Photo by Kelly MacWilliams
The Metrodome collapsed under 17 inches of snow, buses got stuck, flights were canceled and plows pulled off the roads. Here at the University, the campus closed for one day—but opened the next, December 12, to host CLA's fall 2010 commencement ceremony.
Only about 30 of CLA's 600 graduating seniors were unable to make it to the event, held in Northrop Auditorium.
Nuruddin Farah, the prominent African novelist currently a Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts, delivered the commencement address, calling attention to the community's investment in the new graduates:
I keep talking about your life...as though [it] is yours to do with what you please. However, let me wonder aloud and ask: how much of a young person's life is his or hers to do with what they please? Has it ever occurred to you that your life is as much yours as the bank in which you deposit your paychecks.... The truth is, you are a mere custodian of your life, which belongs, in big or small ways, to many other persons too. I propose that your life belongs, in part, to those who have invested in it: your parents, your guardians, your relatives, your peers, those of whom you're enamored and to whom you've committed yourself. In short, it belongs to anyone who has invested in your well-being from the instant you opened your lungs at birth until now.
