Ceremony Honors Cum Laude Seniors

Twenty-five members of the Class of 2008 were inducted into the Hopkins Chapter of the Cum Laude Society on May 28, 2008. Congratulations to the following Seniors:

Kyle Alpern
Adam Arthurs
Kara Bloomgarden
Genevieve Brett
Maria Carolan
Emily Carroll
Cole Galvin
Julian Gewirtz
James Gusberg
George Haines
Clara Kiely
Kyung Hwa Lee
Cory Levinson
Helen Lu
Hannah Marek
Jacqueline Outka
Christopher Pagliarella
Elizabeth Peters
Gabriel Pittleman
Joseph Schottenfeld
Lydia Stepanek
Stasey Vishnevetsky
Abigail Walworth
Benjamin Watsky
David Zackheim

Dario Borghesan, Cum Laude, Hopkins Class of 1998 addressed the students just prior to the awards presentation. The full text of his speech follows:

            "It's an honor to speak before you today and I want first and foremost to congratulate you on your accomplishments.  Hopkins is a tough school and you've obviously done extremely well here.  I graduated ten years ago, but I still remember how surprised I was to find that college was way easier than Hopkins.  I'm not trying to suggest that you're embarking on some kind of four-year senior slide, but I do want you to know that you're more than prepared for the next step of your education.

In large part, that's thanks to the teachers you've had here.  The buildings have gotten a lot grander since I graduated, but it's still the teachers that are the foundation of this school.  For me, there was one teacher in particular who loomed large, and that was Karl Crawford.  Mr. Crawford was a notoriously difficult teacher.  In ninth grade everyone who wasn't a masochist, which was probably about 90% of us, knew not to register for British History, which Mr. Crawford taught, but to opt for Modern European History instead.  I duly chose Modern European history and, to my horror, got stuck with Mr. Crawford.  Our first assignment, in my 10^th grade modern European history class, was to memorize every river, mountain range and capital in Europe and be able to mark them precisely on a map.  Mr. Crawford generously gave us ¼" margin of error.   

Mr. Crawford exuded adventure.  In his thick Maine accent, he used to regale us with stories of how he joined the Navy, how as a younger man he had traveled through Russia, and how he ended up teaching at Hopkins when, after having applied here for a job as a groundskeeper and being turned away, he left swearing and muttering under his breath in Russian at the headmaster, who promptly hired him to teach the language.  He had a palpable curiosity about everything.  My senior year I took a course in Modern Latin American History from him, the first time the course had ever been offered.  Each student's assignment was to choose a country or topic of interest – mine was, weirdly, the growth of the wine industry in Chile – not sure why - and give an hour-long lecture to our classmates.  Mr. Crawford would just sit back, eyes gleaming, and pepper us with questions – you could tell that he had never really stopped being a student, and this class, for him, was just another chance to sate his curiosity.  When I returned from the Peace Corps, in 2005, I went to visit Mr. Crawford at his home.  He was battling throat cancer, and had just had a major surgery that left him unable to speak without great pain.  He had a pad and pen, but with every picture I showed him or every story I told, he couldn't resist exclaiming or interrupting to ask questions, and the pad sat, mostly blank.  In class, he had little patience for phoniness or evasion and you got about three seconds of BS before he cut you off.  Mr. Crawford was a large man, well over six feet tall, but even though I was almost the same height, he seemed enormous; I could scarcely believe it when he told us he was only 5'2" when he graduated high school – to me he was a giant in every way. 

For all his worldliness, however, Mr. Crawford was intensely rooted in this town and in this school.  He had a love for all things local.  We would have class inside the old schoolhouse and he would expound upon all the ways it had been built to match the original 1660 schoolhouse on the Green.  He wanted us to marvel at the thickness of the timbers, all from local, first-growth forest, and the way the door was constructed with overlapping planks of wood, and the fireplace which was salvaged from an old, crumbling farmhouse in Woodbridge.  During his tenure, he had held pretty much every position available at Hopkins, from head of the junior school to director of the summer school, but the one he seemed to have enjoyed the most was being coach of the thirds soccer team; under his tutelage they were the "thundering thirds," and apparently a force to be reckoned with.  I don't think Mr. Crawford put much stock in rank or hierarchy, and he seemed to take special delight in telling us how he coached the thirds, many of whom had doubtless given up dreams of athletic glory if they ever held them at all, to victory over the JVs one autumn day.  He truly believed in his students, no matter how badly they did. 

Mr. Crawford was remarkable for many qualities, but what stands out to me is this combination of worldliness and taste for adventure with commitment to the people and things immediately surrounding him.  Whatever he learned out there growing up in small-town Maine, on the other side of the Iron Curtain in the USSR, or cruising under the sea in a submarine, he channeled into his classroom and lavished it upon his students.  Class with him was like being taught by a human edition of Wikipedia, only with more colorful commentary. 

In a few months most, if not all, of you, will be starting college and, for the first time, you'll be almost completely in control of your own lives.  For your parents, I'm sure, the prospect is terrifying.  Many are still not completely resigned to the fact that you can drive, so the notion that you're going to be responsible for feeding, housing and generally planning the trajectory of your life without them might give them heart palpitations.  And it may be frightening for you too, albeit for different reasons: you may not know what you want to study, or what career path to follow, or you may be worrying about whether you'll succeed in your chosen path.  The bad news is that that kind of anxiety might not go away for the while – if you're anything like me, existential anxiety might become a chronic illness.  But that's a good thing – exploring, and changing your mind, and feeling your way along until you find your interest and inspiration is your new job now.  And when I look over the past ten years, it's apparent that the times I have grown most, both in intellect and maturity, are the times when I've tried to do what Mr. Crawford did: seizing an opportunity for adventure, and getting involved with the people and institutions around me. 

