Your turn: Graduates, you have freed yourselves. Go back for others

Editors note: The following is the 2023 Rock Valley College commencement address delivered Friday, May 19, 2023, by RVC English professor Mathew Oakes.

Graduates, it is my privilege to congratulate you on behalf of the faculty of Rock Valley College on this momentous achievement.

At these events we rightly celebrate academic excellence, marking various achievements with cords, stoles, and honors. I want to celebrate other kinds of excellence today, too.

Some of you are the first in your family to go to college, parented or fostered children or grandchildren whilein college, studied in English which is not your first language, managed a disability or ongoing health issue , worked a job to pay your tuition and support yourself while in school, descended from enslaved Africans or other oppressed people, took more than 30 minutes to get to campus by car, bus, or bicycle, grew up poor or overcame another type of obstacle.

We could not be prouder of all you have accomplished and what you will go on to do.

Your turn: What should we expect from RVC in these turbulent times?

So often, however, we think about education only in terms of what comes next: prerequisites, degree requirements, job qualifications, professional certifications, transfer institutions and so on.

These are essential and important, but they are not the only reason we support institutions of higher education like ours with public funding. We are doing much more here than ensuring a steady stream of productive workers to keep the economy humming.

American philosopher, psychologist, and educator, John Dewey said that “education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” What did he mean?

Yes, you specialized in some way here, developing skills and knowledge as a historian, mechanic, nurse, chemist, musician, or engineer. But underneath all that, what did you learn? Who have you become? How do your soul and mind hum now?

Earlier this semester, Tim Spielman, RVC’s director of advising, reminded me of the origins of liberal education — that term we use to describe our broad curriculum in the arts and sciences.

It has nothing to do with partisanship, but it is rooted in a political claim of what it means to be alive.

Liberal, here, comes from the Latin, līberālis — the etymological ancestor to words like liberty, liberated, and liberation.

This is Freedom Education. In an age where we see the terrifying rise of fascism across the globe and here at home, Freedom Education is as important now as it ever was.

In this moment when state governments suppress democratically elected voices, remove books from library shelves, police who belongs in public spaces, and censor what teachers can and cannot teach in classrooms, education for freedom is as important as it ever was.

And make no mistake, my friends, there is no such thing as remaining neutral.

Anyone who tells you that education should just “stick to the facts” forgets that Galileo spent his life under housearrest for asserting the then audacious fact that the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around.

For as long as facts threaten the powerful, education is and will always remain political.

But you already knew this, for our very presence here together protests the notion that education is only for the elite, the rich, the blue-blooded, and the oligarchs.

You know better. You had the audacity to demand your Freedom Education knowing that the educated mind can never be caged. And if you have really absorbed this lesson, this freedom, then one thing has sunk deep into your bones: It is your birthright as a free person to ask why and demand an answer.

Our freedom is interwoven, friends. I need you free. You need each other free. Your family and community need you free. Your ancestors and your descendants need you free.

Icon of the Civil Rights Movement Fannie Lou Hammer said it this way to the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

And at the end of the day, that is the difference between power and freedom. Power contracts where freedom expands.

So may we all live up to the example of Harriet Tubman, the formerly enslaved conductor of the Underground Railroad who, as my 8-year-old daughter put it, “freed herself and then went back for others.”

Graduates, you have freed yourselves. Go back for others.

Thank you and congratulations.

Mathew Oakes is a Rock Valley College professor of English and the 2023 Faculty of the Year at Rock Valley College.

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Your turn: Graduates, you have freed yourselves. Go back for others