An Education for the State of Alaska's Second Half-Century

Commencement Address
University of Alaska Southeast
May 4, 2008
Stephen V. Sundborg, S.J.

I am delighted and surprised that I am the speaker at your commencement from the University of Alaska Southeast here in Juneau.  Delighted, because as the president of Seattle University I love commencements more than anything else and am proud to contribute to yours.  Surprised, because I never would have imagined that this kid from Juneau would be doing this.

I left Juneau, the capital of the Territory of Alaska, fifty years ago this month, May 1958, not yet 15 years old, having just finished my freshman year in the brand new Juneau-Douglas High School on Gastineau Channel.  What I realize today is that you can leave Juneau, leave Alaska, but Juneau and Alaska will never leave you!  My hometown always will be Juneau and I always will be an Alaskan.  They made me to be who I am.  Your hometown and your Alaska have also made you to be who you are.

I can still in my heart and feelings walk out of our family house, cross Gold Creek, climb the Ninth Street hill, walk past the Governor’s Mansion, along Calhoun overlooking the Tlingit village below, go over “The Overpass”, pass between what was then the Federal Building and the old high school and grade school, go past St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church and make my way to St Anne’s Grade School where I went to school for eight years.  That’s where I started school.  I may now be a university president and have a doctorate and lead 7,500 students and 1,200 faculty and staff, but the most important educational walk I ever took was from Gold Creek to St Anne’s near the bottom of Starr Hill leading up to Mt. Roberts.  I not only took that walk but those Alaskan educational days “took” in me.  I believe in a similar way, as you this day look back on your long journey to this commencement, that you too will find that there is a very special Alaskan education that has taken hold of you and more than anything else made you to be who you are today and who you always will be.  You may leave Alaska—though I hope not—but if you do, don’t worry, take it from me, Alaska will never leave you.

When I left Juneau our family moved to Fairbanks where my father, George Sundborg, was the editor of the Fairbanks Daily News Miner in the years immediately before statehood.  He had been elected as a delegate at large to the Alaska State Constitutional Convention, chaired the Style and Drafting Committee of that Convention, meeting in the very cold winter of 1955 56 at the University of Alaska in Wickersham Hall, and today at the age of 95 is the oldest of the four-out-of-fifty-five surviving founding fathers and mothers of your—our—state’s constitution.  He lives in Seattle, having lost his wife, my mother, two years ago who lived till she was 100 and six months old.  He’s determined to surpass her age, and says he is feeling enthusiastic because he’s in the process of writing a new book, Alaska in Our Lives, a book on our family’s years in Alaska and the making of Statehood.  What he tried to do in writing the Constitution was, in his words, “to make it sing”, that is that it be the uplifting, inspirational Constitution of the spirited people of Alaska.

That Constitution has served Alaska well for fifty years.  My question to you on your graduation today from this University of Alaska Southeast is how you will serve Alaska in the second half-century of Statehood.  How will your education be the text, the style and the drafting, of what will constitute this great state for the next fifty years, your fifty years of leadership.

I must tell you, before I explore that question further, that I have a special memory of this very place where your campus is situated.  In the territorial days the most photographed spot in all of the Territory of Alaska was from the bridge on the one and only highway which went by here, a view from the bridge over Auke Creek, across a lily pond, over the still waters of Auke Lake with a view of the expansive face of Mendenhall Glacier in the distance.  You are situated on the most prized spot in the Territory of Alaska.  Maybe it still is.  My memory is of hitchhiking out here with my buddy Chuck Sanford to go fishing and to camp overnight along Auke Creek which links Auke Lake and Auke Bay.  We caught nothing worth keeping the first afternoon.  We pitched our clear plasticeen tent just where the lake flows into the creek.  Without fish to fry for dinner we decided to substitute instead the pound of bacon we had intended for breakfast.  Chuck put the whole pound in the frying pan and held it over the campfire.  Before long the flames licked over the edge of the pan and caught all the grease in a ball of flames.  He swished the pan to the side to try to put it out and the grease flew out of the pan onto the clear plasticeen tent, creating a three-foot-wide hole in the middle of it, and then it began to rain.  I’m back at your commencement at Auke Lake having fished—metaphorically—elsewhere in many other waters with much better success.  But as I say, “You can leave Alaska, but Alaska will never leave you.”

