A Healthy Ecosystem
"Learning is the birthright of every living thing. And access to education is the mark of a just society, the hallmark of Democracy. Pursuing an education is a noble endeavor that we at HCC are honored to support and advance." – HCC English Professor Elizabeth Trobaugh
As the recipient of the college’s 2025 Elaine Marieb Faculty Chair for Teaching Excellence Award, HCC English Professor Elizabeth Trobaugh of Amherst lead the procession of graduates into the MassMutual Center arena for Commencement 2025 and delivered the keynote address:
'Greetings all, and welcome to HCC’s 2025 commencement.
Congratulations to today’s graduates and to all the people in your lives who have supported you and helped you reach this moment.
I am honored to address you all, and to celebrate with the graduates, their guests, and my HCC colleagues.
Today is the 24th HCC graduation ceremony I have attended. In all previous years, I sat with my colleagues in those rows over there, and I brought a pen so that I could put a check next to the name of any graduate I’d taught or advised and cheer when their names were called. I am always thrilled to see my former students reaching and celebrating this milestone. But since I cannot do my usual Commencement routine today, I am going to ask you to do me a favor – If you have been my student or advisee, please raise your hand when you walk across the stage later, so I can see you and cheer for you. Thank you!
So, yes, there will be class participation today, and yes, I did require myself to fill out a planning worksheet before writing this speech. As I always say to my composition classes when they prepare to write essays, the planning worksheet is flexible and adaptable and can serve you well beyond English class. You may also notice that my speech has a hook, a thesis statement, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion: the proverbial five-paragraph special!
Here’s my thesis statement: HCC’s core values of Kindness, Inclusion, and Trust form the foundation of a healthy community, a healthy ecosystem, and a healthy society.
Like a coral reef or a forest, HCC is an ecosystem that provides a learning environment where students can thrive. HCC’s ecosystem relies upon interdependence and collaboration. Thanks to the maintainers, the buildings and grounds offer welcoming spaces for teaching, learning, studying, exploring, and connecting. Thanks to administrators, the IT department, the Development office, the Registrar, Office Services, office staff, dining services, Admissions, Financial Aid and more, all working in concert, HCC manages and supports hundreds of courses and thousands of students each semester. The classroom instruction would not be as successful without student support services, offering mentoring, tutoring, adaptive technology, interpreting, advising, and coaching. With academic, identity, and interest clubs, fitness and wellness sessions, and a variety of campus activities, Student Engagement helps students find a home at HCC.
Here’s another class participation part: As I name a service or activity that has enriched your HCC experience, please raise your hand and keep it up.
The Writing Center, the Math Center, the CAPS Center, Library Services, reference librarians, the HCC library databases, Student Senate, Trio, ALANA, El Centro, SAMP, OSDDS, the HCC radio station WCCH, Pulp City, academic clubs, identity clubs, interest clubs
These raised hands prove my first point: A college is an ecosystem where a wide variety of people working together provide an environment that nurtures student success.
We have reached my first body paragraph: HCC’s core value of Kindness provides the foundation for successful communities and societies.
On the side of the Donahue building where I spend most of my time, is a large banner announcing the value Kindness. It includes a quote from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. My colleague Raul helped me paraphrase her message: The antidote to fear, mistrust, and division is “active, courageous love,” aka kindness.
As my students know, I love word histories, and the history of the word kindness holds a relevant message for us today – it comes from Old English words meaning family, nature, and nation.
When we extend kindness beyond our family, we build a community, when we extend kindness beyond our community, we build a commonwealth, and then a nation. Kindness to family is the prototype, the model for extending kindness and empathy, to all of our human family, and our non-human family, as well. Yes, dogs. Of course, cats, too.
Like an ecosystem, a community is built on interdependence. We rely upon each other, and we rely upon our habitat, our environment. To thrive, we need the support of each other, and we need to support each other. We also need to extend our care and kindness to the environment and our non-human kin. I am proud to work at a college where we are working towards greater sustainability, and we respect the non-human residents of our habitat. Each spring, we close one of our access roads for a few weeks to allow the local salamander population to make the yearly migration from their wintering site to the vernal pools across the road.
Every day I see kindness at HCC: students step up by supplying a pen, sharing notes, holding open a door, validating each other’s contributions to class discussion, and, my favorite: saying “you’ve got this” to the fellow student about to give an oral presentation or perform on stage. I am so lucky that I get to spend every workday with people who know how to practice kindness.
Inclusion
Body paragraph number two: The core HCC value of Inclusion strengthens and enriches the community.
Like the word kindness, inclusion is about expanding – enlarging social, academic, and professional circles to build a community that includes more people, voices, ideas, and variety – everyone has a seat at the table.
My father was a first-generation American, a first-generation English speaker, and a first-generation college student. It was access to public education that enabled him to become an English professor at Bronx Community College. He taught me the principles of good writing, the magic of literature, and the power of education. From my parents, both English professors at Bronx Community College, I inherited my lifelong, proud, firm, and unwavering commitment to Access.
