The Spence School’s graduating class this year looked like no other class that had walked before it.

 

The 57 students of the Class of 2017 entered The Church of the Heavenly Rest on June 9, 2017, donning academic robes over their white attire—a first in Spence’s history.

 

This year, students wrote to Head of School Bodie Brizendine expressing their belief that “the time has come to reimagine the Spence Commencement, not by rejecting tradition but by adding a new one.” The young women sought to “shift the attention from what we’re wearing to what we’ve achieved,” and both Brizendine and the 2017 Commencement speaker Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University President and Lincoln Professor of History, commended them for their thoughtful letter and efforts.

 

Attendees first heard opening remarks from Brizendine and President of the Board of Trustees William L. Jacob III and enjoyed hearing Select Choir sing Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do” and the Glee Club sing Adele’s “When We Were Young.”

 

Adia K. ’17 delivered the senior speech, which celebrated the different makeup of the student body. “We have learned to embrace such differences and find interest in other people’s experiences and backgrounds,” Adia said. “Our differences do not set us apart but rather bring us together. Each day, we walk through the Red Doors bound together by the unbreakable bond of Spence.”

 

She encouraged class members to be grateful for the opportunities they have received and also take responsibility to “harness the power of our voices for the greater good and to prove how capable women are.” She also mourned the loss of beloved history teacher Molly Woodroofe this year and welcomed her younger sister to the Upper School next year.

 

Finally, Adia encouraged the class to “take risks, be vulnerable [and] challenge yourself.”

 

Remy G. ’17 then provided an introduction for the Commencement speaker, noting that Dr. Faust’s grandmother was a Spence alumna.

 

In Dr. Faust's speech, she described her grandmother, Isabella Tyson Gilpin, Class of 1912, as a “steel magnolia and an iron fist in a velvet glove.” Gilpin was a boarder at Spence and was a spectacular student; her science teacher, Miss Crowninshield, encouraged her to go to college, but Gilpin wrote to her parents saying, “I don’t want to go to college.” In this time, very few women went to college and they did not yet have the right to vote, she explained.

 

“Even Miss Spence’s School could not overcome the limited educational ambitions my grandmother had internalized,” Dr. Faust noted. “…Yet a century later, here we are. All 57 of you bound for colleges and universities and filled with dreams and ambitions. So I want to talk for a moment about how, through education, we come to imagine ourselves differently from the way others sometimes imagine us. For even though my grandmother rejected the idea of college, Miss Spence’s School instilled in her an intellectual curiosity, an insatiable appetite for books and learning, and a love of the arts that shaped her whole life and made her a vigorous advocate for my education and my opportunities.”

 

While many advances for women have been made since 1912, Dr. Faust highlighted that women hold only 20 percent of seats in the U.S. Senate, are CEOs of only 6 percent of Fortune 500 companies and make up only 30 percent of full professors across all academic fields. But she insisted that the graduates had the power to change this, noting that “one way is through your excellence.”

 

“You have been held to very high standards,” Dr. Faust said. “Sustain them. Another way is to persist—for yourself and for others.”

 

Dr. Faust concluded by saying she could feel the palpable presence of her grandmother inside the church.

 

“I like to think that her spirit is here today, handing you flowers and cheering you on as you depart for your new intellectual and moral adventure,” she said. “Go well, Class of 2017. Celebrate what you have learned. Keep learning for life, and like my grandmother, for a lifetime, passing on the gifts that Spence has passed on to you.”  

 

After Dr. Faust’s remarks, Head of the Upper School Michèle Krauthamer and Academic Dean Douglas Brophy joined Brizendine in presenting the diplomas to the graduates before Brizendine’s final words about integrity—“that important weaving of your inner and outer selves.”

 

“And as you leave these Red Doors for new ones not yet open, and as you metaphorically or literally write many more letters such as the one you wrote me, think, too, about how you build this integrity, this inner and this outer,” Brizendine said. “Like many things, integrity rarely happens accidentally: it’s intentional and purposeful work.”

 

She also emphasized that integrity required practicing kindness, shunning hatred and refraining from judgment.

 

“You have worked hard at seeing yourself better in this ever-changing world, and your education here has rendered you forever active in what Miss Spence called that ‘moral and intellectual adventure.’ And ‘adventure,’ a word full of promise and learning, is the perfect word for you today.”