The air is sweet with success all around the world as another academic year draws to a close. A rightful sense of accomplishment and pride abounds as graduates, their families and friends, educators who guided them, and communities that supported them come together to celebrate this momentous occasion. It’s a milestone that marks the culmination of years of hard work, dedication, and perseverance, as graduates have demonstrated their commitment to excellence in various forms.

As I reflect on my own academic celebrations down through the years as an educator and as a student, one stands taller than the rest: Alderson-Broaddus University’s Honors Convocation on April 5, 1997. Held in Wilcox Chapel, it was the university’s forty-fourth annual convocation, and I was the speaker. I can’t begin to express how honored I was to be returning to my alma mater to speak on such an important occasion. What made it even more special was the fact that the invitation came from a former classmate, Dr. Kenneth Yount. Ken and I were both 1969 A-B grads, and as seniors, he was President of Student Government, and I was Vice-President. Ken went on to become A-B’s Provost/Vice-President for Academic Affairs, and, when he invited me to come back home to our mountaintop campus, I was serving as the Training Coordinator, United States Copyright Office, the Library of Congress.

In delivering my remarks, I had one goal: ignite a spark of introspection and perseverance among those being honored and those in attendance. I believe that my remarks achieved that goal, and I believe that what I had to say then is equally relevant to graduates today whenever they might be on their journey to tomorrow.

I am honored to share my remarks today with readers all around the world.

“Winning from Within”

Dr. Yount, President Markwood, Faculty, Honored Students, Parents, Guests: thank you for such a warm welcome.

When Dr. Yount invited me here today, he asked that I do three things.  First, he asked me to sprinkle my remarks with humor. Second, he asked that I speak from the heart about what Alderson-Broaddus has meant to me. Third, he asked that I talk about academic excellence. As an aside, he noted that I had to do all this–make you laugh, make you cry, and make you think–in no more than 15 minutes. What a challenge. In fact, I confess that it makes me feel rather like a mosquito in a nudist colony. I know exactly what I’m supposed to do. I just don’t know quite where to begin. 

Thank you for your laughter. You prove that I can be humorous. Believing brevity to be the soul of wit, now let me speak from the heart, from the heart about my experience here at A-B, from the heart about excellence, and from the heart about winning from within. 

I do so willingly. I spent four wonderful years on this mountaintop. They were so good, in fact, that I would live them again, and never once say, “If I knew then what I know now.” That’s no small concession, considering that I will turn fifty later this year. But I would live those four years again, because I am able to say–and do say, day after day–that A-B touched my life in ways that made lasting differences.

Let me explain. I grew up in a small town, the sixth child of a West Virginia coal miner. My mom and dad always provided well for us, but in reality, they lived rather anxiously from coal-strike to coal-strike, from pay-check to pay-check. But they rose above those financial challenges and instilled in my brothers and sisters and me a work ethic, the likes of which I have never seen. They made us know that there is nobility in work, that there is honor in work, that there is dignity in work, and that there is love in work. My dad labored for fifty years in the coal mines, but neither he nor my mother ever said to me, “You can’t grow up to be a coal miner.” Instead, they taught me this, and it stands as my earliest lesson, my greatest tribute to them: 

If a job is once begun,
Never leave until it’s done.
Be its labor great or small,
Do it well, or not at all.

That quote has governed my life–shaped my life–in ways that probably only a psychiatrist could unravel. But at least one part of it is woven in a continuous thread that requires no untwisting. As early as the fourth grade, I fell in love with words and how words relate to one another and how they serve as building blocks for ideas. I fell in love with the eight parts of speech. I fell in love with diagraming sentences. I took my parents’ guidance at face value and applied it to my love of English.

My classmates, of course, had no idea of how possessed I was by my love of the language. They had an even more feeble understanding of how driven I was by the work ethic that my parents had instilled in me. But I was possessed by my love of words. And I was driven by my work of putting words together. And if my classmates did not quite understand it then, they soon came to realize that they had better step out of my way whenever it came to moving to the front of the class in spelling bees, in parsing, in diagraming sentences, in writing assignments, and in essay competitions. Those honors and all those related to English were mine exclusively. I had claimed them. I knew the subject. I loved the subject. And I had no fear of hard work.

