On a sunny morning, joined by family and friends on the Green, the 1,649 men and women who received Dartmouth degrees, including 1,067 undergraduates, passed from students to alumni in the College's commencement exercises.
Graduates and families responded well to keynote speaker and honorary degree recipient General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt '78, who urged the class to be both "great" and "good."
Immelt addressed head-on the idea that many '04s were upset over the selection of a perhaps uninspiring businessman as graduation speaker, when other universities asked well-known politicians or entertainers to be their graduation speakers.
"You know The Dartmouth quoted students calling me an uninspiring and uninteresting choice for commencement speaker," Immelt said. "You would have preferred Bono or Jon Stewart or Colin Powell and you have every right to expect that the fortune your parents paid for your education should get you a world leader. But do you really believe that an aging rock star would speak to the class that created Keggy, a human beer keg, to be the new college mascot?"
He then told the audience that, as head of GE, he offered some positives as a graduation speaker. He told the graduates that if they wanted a jet engine, he could "hook you up, wholesale." He said he could rename the reality show "Fear Factor" on NBC either "The Dartmouth First Year Show" or "Saturday Night on Webster Avenue."
In the difficult times that Immelt said the Class of 2004 will face, he said they needed to be both great and good, a topic he stressed throughout his speech.
"Great in the sense of competing to be your best and good in the sense of building trust through compassion, humanity and love," Immelt said.
In many ways, as an alumnus, his speech was improved, as he talked about his Dartmouth experiences that included the stealing of the Hanover Inn's Christmas tree while streaking, "but there are parts of this story that GE shareholders need not know."
"So I'm not here today because I'm a star -- I'm not Bono or Jon Stewart or Colin Powell," Immelt said. "Rather I'm here because I'm just like you. I left this campus as a 22-year-old with nothing but a good education and a sense of confidence.
"But there are five values that I learned right here at Dartmouth that helped me build a life where I could do my best without ever losing a sense for the type of person I wanted to be."
Those five values, Immelt said, were commitment to learning, working hard with passion and courage, giving, confidence and optimism.
Valedictorian Savina Rizova, who finished Dartmouth with a 4.0 GPA, focused her speech on celebrating the College's "international orientation," which she said helped her during her time here. She was the second consecutive valedictorian from the First English Language High School in Sofia, Bulgaria.
She praised foreign study programs and full financial aid for students like herself, "a poor high-school student from a small faraway country."
She also praised the College's focus on "thinking outside the box." She recounted a story from a class she took, "The U.S. Foreign Relations from 1945 On." Her class was assigned to write a paper investigating the validity of several claims made by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. One student actually telephoned Kissinger himself, rather than relying on exclusively published sources.
"This amazing phone call will remain in my memory as a brilliant manifestation of the intellectual creativity and curiosity that Dartmouth nourishes," Rizova said.
