Restarting at long last!
After a long hiatus, I’m re-launching my blog with a slightly different format. I intend to post twice monthly, one my own piece and one a guest-written piece. So, here is my first blog in ages.
As many of you know, Southwest Minnesota State University has a yearly distinction, the conferring of the Cathy Cowan Award, an honor given to a faculty or staff member who has over five years of service and has demonstrated devotion to the campus and the community. I am this year’s recipient.
With all due humility, here is the text of my acceptance. (For those who do not know, the mascot of Southwest is the Mustang. We are the Mustangs!)
After a long hiatus, I’m re-launching my blog with a slightly different format. I intend to post twice monthly, one my own piece and one a guest-written piece. So, here is my first blog in ages.
As many of you know, Southwest Minnesota State University has a yearly distinction, the conferring of the Cathy Cowan Award, an honor given to a faculty or staff member who has over five years of service and has demonstrated devotion to the campus and the community. I am this year’s recipient.
With all due humility, here is the text of my acceptance. (For those who do not know, the mascot of Southwest is the Mustang. We are the Mustangs!)
Cowan Award Thank You Speech
SMSU Commencement, May 10, 2014
President Gores, Distinguished Dignitaries and Guests, Parents and Family of our Graduates, Faculty and Staff, and today’s Graduates, thank you all for acknowledging me as this year’s Cowan Award Recipient. I am touched and honored more than I can say.
My thanks also to Marianne and Elaine, my wife and daughter, who have helped and encouraged me throughout my twenty-five years here. In fact, today marks forty years of my academic career, from high school teaching and college teaching in four states coast-to-coast and eventually to Southwest in 1989.
I also want to thank my nominating team for their belief that I am worthy of this distinction, especially since I know all the other 11 Cowan Award recipients. I stand in awe among and with the pillars of this university. Thank you.
But it is to you, our Esteemed Graduates, that I want to speak:
A girl enters a wardrobe and finds herself in Narnia. A hobbit leaves his hole and ends up fighting dragons. Dr. Who enters his TARDIS and lands wherever the space-time continuum takes him. You entered Southwest years ago, and here you are today.
These all seem different, but they are all in fact the same.
Here’s how: Maybe you came right from high school or maybe as a transfer student. As a graduate of another college or a parent whose children just entered kindergarten, or even a high school student beginning your university career early. You might be someone who crossed a street, the state, a state line, or an ocean; it does not matter. At whatever stage of life you came from, you stepped out of your familiar world into a world you did not and could not truly imagine before.
This excellent university has brought you to places as far from your previous lives as any magic doorway could. And it has helped make you a citizen of a broader world, a more thoughtful and deeply-concerned citizen, an inquisitive citizen.
Oh, Southwest may have trained you for a job; perhaps you start next week. Or, it prepared you for graduate school, law or medical school, or to return to that family farm or a family business. Whatever and wherever, you return as a traveler from a foreign land. And as you move on from Southwest to the next stage of your lives, you do so with vision and ideas expanded from those you once had when you came. Savor this! Savor all of this!
Wherever you land next and next and next, you go there transformed by your efforts, indeed, sometimes transformed in spite of your efforts. Savor that transformation! Be proud of it. As Thomas Paine reminds us: “The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”
This dark world needs your enlightened citizenship.
In her address at a commencement several years ago, J.K. Rowling stated, “We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.”
And so, Graduates, of whom we are so proud, as your amazing lives unfold, transform your world. Transform our world. Bring it your light. Imagine for us all a better world.
And if in a year or ten or twenty-five, when you look back on the road you’ve just trod, let no one, including yourself, ever say, “You did too little with your life; you shone too dim; all because you dreamed too small.” Dream BIG with your lives and your loved ones, with your communities and your careers.
Play BIG.
And remember always, you are not Shetland ponies!
You are Mustangs!
Play BIG!
Congratulations once again and thanks to all of you for allowing me this slice of your wonderful day.
*
If you are a longtime reader, thanks for looking once more at my blog. If you are new to the Eclectic Blog, welcome.
