Commencement 2016

Portsmouth Abbey School
86th Commencement Exercises
Sunday, May 29, 2016

Mr. Daniel McDonough
Headmaster's Remarks

Abbot Matthew, Mr. Ferry, Mr. Bohan, monks, faculty and especially you, the Class of 2016 and your families and friends: welcome to your final mandatory assembly here at Portsmouth Abbey School.

My words today are for the Class of 2016. When I accepted the appointment as Headmaster I concluded my remarks to the School by saying: "I cannot think of a better work than walking with you in your journeys to adulthood." Well, from this point on that walk will necessarily be metaphorical. You no longer have to worry that I will mysteriously materialize by your side as you do something silly. And for you, it mostly was silly stuff. That's why you didn't lose anyone this year, a legacy that very few classes have achieved and one that you can be proud to leave for your successors. But I do have a couple of things to say to you as you walk away.

A few nights ago you dedicated the stone in the Healey Plaza with your class quote: "We do not remember days. We remember moments." Today is likely one of those moments, because as Sydney Welch noted on Thursday at the dedication, this could be the last time you are all together. But you have had many of these moments here. To help you have more such moments, I will offer two questions, a reminder, and a statement.

First question: what do so many of the successful young people in today's business and tech world know that makes them intentionally limit their screen time at regular intervals, even though they may be using it intensely and continuously the rest of the time? Second question: Is it possible the Benedictines have known something for the last 1500 years which is constantly being rediscovered? My reminder: could this have anything to do with the "chill time" that John Humphrey described to you on Thursday night, that two-hour block he takes once every weekend to just sit down and literally do nothing? Now, you may not yet be capable of spending two hours with just yourself, but take Ben Franklin's advice that Ms. Behan passed on to you yesterday: try starting a habit of a few minutes and grow it over time.

Finally, my statement: While two hours of chill time once per week is great, talking to God in your own words for a few minutes every day is even better. So do both. You can be sure when you are talking to God that, unlike some people you meet, He will actually listen to you.

Thank you for our time together, God bless all of you, and I hope you come back often.

Mr. Peter Ferry '75, P '16, '17
Board of Regents

Abbot Matthew, Headmaster McDonough, members of the Monastery and Faculty, Parents, Relatives, Friends, students and the Class of 2016, on behalf of the Board of Regents, it is a great honor to welcome all of you today to these 86^th Commencement ceremonies .

I am really not sure if Donald Trump will make America great again, but I am absolutely sure that this Class of 2016 will.

We did not need the Hollister Clothing Company to inform us that this Class, and School, have the best school spirit in America. The graduating Class of 2016 have not only excelled academically, in sports and the arts, but also in esprit de corps. You have been exemplary role models for the rest of the School. You have pushed yourselves and excelled. You have set the "bar" high for yourselves and for future classes, and we all thank you for this.

"To whom much is given, much will be required"—I am sure that all of you will rise to this challenge from these words of St. Luke.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank your parents, who have sacrificed both financially and emotionally to send you to Portsmouth. It is never an easy decision to send your children away to boarding school, and there is much choice today, but few schools offer both the intellectual and spiritual elements of a Portsmouth education. For this we thank you, parents.

Finally, I'd like to thank all faculty and administrative staff of the School, and the Monastery, from the Latin teachers to the kitchen staff, for your dedication and hard work, without which we would not be able to have another successful school year.

To the Class of 2016, all of us care for your future success and happiness in college. I want to leave you with some practical advice on happiness and success in college, based on my experience and numerous books, studies and research done on the subject. Ironically, much like the Hollister School Spirit Award, the common thread is quality friendships. It is quality relationships and not quantity that matter. Firstly, in numerous studies, all students who were happy and successful in college had developed one or two strong friendships with a fellow classmate. This student was a soulmate, a confidante, and shared common values and beliefs. This relationship is not based on utility or pleasure. For Aristotle, this would be his third type of friendship, in which the basis is goodness of each individual, and both help one another strive for goodness, and only want goodness for the other person. Secondly, those same happy and successful college students had met a faculty member who inspired them in an academic subject and who served as a mentor throughout their academic career. Befriending a fellow student is straightforward. Making a relationship with a faculty member will be tougher. Take advantage of office hours to get to know them. You will have to make all the effort here. I am not saying that only if you have both of these relationships will you be happy and successful in college, but this is a good starting point, and the common denominator in countless studies on the subject, as well as my personal experience in college.

