Bell Cote 1976

If I had to select one word for this year and this occasion it would be celebration:
We are celebrating a new year
We are a celebrating 100th anniversary
We are celebrating international women's year
We will be celebrating the beginning of this country's bi-centennial
We are certainly celebrating in joyful confusion the largest freshman
class and total college enrollment in the history
of Mount Vernon
And we are also celebrating for the first time in many years a near-world
peace, tenuous though it may be.
In a time of celebration, however, one cannot help
but look forward, and on such an occasion as this, I am
reminded of the young girl when asked who made her, replied: "I don't know, I haven't finished yet."
Today individually and collectively we are like that young person. We know where we are and where
we have been, and we are looking forward sometimes eagerly and sometimes with uncertainty to what
we may become. A convocation is a beginning; it helps
way
it should be.
to make us aware that we haven't finished. That's the
But the trick is that we are never really finished, never really all we would like to be or never quite able to
contribute all we would like to for future generations. The best we can do is to make as improvements the
process of personal and institutional evolution takes place, and the simplest way to do this is to look with
candor and affection at the present and with creative anticipation to the future. In that way the process of
celebration is never ending.
By 1875, only seven years after admitting her first students, Elizabeth Somers had formally established Mount
Vernon as a distinctive girls' school offering a unique six-year, secondary and post-secondary program of
studies.
Today on the occasion of Mount Vernon's centennial convocation we continue to appreciate, enjoy, and
respond to the creativity of this distinguished woman, who was dedicated to the possibilities which life and
learning provided.
And that is my hope for each and all of us today: that in 1975-76 we share in a willingness
to define our
individual and collective possibilities and to use that potential effectively and with exhilaration in exploring
that which we may currently conceive of as the impossible.
Elizabeth Somers said it best: "Every work of the past is incomplete unless the present
The college motto "She who conquers herself conquers all things
And Emily Dickinson provides the appropriate climate for implementing
Writing in 1875, she said:
That love is all there is
Is all we know of love.
Today's convocation provides not only an occasion for a loving
exhilarating example of what is and what may be.
The possibilities are vours and ours. Let us use them well and lovingly.
Convocation Address
President Peter D. Pelham
September
l-J ^'75
"
sustains it."
documents that belief.
individual and collective actions.
recollection of what has been, but also an