Page 10 - ProvidenceChristianCollege_Magazine_Spring2018

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LiVing Water
Dr. David Corbin’s commencement address to the Class of 2018
On an overcast day twenty-five years ago on the campus of the University of New Hampshire, Pulitzer Prize winning historian David McCullough delivered a commencement address to over 2,000 graduates. A member of that 1993 graduating class, I was not in attendance.
My choice would have been otherwise unnoteworthy had it not been to the great frustration of my father who, when I relayed my plans not to attend the ceremony the night before, replied:
“How could you do this to your family, David? Don’t you realize how important this is to us?”
His were not the complaints of a parent angered because I was the first in my family to graduate from college. My father was upset because I had come from a family of college graduates.
As a family, we had never been wealthy, prominent, or influential. Yet, he explained that we took things like commencement
ceremonies seriously because they represented the only consistent markers of accomplishment for a family that had otherwise achieved very little.
But I didn’t budge. I didn’t go the next day. He attended in my place, grabbed an extra program that he gruffly gave me weeks later, still angered by my uncaring decision not to attend. I’m not sure if he was ever more upset with me than that weekend. Of all the interactions that produced intense regret when years later, he passed away unexpectedly, that was the interaction that played over and over again in my head.
Regret doesn’t flow easily at 21, if at all. Not because I thought David McCullough had nothing important to say. But because I reasoned that the whole fuss associated with ceremonies was of little value, that what was truly important in college was what took place in the classroom or in
the library when no one was looking. I still in part carry this idea with me, and never quite have enjoyed commencement
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