Finally, the most important and, and as you will soon find out, the most challenging relationship you will need to develop in college is that with Christ. Portsmouth has established a foundation for your spirituality, you now need to build on it, nurture it and grow it. This will not be easy, especially given the unfriendly environment towards any religion found in colleges these days. G. K. Chesterton says it best for me in his epigram: 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried'. Believe me; it is difficult for all of us. Don't leave it untried. Keep Christ at the center of your life and you will have a balanced and happy life.

80% of millennials recently surveyed want to be rich.50% of millennials want fame. The fact is that fame and fortune isn't the way to happiness, whether in college or afterwards. We are social beings and need quality relationships, and not many, to make us both happy and successful in our lives.

In summary, a fellow student, a faculty member and your relationship with God are the three most important relationships you need to focus on over the next four years. Quality relationships make all the difference in life, not the quantity of relationships. Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp are all great innovations, but they are not going to help you achieve quality relationships.

And so, on behalf of the Board of Regents, I want to wish the Graduating Class of 2016 Good Bye, Good Luck,

AND

Don't forget St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 9, Verse 24: 'There are many runners in a race, but only one runner wins, RUN so you will win!'.. And go out there and make us proud to be a Raven!

Thank you and God Bless.

Claire Flowers Davidson '16
Class of 2016 Commencement Speaker

Welcome, friends, family, and the Class of 2016. I would like to begin by drawing a comparison; Portsmouth Abbey is a lot like a bag of Doritos...no, I'm just kidding, I won't do that to you. On a more serious note, I want to clarify that here at the Abbey, valedictorians are not chosen because of our GPAs. In fact, in the interest of full disclosure, this very speech is one of only three major papers that I didn't write the night before the deadline. So why, you ask, was I was chosen to speak? Apparently, I'm told that the Class of 2016 wanted someone who had the best chance of keeping everyone awake. Truthfully, this seemingly simple task is one of the most terrifying things I have ever had to do, second only to driving down Manor House road in broad daylight. However, as I stand up here looking out at the 94 other graduates, I can see a group of people (figuratively, of course, because I can't actually see any of you without my glasses) that I am immensely lucky to have spent four years with.

We can all remember how this story began: four years ago, we arrived on campus and sat through our first Third Form meeting, much like today. And although we didn't understand anything Mr. C. was saying, it marked the first time we sat together as a class. We were smaller, and not as bright, but we made it through freshman year with few casualties. Then, before we knew it, we were Fourth Formers, simultaneously juggling humanities and hormones, and as quickly as Fourth Form came, it, too, ended. So, we moved on to be upperclassmen. All that's left of Fifth Form is PTSD and long-term sleep deprivation. But we all survived that, too. And at last we started senior year, the crown jewel of our years here, expecting nothing but full custody of the senior room in Tuck and the tables by the windows in the dining hall. The excitement quickly died off as we returned to campus in September and were promptly dealt a fate graver than death: the college process. You see, completing the Common App is a lot like donating a kidney, you can only do it once, but you want to make sure you do it right. And, most importantly, you have to make sure that the match is perfect. As we know, the process is not fun, and the recovery is long, but in the end you feel pretty good about it.

Now, here we are, kidneyless, and in our very last meeting together. Yet, if we compare where we came from and what we are like today, I think it's safe to say the Class of 2016 is pretty damn incredible.

Next year, we will become the Class of 2020 and we will start over again as freshmen, once again smaller and not as bright as the rest of the school. But it won't be the same. Today you've heard enough advice, both solicited and unsolicited, but I'm about to tell you the only important things you'll need to know next year, and I can assure you that it's not from John Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government:

1. No matter what anyone tells you, writing an entire research paper in one night is VERY possible.

2. Wearing bow ties and Lily Pulitzer are fundamentally advantageous to the happiness and success of the individual.

3. The best way to learn a recitation in church is to recite it while the rest of the congregation is singing.

4. Conference periods are obviously better spent as snack time. I am uniquely qualified to speak on this point, as I am a proud member of an elite group of students that went a full two years without using a single conference period.