As university graduates you are used to poring over and deciphering many texts.  I am wondering what texts will have served you best for your writing the history of the second half-century of the State of Alaska.  Let me suggest what are in my view the two most important texts.

The first text is the text that gives shape and contour to the geography of your very spirit.  It is the text of place.  There is nothing like the text of place, the sense of place, the feel and memory of place, to inform the kind of persons we become; what I call the geography of our spirit, the very shape and contour of who we really are.  Glaciers, Mendenhall Glacier in particular, gave shape to the geography of the campus of the University of Alaska Southeast long before a professor here assigned you readings in a particular text.  So too the place of your life in Alaska, a city, a town, a village along a lake, a river, a coast, at the foot of a mountain, on the tundra, on an island, in deep virgin forest, scalped hillside, sparse interior scrubland, shaped you.  This place is the most formative text of your life.  Open it, look at it, read it, let it inform, give form to, shape the geography of your spirit, your future self, the kind of person you are and will become.  Be grateful for this text of place.  It’s because of this text and what it does to you that no matter where you go, it will never leave you.  How has the text of Alaska, your place in Alaska, shaped you, and how by reading that text are you told what history to write for the second half-century of your state?  Read it, be grateful for it, then author the constitution—what will constitute—of the Alaska of your years of leadership.

I should tell you that it was for some reason the creeks and rivers of Juneau that shaped my soul.  I still listen to them, learn from them, lead from what they tell me.  Gold Creek whose sounds I heard 24 hours a day from our house; Salmon Creek with its reservoir behind Mt. Juneau; the milky waters of Lemon Creek; my favorite fishing holes along gentle Jordan Creek (perhaps now paved over but still speaking to me); this short but wild Auke Creek; Shrine Creek at the Shrine of St Therese, short but rippling with spawning salmon; best of all Montana Creek with abundant Dolly Varden trout, blue berries, and bears; treacherous  Mendenhall River; scout camp along Eagle River; family picnics south of Juneau at Sheep Creek at Thane.  Somehow these creeks, and the many nameless ones everywhere, their freshness, the promise of trout, their snow-fed coldness, their never ceasing flow, make me hopeful, very creative, attuned to the springs and sources of life, a spiritual person, an optimistic person, an educator.  The creeks of Juneau sculpted the geography of my spirit.  I still listen to and read them as the texts of my life.  They are the prophets of the promise of my life, the flow of my future.  What place forms your inner geography?  Are you committed today always to read and listen and heed your text of place as leaders of Alaska’s future?

The second text which I suggest you pay attention to at this commencement is the text not that your professors assigned you, but the text which certain of your professors as persons themselves were for you.  You know as well as I do—much better than I do—that what all students pay attention to and are keenly attuned to and expertly able to assess in the first hours of any course is not the course itself or the textbooks, but the professor herself or himself.  What’s he like; how much will she require; does he have a sense of humor; will she care if I’m late; what makes him tick; what does she really care about; will I like him or her; will he or she like me; how hard will he be; does she know what she’s talking about; does he live what he teaches, etc.  Yes, the first text of any course we take is not something we buy in the bookstore but the living professor before us and his or her person, his or her passion.  My suggestion is that the text of the professor is not only the first text we read, but is also the last one we read and the only one we remember.

