Commencement

For the past couple of weeks, I've been scuttling between Burton Conner and my hometown. A week at home, a week at BC, a week at home again. Today I moved back to the city for good, since my internship starts tomorrow.

During the week at BC, I tied up loose extracurricular ends, including finishing up a feature story (begun in February) about tenure for The Tech. Then that Friday, I volunteered for Commencement, getting my first glimpse of a day two years from now.

As one of the roughly twenty people assigned to street duty, I witnessed the healthy line outside Killian Hall at 7 AM. It was like a mini-Black Friday; I was told people had started lining up as early as 6, maybe even before. Commencement didn't begin until 10 AM or so. What a long day for a lot of family members.

In the course of the morning, I moved from furiously handing out programs as waves of people entering Killian Court flowed by me, to standing on the Memorial Drive sidewalk saying good-mornings and directing people toward the correct side of the rope that was set up to corral them into a line (next year, they just need an arrow sign).

Around 10:45, I was reappointed to the interior of the Court, where I spent the rest of the day saying, "Please sir could you take a seat? You're blocking everyone's view." One person would go up to the front of the section to take photos, and a pack, a nonstop stream, would follow, leading to a wall of bodies blocking the views of those sitting behind them (a problem of fairness) and packed aisles (a problem of safety).


I was determined to do my job, though I was far more concerned with the equity issue than the safety one, and I was effective. When they saw me approaching, I could see the parents thinking, damn, why is she here again? (I had to deal with people multiple times). I felt vindicated only about twice, when a specific family asked me to clear their view of the large screen showing the action on stage, graduates continually flowing down the center ramp like items off an assembly line.

Mostly my frustration increased. One man in particular got to me. He knelt in front of a tree for at least fifteen minutes and refused to move. It wasn't refusing to move that was remarkable--several other people did the same--but when I finally eroded his resistance, when he finally said, fine, I'll leave, he left with a bitter directive: "You have to promise you can't let anyone else up here either." And I said, I won't, I'm trying.

But it was an impossible battle, and my commitment to equity soon collapsed to the realization that not only had I failed in my promise, but that now the winners in this game were the mean and stubborn. And then as more and more chairs cleared out as the ceremony neared the end, there was simply no reason to stop people.

Eventually the other volunteers and I just let them. Even one of the main event organizers was up there with the parents. The unofficial policy became, "please just take your pictures quickly and let other people behind you have their chance." By now I was more sympathetic to the parents, who weren't actually trying to give me a hard time, but just wanted to take a picture of their kids.

I was slightly in wonder. I thought, We're engineers. We must have a better solution than this.

Then again, we techies here know the truth. People aren't robots, and they're a heck of a lot harder to control.