5. The most efficient way to go about packing books for the day is definitely not packing any books at all, and sharing with your overachieving friends in every class; it lightens the load by a lot.

6. The gym is a scary place; don't go there.

7. Hold the door for anyone in sight, no matter how far away they are. In fact, the farther they are the more uncomfortable it becomes, and they will usually start jogging.

8. And finally, always remember to tell the Portsmouth police officers that you're an Abbey student if you get pulled over; they'll let you off with a warning every time.

Andrew Brandt Matthews'16
Class of 2016 Commencement Speaker

Welcome friends and family of the Class of 2016. It is my honor to be speaking to you here today, but the even greater honor goes to the 94 graduates in front of me. Through our hard work and dedication, we were able to make four years at a prestigious New England boarding school sound like utter hell in Instagram captions. But this trend has let up recently. Long gone are the posts lamenting exams or likening this campus to a prison for its distance from the nearest Starbucks. Instead, they've been replaced by a constant countdown of the days remaining and innumerable teary-eyed emojis. In these final weeks, we've been able to stop and look around, the end of the journey approaching, free of bitter weather or any motivation to do schoolwork whatsoever. Our steps grew slower, our perceptions more refined, and our memories of days and years passed returned to us, as sweet as when they occurred.

Our time at the Abbey has been like the perfect ice cream cone – delicious, but never meant to last forever. Trying to accomplish that will only leave you sad with sticky hands. It was something we got to savor, but only at a fixed pace. Coming here as a lanky 15-year-old with a Justin Bieber haircut and an odd penchant for staring out of the corner of my eye, I am shocked, in retrospect, to say that I survived. But that was solely thanks to this community. The Abbey is such a welcoming environment that I've felt myself become progressively weirder with each year thanks to this place, and I know I'm not the only one. No one reads a book by Sigmund Freud or watches the video of that Eastern European woman give birth and walks away the same person. And, of course, you can't live across the hall from Austin Rooney for a full year without learning how to properly react to a Sasquatch call.

Each day we get five minutes of passing time between classes. Over four years, this adds up to 320 hours of walking. Three hundred and twenty hours. That's enough time to cover 80 Saturday school days. That's enough time to finish House of Cards six times, or to watch all of Grey's Anatomy, assuming you don't pause to cry during the sad parts. That's enough time to fully study for one Bio term exam. If we're looking at the 10,000-hour rule, by being a student at Portsmouth Abbey you're granted a substantial head start toward becoming the next Michael Jordan or Bill Gates ... of walking. These 320 hours translate to rough 992 miles. A 992-mile journey to get to where we are today. And as I look out at my classmates, I see that journey reflected on all of you – or more specifically, the circles under your eyes and that caffeine jitter half of you have going on. For every calm spring Sunday, there was a winter Thursday, a jagged slope with the steep cliff of our GPAs lingering to our left, daring us to fall over the edge. Nine hundred, ninety-two miles, with every back-to-back all-nighter for AP U.S. History, Humanities reading longer than a penance service, or evenings where the Stillman cucumbers just weren't cut right.

But we made it. It's done. Not only did we get an incredible amount of exercise in, we did all that other stuff as well. Because as I look at all of you, I don't just see a bunch of tired faced. I see friends. I see accomplishments. I see a group of individuals who loved to complain but never once stopped working. And now we're there. But, this isn't the time to reflect on the big things. Those are what we'll talk about at reunions to come – whatever happened in Rome or who got away with what during an AP exam. Those are the things we'll take with us, that we'll remember forever. Now is the time for us to think on the small things, the type of things you can only really grasp for such a short time before the moment passes. Now, before we finally depart, we have to stop and appreciate the things we know we'll one day forget.

1. That feeling you get on any given weeknight right around one in the morning, sitting in a friend's room, when you realize that you've seriously screwed your sleep schedule. You'll stay 'til two-thirty anyway.