I can reflect smugly on my childhood accomplishments now. They were not easy accomplishments then. Every trip to the front of the class was characterized by no small degree of fear and trepidation. After all, I was only nine years old. But I believed my parents and never once questioned their guidance. I studied hard, worked hard, and played hard at what I loved to do. I knew from the start that my life’s labor would center around English, teaching English, whatever that might have meant to a fourth grader. I thought then that it meant, somehow, making the world a better place by helping others understand the parts of speech and helping them diagram sentences so that they could express their ideas clearly and, obviously, in a grammatically correct manner. Much later in school, I learned what the study of the English language really entailed, but in my nine-year-old world, it was quite sufficient for me to believe that studying English was a great labor, to know that my accomplishments in the field outdistanced my classmates. and to know that I would not leave my pursuit until it was done. 

Looking back, I am not too surprised by this turn of events in my life. Remember. I grew up in a small coal mining town. We had no library. Now let me tell you this. We had only two books in our house: the King James version of the Bible and Webster’s dictionary.  My mother dog-eared the pages of the Bible and preached and prayed it to the rest of us. Though always mindful of–and let me add influenced by–her spiritual travels, I dog-eared Webster and pursued my own adventures with the English language.

Imagine my parents’ surprise when I declared, again, as a fourth grader, that I was not only going to college but also that I was going to complete a doctoral degree in English. I had not the foggiest idea of how I, in a coal-strike to coal- strike, pay-check to pay-check household, would ever get there. But I believed fully that if I followed by parents’ guidance, stuck with what I loved, worked hard at it, somehow, the door would be opened. I went forward with blind faith, declaring finally in my senior year that I was going to West Virginia University or to the University of Richmond. I applied to both. Then I met Tom Bee, the Admissions Counselor here at A-B, when he visited my high school. I had no idea that his visit would redefine my life. But it did. He encouraged me to apply to A-B. I did and was accepted here as well as at my other two choices.

Thank God, Alderson-Broaddus saw my needs. It saw my needs financially. Remember my dad, the coal miner. It saw my needs spiritually. Remember my mother, the prayer warrior. It saw my needs intellectually. Remember my dream of becoming an English teacher.

How well I remember the summer of 1965 when I visited this campus for the first time. I had no decision to make. I knew from the start, in the inner recesses of my soul, that I was home, not in the Robert Frost sense that “Home is the place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in” but rather in his sense of the word that “Home is something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” I am not certain I deserved the home that Alderson-Broaddus made for me when it took me in, in 1965.  And I am even less certain that I deserve to be invited back on an occasion of this importance. But it’s good to be home again, and I thank you heartily. 

I use as the springboard for my remarks today an oft-told story about an event that took place in Thailand. The year, 1957. The city, Bangkok. The players, a group of monks and a group of construction workers. The situation, a new highway that was to run smack dab in the middle of the temple. The monks had to move a 10 ½ foot tall clay Buddha from their temple to make room for progress. When the crane began to lift the giant idol, the weight of it was so tremendous that it began to crack. The head monk–the abbot–aside from being concerned about the immediate damage, became even more alarmed as rain began to fall. He ordered that the statue be lowered to the ground and that it be covered with a large canvas tarp to protect it from the rain.

Later that night, the abbot went to check on the Buddha. He shined his flashlight under the tarp to see if it was staying dry. As the light reached the crack, he noticed a gleam shining back. He looked closer at the gleam of light, believing that there was something underneath the clay. He fetched a hammer and chisel and began to chip away at the clay. As he knocked off shards of clay, the gleam grew brighter and brighter, and by morning, the abbot stood face to face with an extraordinary solid gold Buddha, weighing more than 5 tons.

Historians believe that several hundred years earlier, monks had covered the Buddha with an outer covering of clay to keep their treasure from being looted by an invading Burmese army. Unfortunately, they slaughtered all the monks, and their golden Buddha remained a secret until that fateful date in 1957 when the abbot recognized the gleam beneath the surface and dared to chip away at the clay, to find the real gold within. 

