You didn’t have to be one of the newly minted master’s degree recipients to figure out the message Sunday at Pacific Lutheran University’s commencement exercises.
The graduates-to-be processed into the Tacoma Dome through a cordon of 51 flags from nations around the world.
A distinguished alumna who has worked the past 21 years in State Department posts, from Sweden to Turkmenistan to Namibia, delivered the commencement address.
And the student speaker was an effervescent geosciences major from Trinidad and Tobago, whose path has taken her from home in the Caribbean to the cozy Parkland campus to three months of study in Botswana.
“I entered the tunnel as a Trinian,” Candice Hughes told her fellow graduates, “and leave as a world citizen.”
The sense of global mission was impossible to miss in Sunday’s commencement. With 700 graduates, it was the largest in PLU’s history, university president Loren Anderson said.
As they leave school they should go intent on “helping to shape a just, peaceful and sustainable world,” he said.
Provost Patricia O’Connell Killen said 40 percent of the graduates Sunday participated in study abroad programs at some point in their PLU careers.
The 51 flags represented the countries where PLU students studied or the home countries of the school’s international graduates.
Ambassador Joyce A. Barr, the commencement speaker, could not resist the temptation to press the latest products of her alma mater to join her in a career in the U.S. foreign service.
She was the United States’ chief representative to the African nation of Namibia from 2004 to 2007 and now serves as executive director of East Asia & Pacific Foreign Affairs at the State Department in Washington, D.C.
Barr grew up on the Hilltop and on Tacoma’s East Side, graduated from Lincoln High School and praised PLU for having the foresight to help her with financial aid to make it through school.
She’s since earned master’s degrees from Harvard and the National Defense University, and Sunday was presented with an honorary doctorate.
But back when the burden of studying and working 20-30 hours a week got her thinking about quitting, she said, a PLU professor or adviser was always there to encourage her to stick it out.
“A PLU education is more than the best that money can buy,” she said, “it is the best that people can give.”
Hughes, the student speaker, would not disagree. She’s the first to graduate in a new PLU exchange with the University of the West Indies.
She said she’ll now go to work for her nation’s Ministry of Community Development, Culture and Gender Affairs, here and there, to promote the exchange program. It also sends PLU students to the Caribbean to study the region’s culture and society.
“Going abroad you get a sense of how people view the U.S., where you are on the whole global scope of life,” Hughes said after Sunday’s ceremony. “It gives you a whole different perspective. You come back to campus with a different perspective on life, on what is important … on a lot of things that you might have taken for granted before.”
More than 6,000 family members and friends filled up to the top rows in one half of the Tacoma Dome.
Cheers went up from a section over here, then a section over there, when each graduate’s name was announced and he or she strode across the stage.
The graduates themselves rose for a standing ovation when it was Jocelyn Maureen Denham’s turn. The 21-year-old history major died in an April 25 car crash near Brewster, Okanogan County. PLU junior Brady Freeman, her boyfriend, was also killed.
Denham’s sister Rachel accepted her diploma on her behalf.
Michael Gilbert: 253-597-8921