Give away, sell back, keep, prop up your beds with the textbooks of your years at the University of Alaska Southeast, but you will not be able to sell back, give away, or get rid of certain professors.  They will be the remaining and the remembered text of your university education when all else is long forgotten.  The professors who will be the text of your future will be the ones whose passion you discovered and were inspired by and resonated to and came alive in your own passion alongside of.  We all have them.  They are different for each of us.  Who are the professors whose passion is the text of your future?  What commitment, what “invitation to come alive”,  what spark, what crazy-zany-weird-wild-wonderful mind and spirit, what passion of which professors of this university is a text, perhaps the text, for your future in the second half-century of the State of Alaska?  What are they passionate about this future; what are they committed to this State becoming or preserving and what do they care about in the next fifty years, which are more your years than their years?  They are like the surviving authors of the first constitution; it is time for you to write by reading their text, the text of their passion, of their person.  You might as well listen to them today, because I can assure you will always be listening to them and learning from them.  Their class in your education, your life, is not over.  Oh, and by the way, have you thanked the professors (or maybe it’s an advisor or director or coach or moderator or staff person) whose passion has lighted your life’s passion?  Today would be a very good day to thank them.

Mine happened to be an ancient Alaskan Jesuit missionary in his last years who had retired here in Juneau, named Fr. Joseph McElmeel, who in teaching us scripture at St. Anne’s happened to smuggle in the most critical and inquisitive mind and the wildest stories about being a dogsled priest, mushing his team across the snowy tundra far north of here.  I’m a Jesuit priest because of Fr. McElmeel’s passion and I often imagine myself as the president of Seattle University as a dogsled priest, mushing my team across that snowy tundra—though as you can imagine, my vice presidents, deans, faculty and staff are not fond of this image of mine!  I still read the text of the passion of that person and it animates me as much as the scriptural texts he was teaching us.  I wish I had thanked Fr McElmeel.  Maybe my life is my thanks.

I mention these texts of place and of professors because I’m confident you don’t need reminding of parents, family, sons and daughters, friends, spouses, classmates, colleagues who surround you this day and have brought you to and accompanied you on your road to today.

I hope—and I’m sure this is also my father’s hope as a Constitutional author and founder of the State of Alaska—that the greatness of Alaska will be a measure of your lives as you lead its second half-century as a State.

• “Alaska” means, as we all know, “the big land”.  But as we all know even better, it means big-hearted people.  Write with your lives a new history of this big-hearted, large-spirited people.
• Alaska is a fresh place; you can breathe here.  Write the next fifty years with a fresh focus, something undreamed of and impossible in the lower forty-eight.
• Alaska is not the land of one people, but of many peoples.  Nobody owns it, though the Federal Government tries.  Write a text for the future of Alaska which will be a text that will constitute a common land for all its peoples with a special attention to the Alaska native peoples, and a text in which all its peoples will recognize themselves, their stories, and their futures.
• Alaska is not like the rest of the United States.  It is no longer the Territory of the United States.  Rather, I believe it has a unique opportunity to be an example for the whole nation.  So, write a text with your lives, a text which constitutes what this State will be like, what it will treasure, what it will believe in and hold to and cherish that will serve as an example for our nation.
• It is widely acknowledged that the Constitution of the State of Alaska is the best of the fifty state constitutions.  Write with the ink of your lives what constitutes the best our country can and should and, pray God, will be.  Make what you write with the ink of your lives “sing”.  Be its North Star.
• What I like most about Alaska—even more than my beloved creeks around Juneau—are its friendly, hopeful, welcoming, uncynical, frontier-seeking people.  Whatever you do, continue to nourish this land, this state with the cold, fresh, wild, renewing waters of friendship, hope and love.

As I said it has been fifty years this month since this Juneau boy left Juneau.  Juneau and Alaska and how it most deeply educated me have been with me all of these fifty years and they have been a wonderful half-century.  The next fifty are yours.  I’m confident as a university president and I pray as a priest that your deep education here and elsewhere in Alaska will be the text that shapes both the texture of your lives and your land.  Thank you and congratulations, my fellow Alaskans forever.