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HACKLEY REVIEW COMMENCEMENT SUPPLEMENT 2021
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Cum Laude The Cum Laude Address Adrianne Pierce
I am so honored to be speaking to you today, and I want to thank Mr. Wirtz, M. Fahy, and my colleagues for inviting me to share some thoughts at this ceremony. I’d like to spend a few minutes talking to you about the “Big Picture”. In 1985, about the time I was beginning my graduate studies, a movie called “Creator”, starring Peter O’Toole and Mariel Hemingway, premiered in theaters (do you remember movie theaters?). O’Toole plays a slightly manic scientist, Dr. Harry Wolper, devoted to bringing his dead wife back to life via her harvested cells. But that’s not important right now. Vincent Spano plays Boris, a young, eager grad student who arrives in Wolper’s lab looking for another professor for whom he will be a lab assistant. Wolper tells him that the other professor no longer has room in his lab and has run out of money, so Boris will have to join his lab. As Boris presents Wolper with his course schedule to approve and sign, Wolper, giant unlit cigar hanging out of his mouth and glasses halfway down his nose, dismisses all of his courses with statements like, “Whatever you learn in Cavelli’s Genetics 101 will be redundant by the final exam.” Boris objects that he needs to take 12 credits for the semester, to which Wolper responds: “Introduction to the ‘Big Picture’’’ — 12 credits.” “That’s it? (says Boris) One course in the ‘Big Picture’ — 12 credits?” “It’s very big; 12 credits probably isn’t enough, it’s so big.” On the surface, the field of Classics and 12 credits of the Big Picture would seem at best irreconcilable and, at worst, oxymoronic. Classics with its focus on nominatives and genitives, ablative absolutes, the
Upper School teacher and DEI Coordinator Adrianne Pierce addressed the Class of 2021 at the Cum Laude Ceremony held on June 10, 2021. Dr. Pierce retires on July 1.
middle voice, and passive periphrastics (“what now?”, I hear you cry) — how could such a field possibly encourage engagement with the larger world? What Classics students have discovered, however, is that Caesar’s military strategies are still a part of the curriculum at West Point and the Naval Academy; that when Taylor Swift sings, “I say, “I hate you,” we break up, you call me, “I love you”...we are never, ever, ever getting back together”, she is channeling Catullus’ famous lament “odi et amo” — I hate and I love; perhaps you may ask why I do this. I don’t know, but I feel it happening and I am tortured. Quintus Cicero’s advice to his brother on how to run his campaign for consulship should be bedside reading for any politician, and I have given copies of this to more than one candidate. These are but a few small examples of Classics’ continued relevance to our 21st century world, but they are echoed in recent comments by Dr. Cornel West: “The Classics force us to come to terms with the most terrifying question we could ever raise, which is what does it mean to be human.” Classics has come under fire, and rightly so, largely because of the way in which it has been taught and the age-old focus on Classics as “the roots of Western Civilization”. Dangerous misappropriation of symbols, misuse of images and texts, and misinterpretation of the ancient
