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2,200 MSU students receive degrees |
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Sunday, 03 May 2009 |
 Kristen Hines Baker/For the SDN Esther Neil of Clinton was one of more than 2,000 Mississippi State University students who were candidates for degrees during Saturday’s spring commencement ceremonies at Humphrey Coliseum. Her boyfriend, Cody Holland, of Hillsbough, Mo., helped her celebrate the awarding of her master’s of business administration degree. By SHEA STASKOWSKI
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Former Gov. William Winter urged Mississippi State University’s spring graduates to remember those who helped them achieve their dreams and urged them to use what they’ve learned become active citizens.
More than 2,200 students received their degrees Saturday during two commencement ceremonies at the Humphrey Coliseum.
Winter, whom MSU president Dr. Mark Keenum called, “a statesman, patriot and humanitarian.” Winter, a Grenada native, led the Magnolia State 1980 to 1984. He now is senior partner in a prominent Jackson law firm.
His election to the state’s highest office culminated a public service career that began in 1947 when he won a seat in the Mississippi House of Representatives while a student at the University of Mississippi Law School. During World War II, he had served with the U.S. Army in the Philippines.
“I come here to today with one specific message for you, who in a few minutes will receive your diploma, and that is this: I hope you will remember how you got here and more than that, what special obligations you now have,” Winter said to the students. “There is not a single one of us, regardless of our age or stage in life or where we came from, that did not arrive on the back of someone else.
Winter reminded the students to remember teachers, neighbors, parents, grandparents, family and friends who played a role in getting them to The Hump yesterday dressed in black robes and mortar boards.
Winter especially remembered his professors that he said made a impact on his life during his time at MSU: “They helped me to explore and embrace new ideas. They helped liberate me to be more than I previously thought I was capable of. They opened up for me a whole new world and taught me how to think for myself.”
Winter said he knew the students sitting before him had a similar experience during their time at MSU as well and he posed a question to the graduating classes, “So how do we go about justifying this good fortune that has made us all the beneficiaries of what so many others have done for us?”
He then told the students about a contract that all are a part of, whether they choose to recognize it or not, that our forefathers began when they wrote the Declaration of Independence.
“Those were not intended to be idle words. They bind us today just a surely as they bound the people who wrote them and if anything, their significance is greater now than it was then,” Winter said.
Winter then challenged the students to find real meaning to the contract that binds American citizens together and told them to look toward their families for the answer.
Winter called on the students, as graduates, to fulfill the responsibility they now have to build up their community, without which, the community can never reach its full potential.
Though he has held many important public offices, Winter said that the most important office is not one in which the person is elected, but one into which a person is born — the office of a citizen.
“Unfortunately, too few of us take that office of citizen seriously,” Winter said. “Too few choose to exercise the power that goes with that office.”
Winter concluded by cautioning the students that if they did not embrace their role as a citizen, then their generation would pay a penalty to the quality of life. But he did offer a solution to the problem and that was for students to be the voice of informed reason—to take the education provided by MSU to go out into the world to make their community better.
“You must be willing to work to eliminate bigotry and injustice and ignorance—that is how you pay your dues for the privilege of being a graduate of this university and of living in a free society,” Winters said. “That is how you can pass on to the next generation a better country than you inherited—that is how you can best honor you’re alma mater.”
Over decades of public service, Winter has received numerous awards and honors. Among them are a Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the Bar Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998 and, earlier this year, the Mississippi Medal of Service from current Gov. Haley Barbour.
“Whether as a public official or a private citizen, Governor Winter has never ceased in being actively involved in efforts to expand opportunities for other,” Keenum said during his introduction speech.
Winter began his address by expressing his feelings of nostalgia upon returning to MSU’s campus and remembering all the people who were apart of his life that helped get him to where he is today. Then he called upon the students to think about the people in their lives that got them where they were sitting yesterday morning.
Also, during the morning ceremony, Fred E. Carl Jr. of Greenwood, founder of the nationally recognized Viking Range Corp. and a major university benefactor, will be presented an honorary doctor of science degree. Carl attended MSU’s School of Architecture for a time and provided a 1979 endowment for its statewide, non-profit community design outreach program that was renamed the Carl Small Town Center in his honor.
In recommending to the State College Board that Fred Carl receive the special honor, Mark Keenum praised the Leflore County businessman’s “accomplishments as founder and CEO of Viking Range Corporation, as the chief architect in the revitalization of his hometown of Greenwood and as a friend of higher education through his extensive service to the College of Architecture, Art and Design at Mississippi State.”
Keenum also said Carl “has lived his life making a difference in the lives of thousands of people.”
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Last Updated ( Monday, 04 May 2009 )
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