2. The awe you felt when you watched someone grab eight cookies from the tray in
Tuck.

3. That one time Michael Ludwig felt angry.

4. Those moments of realization when asking Mr. Calisto about a recipe, or giving Dr. Rudasill a fist bump in the hallway, or any number of others that made you know a teacher had really become your friend.

5. What a headmaster's holiday was like.

6. This feeling right now. This feeling of being your high school self – because we're never going to be like this again, not exactly. Now is as good a time as ever to just really stop and remember what it feels like to exist as a Portsmouth Abbey student.

The world off of Cory's Lane is waiting for us, and the longer we wait to embrace it, frankly, the more we miss out. So I'll end this speech the only way I can. Not with a quote, not with a lesson, but with a haiku constructed from the titles of Drake albums:

Nothing was the same.
What a time to be alive.
Take care.

Congratulations to the Class of 2016.

Mr. Conor Bohan '86
2016 Commencement Speaker
Founder and Executive Director,
Haitian Education and Leadership Program (HELP)

Father Matthew and members of the monastic community, Mr. McDonough, members of the Class of 2016, friends and families... thank you for having me here today. I gave a Dom Luke Childs' lecture here a few years ago, and I opened by saying what a pleasure it was to be back at the Abbey and not have to wear a tie. On Friday at the Sixth Form Dinner, not coincidentally I think, Mr. McDonough presented me with a class tie. So today I can say that what a pleasure to be back at the Abbey to be able to wear this class tie with you today. I want to thank Mr. McDonough for inviting me and I want to thank you all for having me. It's a great honor for me to be up here. Life is funny; one minute they are giving you work squad for skipping assembly, and the next minute they are inviting you to give the graduation speech.

I wanted to tell you a story I recently read, about a guy named Stan, from the rural farming village of Ashland, MA, only about 100 miles from here. Stan graduated from high school and went to nearby Williams College. Stan's parents were farmers, and his mother wanted him to be a minister, which she thought was a career she could be proud of. But at 17, Stanley wasn't sure what he wanted to do. He only knew that he wanted, in his words, "to do something and be something in the world."

Stan had a great time at Williams, exploring different majors and getting top grades, but his practical-minded parents considered his choices erratic. Stan soon came to the conclusion that he wasn't cut out for the ministry, but a mother's well-intentioned aspirations are hard to escape, so after graduation he enrolled at the prestigious Union Theological Seminary. It turned out to be the right choice after all, because after a few months of all the great distractions of New York City, Stan was surer than ever that theology was not for him. Much to his mother's chagrin, he dropped out of the seminary, got a loan and took off for Berlin where, when he wasn't exploring the famous beer halls, he took classes in philosophy, physics and physiology. Then he told his parents he was thinking about a PhD in philosophy:

"Just what is a Doctor of Philosophy, dear?" his mother wrote.

"What exactly are you doing over there, son?" his father wrote.

His parents wanted him to come home and get "a real job," and with most of Stan's loan money in the hands of Berlin bar owners, he had to acquiesce, even though he knew he wasn't finished exploring. As he put it, "I've scarcely tried my hand in the world to know where I can do anything." Stan was 27.

After earning the very first PhD in psychology ever awarded in the United States, G. Stanley Hall taught at Antioch College, Harvard and Johns Hopkins before becoming president of Clark University. He founded the American Psychological Association and developed a fascination with the period in life between childhood and adulthood. In 1904, he published a book identifying a new stage in human development that he called "adolescence."

Hall made significant and permanent contributions to our country and to mankind. But we would never have benefitted from his work if he had been forced to follow the path that was expected, by his parents, his peers and society. What would have happened if Hall's mother had insisted on his finishing the seminary, or if Hall had decided that he should finish the seminary just to please his mother? If he hadn't believed in himself and his wandering, and created his own path, we would all be much worse off.

My own young adulthood wasn't too different from Stan's. I graduated from The Abbey 30 years ago and at college I took philosophy, biology, French, math, Italian, physics, Middle-eastern art and archaeology and political science. But the classes I found most interesting were in history, so I made it my major. Many people's reaction on hearing my major was, "History?!? What are you going to do with that?" To tell the truth, I didn't know what I was going to do with that, but I did know that that's what I was most interested in. When I told my friend Ethan about one such conversation, he said, "You should tell them you are going to school for an education, and not just job preparation." Ethan is now a tenured professor at Brown and has published two books on Soviet history, so his history degree worked out OK for him.