What a splendid discovery. Finding real gold, solid gold, within. In many ways, we are all like that Buddha, pure gold inside but covered with a hard outer shell that hides our “golden essence,” “our inner self,” “our real self.” Much like the abbot with the hammer and chisel, our challenge is to break through the surface to find our true essence, to find our pure gold, to win from within. 

Today’s Honors Convocation confirms that you have been hard at work with your own hammers and chisels. You have chipped away across academic classes and across academic disciplines. I am more than gratified to see that excellence in writing is being recognized in several fields. I am heartened to see an emphasis on Greek academic excellence. I am encouraged and touched and saddened–all at the same time–by the growing number of memorial awards. At the risk of singling out any, lest they be given a prominence equally deserved by all the others, I cannot help but note the awards being given in memory of Dr. Ruth Shearer and Dr. Louise Callison, two of my own English professors.

I salute you. You have broken through your own hard outer shell. Your own true excellence shows. Your own true gold shines. I salute Alderson- Broaddus as well, for its role in guiding you throughout this time of personal discovery and growth. Today is a shared celebration. As an institution and as individuals, you should feel rightfully proud of your accomplishments.

As I stand here, though, I cannot help but ask myself, “Why aren’t all your classmates being honored?” Wouldn’t that be wonderful? To have so many students recognized today that Wilcox Chapel would be filled in a celebration of collective institutional excellence.

In case I have not made my point clearly enough already, let me hammer it home one more time: we are all solid gold. We are all capable of achieving excellence. Just as I have never met an ugly person–and I have not–so have I never had a student who is not gold, not capable of excellence. Never forget that point for one moment. If you do forget it, now or later on in your life, your competition will do you in. Ounce for ounce, your classmates in the world are just as much solid gold as you and just as capable of distinguishing themselves as you. They, too, can achieve excellence. And to varying degrees, they are.  Like you, they have begun chipping away at their outer clay. But unlike you, they haven’t broken fully through the surface, yet, to see what’s inside. That’s what an undergraduate education is all about: taking the time to look within, to do self-exploration, to bring out self-awareness, and to find out who you are.  At no time in your life, even when you pursue graduate studies–and I hope that many of you will–at no time in your life will you ever again have the luxury of focusing, twenty four hours a day, on winning from within–on finding yourself–and of being sheltered all the while from the cares of a 9 to 5 work-a-day world by an institution like Alderson-Broaddus, of being nurtured by such caring and dedicated and learned faculty as are assembled with us today.  But I believe that you, unlike your classmates, have chipped away more broadly and more deeply. You have taken your pursuit of excellence to a deeper level. You have engaged yourselves in a more spiritual kind of search, a more personal search that has helped you become knowledge navigators in the academic fields you love best.    

But, looking ahead, what do you do?  It’s simple. 

● It has but three words. Stick with it. 

● It has but two words. Chip away. 

● It has but one word. Persevere. 

If you don’t stick with it, chip away, and persevere, your honor today will be short-lived. Here’s why. If you don’t continue to remain engaged in a spiritual search to find more and more of your real gold, more and more of your inner essence, if you don’t continue to develop your talents to the fullest, you will soon get side-tracked. You will soon start looking for self-love in all the wrong places, and you will ignore your own deep-rooted needs.  You will get caught up in the busy-ness of life, of trying to demonstrate your self-worth through external sources, through achieving a material worth that will be obvious to others–that they will notice, that they will validate, and that they will appreciate. That approach may well bring you pleasure, accomplishments, a coveted job, big bucks, status, and even success. Just keep in mind, though, that the world is filled with people who have spent their entire lives validating themselves through external sources. All too often, their stories end on the sad note of personal regret and profound unhappiness.   

Don’t wait for others to approve you. Respect who you are. Accept yourself. Approve yourself. Continue to tend to your soul, to develop the real you that lies beneath the surface, and to go for your own gold. Doing what you love should govern not just how you spend your time now, not just how you pursue college, but how you pursue your life. 

Find what you love. Then do it with dedication, with determination, with daring, with ceaseless work, and with dogged perseverance. If you do, just as you have distinguished yourselves today, so too will you lead lives of distinction that will bring honor to you, to your families, and to Alderson-Broaddus.

Again, I salute all of you on your accomplishments, and, again, I thank you for including me in your celebration.