Hello and Good Morning, I’m grateful to be here with you today. My task is to welcome you, graduates, to the Antioch College Alumni Association. Perhaps a now familiar exercise of your liberal arts education is to begin by defining the terms. What is it exactly that I’m welcoming you into? What does it mean to be an alum of Antioch College, to somehow bear Antiochian as a part of your biography or identity, and to be in community with fellow alums - associating with them?
I often think of Miranda Joseph’s book Against the Romance of Community, which questions the signifier of community as an unquestionable good. Community in its rhetorical and social processes can be mobilized for any sort of cause, which is to say that oppressive ideologies also couch themselves in discourses of community.
How do we think about the “community” of Antioch Alumni who constitute the Association? We are linked by a common connection to the college, across time and institutional iteration, and yet deeply heterogenous–not all of my Antioch is your Antioch and vice versa. Are there integral parts? And what are they? How can I invite you to make your own meaning, instead of attempting to absorb you into a narrative about what Antioch is and how to belong to its legacy. How to invite you into the presence of this momentous occasion, and simultaneously, to the association, which assumes a continuity or ongoingness.
I reflect on these complications because I find it essential, but also in sincere anticipation of any cynicism. We may be rightfully weary of community as a romantic endeavor, and maybe romance in general, but I want to offer that perhaps a little romance is of the essence. I’ve been thinking about poet William Blake and the Romantic response to the rise of industrial capitalism. Amidst increasing integration of the world, the attempt to break down life to bare efficiency, and to mechanize it, the Romantics believed in the rebellion of beautiful excess. We might also invoke Saidiya Hartman’s adaptation of the Lordean refrain: “Beauty is Not a Luxury.” There are many resonances with our techno-accelerationist present. And so I think abandoning romance doesn’t get us to some measurable core, wherein we finally see the world with clarity.
I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but getting to be a part of Antioch has been one of the most romantic experiences of my life. The site of my most transformative relationships, of a learning that continues to invite the labors of responsibility, potentiality, and justice at the heart of our honor code. I hope it has given you the same. Romance, the willingness to confer our attention, to be seduced by the beauty of Beloved Community, predicated on radical hospitality, might inspire our devotion—and what is this long work of freedom without devotion?
I did not realize until after graduating, and really until joining the Alumni Board, what it means to take up the vocation of intergenerational work in all its contingencies and commitments, its struggle and self-evidence. I have cultivated friendships with alums of all ages, and I believe we learn with one another–imperfectly–to sustain vital practices of care. Together, we continue to participate in this project of holding the world open, of helping to hold Antioch open, between past and future, an expansive dimensionality more than a linearity. This is the gift–and I venture that a welcome is nearly always a gift–that I extend to you. Receiving it is another question.
And so I want to be romantic about the fact that today you are joining a long and intricate inheritance of which you are now an indelible and irreplaceable part. We are so happy you’re here.
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