Inclusion means making sure that the good things in life are accessible to everyone, and Education is one of life’s Good Things.
HCC welcomes students from near and far and all over the world. In any HCC graduating class, there may be students from a dozen different countries. Though forces and systems often inhibit access, HCC and community colleges across the state and the nation work to expand access. All of us who work at HCC are united by our shared belief that including as many people as possible, expanding access to higher education, is good.
One of today’s graduates is emblematic of the triumph of inclusion, student support services, and the public good. A first-generation college student, this student began her college journey with the guidance of Trio, a nationwide, federally funded program that supports underrepresented students. To get to campus, she traveled by public bus, two hours each way. And even with four hours a day spent on a public bus, she consistently earned A’s and made time to support others by working as a peer tutor in the Writing Center and through SAMP, the Student Ambassador and Mentorship Program. This graduate, here today with friends and family, is like so many students at HCC. With optimism and tenacity, she has overcome challenges to pursuing higher education and has forged a path she did not inherit but has made her own.
That’s the promise and triumph of Inclusion and Access.
Learning is the birthright of every living thing. And access to education is the mark of a just society, the hallmark of Democracy. Pursuing an education is a Noble Endeavor that we at HCC are honored to support and advance.
As an English professor, I have the pleasure not only of teaching writing, but also reading with my students. At a time when the value of a literary education is increasingly questioned, I continue to believe that literature is a vital part of any education. Stories, whether fiction or history, written or oral, enable us to connect with others, to learn from our predecessors and contemporaries, to see life from a different perspective, to widen our range of understanding and compassion. Reading deepens our humanity. Because Literature is the history of the human heart.
From reading stories, I have learned many lessons that I share with my students, enriching their hearts as well as their minds:
Don’t let other people define you. You get to define yourself.
Empathy is human, and without empathy, we lose what makes us human.
Compassion is the foundation of effective communication.
Hope requires both courage and imagination and is the first step in making the world a better place.
Every challenge you overcome builds the confidence to take on the next challenge. And these accomplishments build true and lasting pride and fortitude.
Healthy soil is the foundation of all life.
Relationships are more important than things.
Cherish the golden-green brief moments in spring and in life.
Earth’s the right place for love, so make it work.
Now for my third body paragraph, and the third core HCC value: Trust. I’m going to tell you a true story. Though this story includes an ambulance, it has a happy ending, and it says a lot about Trust.
Sixteen years ago, I was at work when I got one of those dreaded phone calls from my son’s elementary school. He had fallen from the top of a slide on the school playground, and an ambulance was rushing him to Cooley-Dickinson. I left HCC, beat the ambulance to the hospital, and was there when the ambulance doors opened. I saw my five-year-old’s bloody, frightened face. The doctor stitched up his busted lip and sent us to radiology for a CT-scan. The radiology technician who greeted us had been a student of mine in English 102 a few years earlier! I knew my son was in the good hands of a graduate of the HCC Rad-tech program who also knew how to write an essay and analyze a poem!
The CT-scan showed no head trauma; my son’s face healed. And I got to experience first-hand how HCC irrigates this Valley and beyond, by sending graduates out into the world the way a tree sends out seeds. HCC graduates – carrying with them the seeds of kindness, inclusion, and trust. Our students put their trust in us so that we can put our trust in them as they do their parts to build a kind, inclusive community. A community that provides all we need, from emergency care to entertainment, and everything in between.
Thank you, graduates, for trusting us, the HCC ecosystem, with your education. You trusted this college as you studied, learned, explored, conducted research, wrote papers, solved math equations, created and performed art, and stretched yourselves – sometimes beyond what you thought you were capable of – all while juggling family and work responsibilities. We are honored by your trust, inspired by your efforts, and enriched by your accomplishments.
Just as my former student Jason, now a rad-tech, did, you will take your HCC education and contributions to the world; you will enrich any community you choose to become part of. The history of the word community includes the concept of “public, held in common, shared by all or many.” Again, kindness and inclusion shine through the word community, which means “shared by all.” I hope that the community you experienced at HCC will inspire you to carry the concepts of Kindness, Inclusion, and Trust with you wherever you go. We thrive when we collaborate, when we help each other, when we extend ourselves and widen our circle of care and compassion. We thrive when we act with empathy, assume the best in others, and communicate with honesty.
Thank you, graduates, for sharing this leg of your academic journeys with us.
Today, we celebrate your graduation from HCC. At the same time, we celebrate public higher education, where so many motivated, courageous, and optimistic people access the opportunities to pursue their dreams, to achieve, to contribute, to spread their wings, and to fly.
As I say to my students at the end of class, thank you for joining me today, and thank you for your contributions."
PHOTO: HCC English Professor Elizabeth Trobaugh at Commencement 2025