At this point in my career, I am off for the summer and will teach only 66% next academic year. The following two academic years, I will teach 50% each year. At that point, I will fully retire. This change allows me to write and publish more. The Marsco Dissident, now available in e-download only, will be available in print this summer. (Details forthcoming.) Marsco Triumphant, Book II of the four-part Marsco Saga, will be available in print and e-download in December 2014. Watch for them.
Thank you all for checking out my blog and for checking out my fiction. I will be posting a guest blog by Tessa Miller, one of the main characters in The Marsco Dissident, in about two weeks. She will be speaking of her frustrations with the Marsco world and her life just before she enters at the start of Chapter 1. I’m sure you’ll enjoy hearing from her.
SMSU Commencement, May 10, 2014
President Gores, Distinguished Dignitaries and Guests, Parents and Family of our Graduates, Faculty and Staff, and today’s Graduates, thank you all for acknowledging me as this year’s Cowan Award Recipient. I am touched and honored more than I can say.
My thanks also to Marianne and Elaine, my wife and daughter, who have helped and encouraged me throughout my twenty-five years here. In fact, today marks forty years of my academic career, from high school teaching and college teaching in four states coast-to-coast and eventually to Southwest in 1989.
I also want to thank my nominating team for their belief that I am worthy of this distinction, especially since I know all the other 11 Cowan Award recipients. I stand in awe among and with the pillars of this university. Thank you.
But it is to you, our Esteemed Graduates, that I want to speak:
A girl enters a wardrobe and finds herself in Narnia. A hobbit leaves his hole and ends up fighting dragons. Dr. Who enters his TARDIS and lands wherever the space-time continuum takes him. You entered Southwest years ago, and here you are today.
These all seem different, but they are all in fact the same.
Here’s how: Maybe you came right from high school or maybe as a transfer student. As a graduate of another college or a parent whose children just entered kindergarten, or even a high school student beginning your university career early. You might be someone who crossed a street, the state, a state line, or an ocean; it does not matter. At whatever stage of life you came from, you stepped out of your familiar world into a world you did not and could not truly imagine before.
This excellent university has brought you to places as far from your previous lives as any magic doorway could. And it has helped make you a citizen of a broader world, a more thoughtful and deeply-concerned citizen, an inquisitive citizen.
Oh, Southwest may have trained you for a job; perhaps you start next week. Or, it prepared you for graduate school, law or medical school, or to return to that family farm or a family business. Whatever and wherever, you return as a traveler from a foreign land. And as you move on from Southwest to the next stage of your lives, you do so with vision and ideas expanded from those you once had when you came. Savor this! Savor all of this!
Wherever you land next and next and next, you go there transformed by your efforts, indeed, sometimes transformed in spite of your efforts. Savor that transformation! Be proud of it. As Thomas Paine reminds us: “The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”
This dark world needs your enlightened citizenship.
In her address at a commencement several years ago, J.K. Rowling stated, “We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.”
And so, Graduates, of whom we are so proud, as your amazing lives unfold, transform your world. Transform our world. Bring it your light. Imagine for us all a better world.
And if in a year or ten or twenty-five, when you look back on the road you’ve just trod, let no one, including yourself, ever say, “You did too little with your life; you shone too dim; all because you dreamed too small.” Dream BIG with your lives and your loved ones, with your communities and your careers.
Play BIG.
And remember always, you are not Shetland ponies!
You are Mustangs!
Play BIG!
Congratulations once again and thanks to all of you for allowing me this slice of your wonderful day.
*
If you are a longtime reader, thanks for looking once more at my blog. If you are new to the Eclectic Blog, welcome.
At this point in my career, I am off for the summer and will teach only 66% next academic year. The following two academic years, I will teach 50% each year. At that point, I will fully retire. This change allows me to write and publish more. The Marsco Dissident, now available in e-download only, will be available in print this summer. (Details forthcoming.) Marsco Triumphant, Book II of the four-part Marsco Saga, will be available in print and e-download in December 2014. Watch for them.
Thank you all for checking out my blog and for checking out my fiction. I will be posting a guest blog by Tessa Miller, one of the main characters in The Marsco Dissident, in about two weeks. She will be speaking of her frustrations with the Marsco world and her life just before she enters at the start of Chapter 1. I’m sure you’ll enjoy hearing from her.
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