I read an article in the paper over the weekend about a high school principal in Westchester County who decided to require students to make 30 minutes time for lunch in the middle of the day, because he found that students had been scheduling the entire school day without a break, in order to pack in as many AP classes as possible.  That article caught my attention because it brought home how disciplined, how focused and driven you are demanded to be.  All work and no play will make you, not necessarily dull, but certainly neurotic, and probably unhappy as well.  Your college years and beyond are for exploration, and so you should seek out an adventure, however you define it.  It might be something completely intellectual, like writing a play, or an article.  It might be driving cross-country.  Take your four years in college and beyond to explore, in the broadest sense, what interests and inspires you, and then, and don't worry if it threatens to take you temporarily off-track or if it doesn't fit into a long-term plan you've been hatching. 

For me, the scenic route ended up leading to a different continent and setting up house in a mud hut in a West African village.  While I was in college I had volunteered at a needle exchange clinic in Northampton, Massachusetts, which had done a lot of outreach and AIDS prevention work with intravenous drug users, so when I joined the Peace Corps I was trained as a community health volunteer with a focus on AIDS prevention.  Now, when I say trained, I actually mean we were given a list of horrifying diseases that we might encounter in our villages and vague instructions to work with villagers to come up with ways to fight these illnesses using local resources.  But even if I had been thoroughly trained, I still wouldn't have known what to do for the first six months, because it was so different from anyplace I had experienced before.

My village, Koumonde, was a village of about 2000 people in a large clearing atop a wooded mountain.  I lived with a host family; my host father had three wives and about 19 children.  Every day I had to walk to a well with the village women to draw my water, and then I would begin my daily rounds of visiting and greeting pretty much everyone in the village.  In my village, if you didn't stop for a few minutes to greet every person you saw on your way, you were either crazy or a sorcerer.  The greetings were so elaborate that two people, after each query about the other's health, family or other topic of concern, would stand there exchanging not words, but a series of bows and grunts that could last twenty seconds; then the other would make his inquiries, and the process would be repeated, several times over.  At first I found the entire process tiresome and ridiculous – why would you even ask all those questions, I thought, if no one would be so rude as to tell you bad news during a greeting – when you asked someone, he was invariably "fine," as if the angry abscess on his left leg didn't exist, or the straw roof of his house hadn't just caved in under the thrashing of last night's rainstorm.  But I slowly came to see how important these greetings were – that I, an "important" foreigner, would stop to ask after them and their families was a sign that I wanted to be a part of their lives and that they could trust me.  What was an awkward formality for me soon became second-nature, and pretty soon I learned to budget half an hour for a 10-minute trip to the market. 

The first 12 months of my time in village I basically spent hanging out, observing and asking questions.  Following Peace Corps's earnest instructions, I spent part of my days at the village dispensary where I helped weigh babies and gave talks to groups of mothers who could barely contain their laughter as I explained the importance of breastfeeding.  In the afternoons I visited with friends and talked with students about sex education at the village school.  I learned about village history and got up to date on the village gossip.  I learned the language well enough to politely decline the frequent offers of arranged marriage thrown my way and the steaming bowls of cornmeal with dried fish sauce that I would invariably be offered if I came to visit.    At night I would return home for dinner, sometimes by myself, sometimes with my host family, where we'd sit around the fire and eat boiled yams and mangoes, or on Thursday nights watch the country's one television for re-runs of Mexican soap operas, which had a social significance in Togo equivalent to American Idol in this country.

It took a good 12 months before any of my health work got off the ground, but that time spent visiting and gossiping was invaluable.  I began to learn complex and intersecting forces that were keeping people poor; I learned who in village to trust, and who to avoid; and most importantly, the strong web of relationships that undergirds small-town life, in Africa and everywhere else, relationships I came to miss terribly once I was back in the states.  In the tribal language of my village, you address everyone as family: "mother, brother, or my child," and the significance isn't purely semantic – by the time I left, I really felt like a son of the village.  

My time in the Peace Corps was really valuable to me – beyond just honing my ability to communicate across cultures and giving me a unique perspective; it gave me a center of gravity when I started law school, where there are people who seem to think the entire world revolves around what Alexander Hamilton said in the Federalist Papers, or who would trade their future firstborn child for a job at a prestigious law firm.  When I start to get caught up in the pressure to "succeed" and to measure my self-worth by my resume, I try to remember how happiness and success were measured in Togo: they belonged to people who stopped to bow and grunt whenever they saw old friends.

            If there's one piece of unsolicited advice I can give you, it's to have faith in yourselves and in your abilities.  You've all done extraordinarily well here at Hopkins; you've made your teachers and your parents proud.  There are going to be times in your life when you're faced with choices.  You're all familiar, I imagine, with the Robert Frost poem in which the poet takes the road less traveled, and that makes all the difference to him.  You're going to come to a lot of forks in the road and, in truth, you can't always take the one less traveled.  But I want you to remember two things.  First, you are capable – you have the skills and talents to take whatever road inspires you.  And second, there will always be another fork in the road.  If you can't take it now, don't worry – have faith in yourself and you'll be ready when the next one comes along.  So congratulations, good luck, and enjoy the road."