Crystal J. Lucky gave the following toast at the English Department's 75th Anniversary Celebration:
This afternoon, I experienced the final meeting of the wonderful class on William Faulkner and Toni Morrison that I had the privilege of teaching with my friend and colleague, Dr. Jean Lutes. Having the opportunity to teach the works of two brilliant writers of the twentieth century to brilliant students is the reason I ever became a professor of literature.
The English major at Villanova University was established during the 1948-49 academic year. The year began with the assassination of Mahatma Ghandi and ended with TS Eliot winning the Nobel Prize for literature. Burma, now called Myanmar, gained its independence from Britain, the World Health Organization was established, and the American Broadcasting Company, better known as ABC, began broadcasting here in Philadelphia. Many historians point to 1948 as the start of the Cold War. Alice Coachman won the high jump that year at the Summer Olympics, making her the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal. And President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Orders 9980 and 9981, which ended racial segregation in the US Armed Forces and ushered in the modern Civil Rights Movement.
When Villanova’s English major came to be, many of us in this room were not considered worthy of its attention, neither would literature produced by people like us be included in its canon of study. Women would not arrive on campus for another twenty years. And only two Black male students would have been recorded in the archives as attending the university in the nearly first five decades of the 20th century -- Miguel Godreau from Salinas, Puerto Rico, the first Black student to attend the university in 1901, and Victor Ashe, a commuter known then as a Day Hop, from Norfolk, Virginia, a member of the debate and theater clubs, and an admirer of Shakespeare.
The major offered its early adopters -- young, white, Catholic men -- a space to cultivate a literary life, a life of the mind filled with novels and stories, craft and criticism, poems and plays. Amazingly, the major has offered the same to you gathered here today, our brilliant English majors who look so different from the early cohort. In a world filled with utilitarian ends, characterized by doom, dread, fear, and distrust, you chose to follow a book-lined path strewn with stories. You trusted your hearts and minds to pursue an academic life of reading, writing, thinking, talking, listening, and revising. Now you're preparing to leave this curated life of Milton and Morrison, Eliot (both George and TS), Dunbar-Nelson and Dante, Shakespeare and Sappho, to go off into the wider world of work and adulting.
You all had a rough go of it as you started college. You had just finished a dismal senior year of high school, one punctuated by drive-by graduations, canceled proms, and hastily designed online classes. Then you started your freshman year having to carry around folding chairs, wearing masks, and remaining socially distanced at all times. I had to stop and count the years, remember your sorrows, recount my own, as I prepared these words. There is something to note here about the transitory nature of pain that leaves an indelible mark in places most cannot see.
It is amazing to me that you had the courage to declare the English major in the midst of so much uncertainty. But isn't that what our discipline offers? Shelter in a time of storm? Friends on the page, always ready to show up when you need them? Endless possibilities when the 24-hour news cycle screams "the end is near!"
I entered college in the fall of 1982, in the second year of Ronald Reagan's first term as president. Economic times were hard and would get significantly harder as I navigated my years as an undergraduate. Like you, I had decisions to make about my life, an uncertain future in a rapidly changing world. But throughout those years, two things anchored my way -- my decision to study literature and my parents' support to do so. I loved to read. I still do. And I loved that I could place reading, talking about books, and writing about them at the center of my daily life.
We are proud of you for following your hearts, for preparing yourselves to live a life and not to work at a specific job, for engaging with ideas and each other, for opening your minds to new possibilities, to people you may never meet by engaging characters whose lives share no resemblance to your own but whose stories have invited you to consider the complexities of the human condition. We need you more than ever. Remember that as you leave us. Remember the complicated, messy, unwieldy discussions you have had in your classes as you read Audre Lorde and Charles Dickens and Zadie Smith. When life's choices present themselves in terms of ridiculous binaries, shake your head and resist the notion. You know that life is actually filled with nuance and difference.
For four years, you have lived in the gray, toiled in the world of revision and drafts. You have witnessed that it's never perfect the first time, and you know the plot rarely ties up neatly. Take with you the practices you have adopted as an English major, along with your many, many gifts and talents. We know you're ready, and we're depending on you to lead the conversations that many of your peers are unprepared to have.
So let’s raise our glasses to you, the class of 2024, who go with all our love, support, and utmost confidence.
And to 75 more years of the English major.
