The University of Vermont issued the following announcement.
As clouds gave way to magnificent sunshine across the UVM Green, the university’s 2022 Commencement speaker, renowned mountain-climber Erik Weihenmayer, spoke of a more profound darkness giving way to light.
As a teenager, Erik slowly lost his sight to a degenerative disease, became blind—and fell into despair. “I was afraid,” Weihenmayer told the sea of UVM graduates and their families who listened with rapt attention, “that I would be shoved to the sidelines, into that dark place. That I'd be left there, I'd be forgotten.”
Instead, Weihenmayer, now 53, grew to become one of the most celebrated adventurers of the 21st century, best known as the first blind person to summit Mount Everest—and the only blind climber to reach the highest point on all seven continents.
(He’s also the parent of Arjun Weihenmayer, UVM class of 2025, who he called out at the beginning of his speech: “I just thought I'd embarrass my son over there. Am I pointing in the right direction?” Erik Weihenmayer said to great laughter.)
But as a scared teenager, he used his “last trace of vision,” he recalled, one eye pressed up against a television, to follow the story of Terry Fox, an amputee who, against all odds and in great pain, ran on a prosthetic leg across Canada. “The miles took a terrible toll on his stump, covered with blisters,” Weihenmayer said to the graduating UVM students—but Fox kept going. “And I thought to myself, there's something inside of us— inside Terry—that I could only describe as a light, a light that seemed to be able to transcend that fragile shell of a body, a light that seemed to be able to feed on frustration, on setbacks—to use those things like a fuel source. The greater the challenge, the brighter that light just kept burning. And I hoped it existed in me.”
It did. And Weihenmayer began to learn to rock climb and ascend mountains around the world, “converting my deepest anxieties and hopelessness into my deepest aspirations,” he said, growing to realize that “vision was not predicting the future,” he said, but was really about attending to a kind of inward light. With it, he reached the 29,032-foot summit of Everest, and, in September 2014, kayaked the entire 277-miles of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.
Erik Weihenmayer is a literal climber, but he urged everyone listening, undergraduates to grandparents, to be some form of climber in their life, to neither quit nor settle comfortably, like a camper half-way up the peak. “Climbers understand life's an ongoing, never-ending process of reaching out into the darkness,” he said, “reaching towards immense possibilities.”
He pointed to the students', and the world's, "collective trauma" from COVID. "There's poverty and disease and a broken healthcare system," he said. "And there's climate change and environmental devastation."
"I'm going be blunt," he said. "Those things may be the things that wind up crushing us—or they might become the most potent fuel source we have for transformation."
“Do we allow adversity to diminish us,” Weihenmayer asked, “to pulverize us, to shape us into something bitter and ugly? Or do we allow it to shape us into something beautiful and purposeful and profound? That is our choice.”
Weihenmayer received a standing ovation.
Back to the Green
This year’s commencement—the 221st in UVM’s history—marked an important return to the university’s traditional celebration on UVM’s Main Green after two years of more constrained ceremonies due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year’s ceremony was a particularly happy one for UVM President Suresh Garimella. His third commencement as president, but his first on the Green. “I’ve waited nearly three years to be here with you!” Garimella said, after congratulating the students. “Like so many special occasions during this time, we modified our last two UVM Commencements to smaller events to accommodate health and safety precautions. This makes today’s ceremony, with all of you and your loved ones and your faculty and staff around you on this Green, especially meaningful to me.”
The president conferred degrees on an estimated 3,332 graduates, including 2,558 bachelors, 515 masters, 131 doctoral and 118 medical degree recipients. Degree recipients hail from 44 states; among the graduates were 122 international students from 27 foreign countries. Approximately 1,057 of the graduates are from Vermont. The graduating class includes approximately 415 students of color.
With the degrees conferred, graduates connect with family and friends.
In addition to Erik Weihenmayer, the president conferred honorary degrees on Megan Walsh Cioffi ’91 for her dedicated community service and support of UVM; Robert Cioffi ’90, a long-time leader in many roles at UVM including as chair of the Board of Trustees; and Rick Dalton, a national leader in helping underserved students become college- and career-ready. Steven Grossman, UVM Class of 1961, was also selected for an honorary degree but was unable to attend the ceremony. Grossman has been the philanthropic force behind UVM’s Grossman School of Business and its dramatic rise to international prominence. His honorary degree will be awarded in a separate ceremony in the near future.
Yvonne M.W. Janssen-Heininger, professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine within UVM's Larner College of Medicine, received the University Distinguished Professor Award.
Celebrations begin under the shade of the trees on the university green.
UVM senior awards were presented at Commencement 2022 to the following graduates: Perin Patel, Kidder Medal; Zyakkiriah Rhoden, Mary Jean Simpson Award; Samantha Marcotte, Class of 1967 Award; Micayla Nadeau-Williams, Keith M. Miser Leadership Award; Areeb-Un-Din Ahmad, Elmer Nicholson Achievement Prize; Sage N’be Francis White Cloud, Katherine Anne Kelly Award.
Additional information about the ceremony, honorary degree recipients, the graduating class of 2022, student and faculty awards, and other honors is available in the 2022 UVM Commencement Program. Recordings of the main ceremony and the ceremonies for individual UVM colleges and schools are available for viewing at https://www.uvmcommencement.com/.
Original source can be found here.
Alerts Sign-up