As graduation approached, I decided I wanted to see the world before starting a career, so after working and saving money over the summer I bought a one-way ticket to France and hitchhiked through the Alps. I worked and travelled in France and Italy for two years until, like Stan, my money ran out and I returned home.

My parents, like Stan's, were a little worried. My father suggested law school, probably because of my penchant for debating...with him. But I knew I wanted to continue to see the world, and after two years in Europe I was especially interested in living in developing countries, where I had never been, so I looked for volunteer opportunities. The first place I called was the Red Cross.

"How long do you want to volunteer for?" They asked

"I'm willing to commit to a year," I replied.

"That's great, you don't know how many people call us wanting to save the world by going to go to Africa for a week, but we are really desperate for long-term volunteers."

"Well, how do I sign up?" I asked.

"What kind of skills do you have?" the woman asked.

"I have a history degree and I speak Italian," I said.

"Oh," she replied. "Well, our real need is for doctors and water pump engineers."

"You couldn't use someone with my background?" I asked.

"We are really looking for doctors and water pump engineers," she said firmly.

I hung up the phone, deflated. Countless thousands of dollars for the Abbey and college and I couldn't even volunteer with the Red Cross in Africa. This was information I thought best not to share with my parents. Maybe I was destined for law school after all.

Then I remembered some photos I had seen at the back of St. Joseph's Church in Providence when I was at Brown. They were of a free high school in Haiti for children who had done well in grade school but couldn't afford to continue their education. So I called the church. When my mother learned I was interested in Haiti, she was very hesitant. Haiti had just come out of a military dictatorship, and the news from there was invariably bad. "Are you sure you want to go to Haiti? They need help in Newark, NJ, as well," she said hopefully.

But I was sure, and, 20 years ago, I arrived at the school. When classes let out that first Friday afternoon a student came up to me. "Good bye teacher," he said, "I'm going home."

"Have a good weekend," I said. ..........................."You too," he said. But he didn't move.

Finally I asked him, "Is there something else?"

I need money for the bus," he said.

"How much is the bus?" I asked.

"Twelve cents," he replied.....If I had come looking for a developing country, I had found it.

In the fall of that year, I received a call from Isemonde, one of the top students in her graduating class. She asked me for $30 so she could register at a secretarial school. When I asked her what she really wanted to do, she told me that when she played with her dolls as a little girl, she liked to take a razor blade and slice them open, in order to sew them up with her mother's needle and thread. "The only thing I've ever wanted to do is to be a doctor," she told me. So I told her I would give her $30 to register for the medical school entrance exam instead. She passed, and I paid for the first year's tuition and books from my savings. My stipend at the school was $200/month. When some of Isemonde's classmates also asked me for assistance, I asked my parents and they contributed. They were HELP's very first donors, and they continue to be donors today. They visited me that year, and for months afterwards, they couldn't stop talking about what a great time they'd had in Haiti. They've been to Haiti several times since, including this year, and I never heard about Newark again, though it's still true that they need help there.

20 years after Isemonde asked me for $30, in a country where only 1% of students are able to enroll in university, HELP has 175 straight-A students in university and over 100 alumni.

Our graduation rate is double the national average.

Haiti's employment rate is 50%. The employment rate of HELP graduates is about 100%.

The average salary in Haiti is $820 a year. The average salary of a HELP graduate is $15,500. Almost 20 times the national average.

HELP graduates have won Fulbright Fellowships, started free tutoring and college prep classes in their hometowns, and created Haiti's first pan-university student association, which organizes over 2,000 volunteer hours every year for university students. I think we are well on our way to achieving our mission of educating a group of young professionals who will work for a more just society in Haiti.

