Convocation is murder

Convocation? Who came up with this? It is a most bizarre mixture of ceremonies that might just be the most uncomfortable thing to sit through ever invented.

First, there are people in silence with tears in their eyes, standing… it all reminds of church: mass or a funeral maybe? Then the gowns: somewhere between the priests’ gowns and the bad costumes you make for Carnival in school (always turn out oversized and shapeless). And then there is the pipe band…. Oh, not what you’re thinking about. It is not like the Celtic stuff I go to hear in the summer. It’s like a military pipe band, neat and appropriate, regulated and disciplined. I love bag pipes, and I hate the pipe band. It’s not music: they are marching sounds of boots hitting the floors. It makes it look like a military parade.

And then the wedding-like profusion of pictures being taken. If people could come out of their bodies and see what they’re doing…. It’s a picture that is there just to stand on a wall, and not just 1. Oh, no, tons of pictures…. Seriously.

And the congratulations. Congratulations for what? For having made it this far? Please… it is so artificial.

And why is it artificial? And here we get to what essentially is wrong with this funny procession of hats and gowns and uniforms and “everyone rise”. It minimizes the work everyone does during years. It minimizes learning. It implies the degree, the symbolic framed paper, is what everyone is working for every day. And it cannot be, it should not be. More than that, when you say congratulations to someone because they are finishing their degree, you are missing the congratulations you should have yelled each time they achieved something more, they wrote a beautiful essay, they answered an exam thoughtfully or came home exited because they just understood something.

Yes, convocation is like a wedding and a funeral. It is a wedding because it is the unnecessary celebration of what cannot be celebrated, of what must lived and valued every minute – knowledge and the pursuit of understanding. It is a funeral because, in displacing value from the ordinary achievements of everyday life to this ceremony we must be killing in ourselves all the thirst for comprehension that used to drive our daily lives as students. We are killing the student, the learner, the thirst.

Convocation is not even a funeral. It is murder.