will have to await a future year. Right now the task is to try and get it right for the moment.
No doubt, many of you who are reading this take similar pains. The reason is not because it matters in some ultimate existential or intellectual sense, or because it is part of our job descriptions. We do so, rather, because what matters is to model painstaking preparation and hard work to our students and to make the academic ritual special for them and their families.
Although on commencement day I may have drawn the short straw compared with those on the platform who shake hands or present certificates, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