Looking back on my time in college, I realize that history allowed me to quickly learn the origins of a unique and complex country. And those years spent aimlessly bumming around Europe? In retrospect, arriving in places where I knew nobody, in foreign countries and cultures where few people spoke English, I learned to fend for myself and get what I wanted without anyone else to advise or support me. Along the way I learned to speak two languages fluently. So when I landed in Haiti, a country with no tourist infrastructure and very few foreigners, I was well prepared to deal with the country's immense challenges but also to appreciate its rich history and culture and see the path to success in what initially appears to be overwhelming hopelessness. History classes and bumming around turned out to be serious training.

I've talked about the scarcity I found in Haiti, and I'd also like to talk about the luxury all of us here are blessed with.

1) First luxury is the luxury of time – In Stanley Hall's time, men's life expectancy was 38. But Stan Hall was 32 when he began his professional career. Today it's double that. But it's actually even higher for well-educated people like you and me, and with advances in medical technology, most of us will likely be active into our 80s. In other words, you don't have to know what you want to do now. It could easily take another 10 years like it did for Stan, in some cases it could take more than that, but you will still have about 50 productive years.

The important thing is to find something that really excites you, because that is your single best chance of "doing something and being something in the world." You will know when you find that. Stan did, I did, and John Humphrey did. But it won't happen if you don't follow your nose. Hall did 150 years ago.

2) We have the luxury of accessibility. We have the means to gather information and to go virtually anywhere in the world with unparalleled speed.

3) We have the luxury of the best education that money can buy. Education that was closed to women and racial minorities is now open to everyone, as are the infinite possibilities that education offers. As you go through life and you meet people who did not have the same opportunities as we did, you will realize that this is one of the single greatest gifts anyone could give you. It will allow you to go anywhere and do anything you want to do.

This combination of advantages is unique in the history of the world. You no doubt heard about someone winning a $1 billion Powerball jackpot in January. In fact, we have all won the lottery, the lottery of life. So just as we all dream of fulfilling our financial dreams when we win the Powerball jackpot, as you go on to college, you are all in a position to discover and fulfill your worldly dreams.

This weekend I have been attending my 25^th college reunion at Brown. Three of my history colleagues are physicians, and I met one classmate who studied music in hopes of being an opera singer. When that career didn't work out, her mother, a librarian, encouraged her to get a master's in library science because she could always get a job. When I saw her this weekend, she told me that she is now a double board-certified physician with a master's in public health.

It is possible, though unlikely, that you have found the subject that interests you most, so I would urge you to, like Stan and perhaps against the well-intentioned wishes of your parents, explore all of your interests in college and continue to explore after college, and don't be afraid to change what you're doing if you realize that there is something you are more interested in. We have the luxury of doing one thing, then another, and still have the wherewithal to try a third career when we finally find the best fit.

Perhaps the greatest luxury we have is the luxury of acting on our aspirations, rather than fear. In the parable of the talents, one servant says, "I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground." Please do not bury opportunities by making decisions based on fear. Many people have to do that. If you're living under ISIS, your greatest aspiration is to make it to the end of the day with your family intact.

Don't worry that you won't be able to find a job. The unemployment rate among college graduates is 2.3%. It couldn't be lower. The unemployment rate among young people with only a high school degree is 18%. With your education, you will always be able to get a job. Remember what John Humphrey said at the class dinner about little decisions that led to big things. He knew he wanted to sign up with the crew team, but he was scared that he was too overweight and wouldn't look good in the locker room. But he told us that he overcame his fears, real fears, and acted on his aspirations, and that made all the difference. John talked about that being the first step to becoming a leader, and when I thought about it, I realized that real leadership is acting on your aspirations and encouraging others to join you.

What happens when we make decisions on aspirations rather than fear?

We are happier because we are doing what we want, and we have a greater impact in the world. When we have a greater impact, we create opportunities for others, so they, too, can win the lottery of life.

So I would ask you to do three things for me as you leave here and head out into the world with Stan's story in the back of your mind.

1) Trust yourself.

2) Enjoy your lottery jackpot: that means exploring your options and acting on your aspirations.

3) Spread the wealth: think about how we, individually and collectively, can offer others the opportunities we are so fortunate to have. Imagine a place where everyone could act on their aspirations and fulfill their potential. Imagine a world where everyone won the lottery. And imagine if we were responsible, in some way, for creating that world. That sounds like a lot of fun, doesn't it?

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