Convocation Speech Fall 2012
Unless otherwise noted, these speeches and open letters were written for the Dean of Students of Biola University between 2011-2016.
[Portions of this work reference the Beloit College Mindset List, and is used by permission]
President Corey…it is with deep pleasure as the Dean of Students that I present the Class of 2016! (Two thousand and sixteen)
These students represent the latest evidence of God’s blessing on Biola and its mission, to equip men and women in mind and character to impact the world for Jesus Christ. And they represents the love and sacrifice of hundreds of parents, friends, and family members who, during tough economic times, decided that a Biola education was an investment that had to be made.
Many of our Biola freshmen were born in 1994. As so, President Corey, and my faculty and staff colleagues, let me put that in perspective for you. Do you remember 1994?
In 1994, Michael Jordan retired, to become a baseball player. But there was no baseball: the players went on strike and there was no World Series. But there was George Foreman, who became the oldest heavyweight champ ever at age 45.
In 1994, you were probably watching the first season of “Friends,” that is, if you weren’t watching “The X-Files,” “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” or “Frasier.” Of course, you never watched “Jerry Springer” or “Beavis and Butthead.”
In world news, Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa. OJ Simpson was arrested for murder. The Rwandan genocide began. The North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, was signed. Closer to home, about an hour north of here, the Northridge Earthquake struck, registering 6.7. And a few miles south, Orange County filed for bankruptcy.
In the tabloids, figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was attacked and injured by the bodyguard of her rival skater, Tonya Harding. Michael Jackson married Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie.
In 1994 we said goodbye to: Richard Nixon, John Candy, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and Kurt Cobain.
A postage stamp cost: $0.29… A gallon of gas cost: $1.09. The stock market closed at 3834.
The hot movies of 1994 were: Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, Lion King, Dumb & Dumber, Shawshank Redemption, Speed, Clerks, Reality Bites.
Musically, it was the year of: Boys2Men, Bryan Adams, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, the Cranberries, Celene Dion, Sheryl Crow, and Snoop Doggy Dogg.
And the growing use of email introduced a new word into our culture: “spam.”
So, as far as our freshmen are concerned,
• They’ve never looked at a Sears catalog.
• LA has never had a pro football team.
• Amazon has nothing to do with mythical female warriors or South American waterways.
• There have never been Commodore computers.
• There’s always been a tunnel between England and France.
• Microsoft has never put out MS-DOS.
• The troubles of Northern Ireland have always been over.
• Fox has always broadcast NFL games.
• Gary Larson has never drawn a “Far Side” cartoon.
• They’ve always used a browser to navigate the Internet.
• They grew up singing about “The Circle of Life,” while knowing that life is like a box of chocolates.
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Every year at Convocation we do this, President Corey… we do the ‘remember 19-whatever,’ which is probably more amusing to us, and to the faculty, than to our students. It’s amusing because it reminds us (first) how old we are, but (second) how so many of the things we used to think were important are really now just historical trivia. Which means, a lot of those things [not all, but a lot] were probably trivial even back then… we just didn’t realize it at the time.
These students, these of the class of 2016, have come to Biola out of a culture that inundates them with trivia… interesting but useless factoids, provocative soundbites, tantalizing eye-candy, meaningless spectacle, inflammatory but empty political speech, a google-plex of disconnected data and content without context, and a 24-hour news cycle that knows everything about immediacy and nothing about importance… a culture often full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Perhaps more than anything else, President Corey, this is what the class of 2016 needs from us:
· They need from us the wisdom and the tools to make those distinctions between Truth and trivia, between what is Eternal and what is extraneous, between what is Meaningful and what is momentary.
· They need our help in finding clarity amidst the chaos, in finding the quiet amidst the cacophony.
· They need tools with which to weigh worldviews and interpret ideologies, so as to decide for themselves where they will stand.
· And they need to know how to hold those convictions with civility and compassion.
· They need for us to show them God’s big picture, as best we understand it… and then to take that vision and ask, “how does this change me, how does this change us, how does this change everything?”
These are big needs, but we have a big God, and the equipping He has given to us, we now—today—begin to pass onto these students. So, I present these new students to you, President Corey—the children of 1994, the class of 2016—as they begin their university journey.
