Story by Kathy McPherson
“My favorite thing about this senior commencement is that I’m not planning from scratch,” Durham Academy Upper School Director Lanis Wilson said with a bit of a laugh. This year — after two years of improvising due to the pandemic — he will return to a plan that Durham Academy is more familiar with: Members of the senior class will be awarded diplomas in a ceremony at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Memorial Hall, a tradition for DA graduates from 2010 through 2019.
The Class of 2022 commencement exercises will mark the first since 2019 that Durham Academy seniors, faculty, staff, and seniors’ families and friends will experience a ceremony without restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Commencement 2020 was about doing it on the fly and working with the rules at the time,” Wilson said. “There were no mass gatherings, so we had individual graduation ceremonies, which took place one at a time.” Commencement was held over the course of two days — four hours on Friday afternoon and four more hours on Saturday morning — as each of the 111 seniors pulled up at the Upper School campus, got out of their cars with a few family members and was awarded a diploma.
“Last year, again, we could not use any of the [off campus] event spaces, so we had to plan it here from scratch,” Wilson said. Commencement was to be in the Upper School’s K Family Outdoor Commons for the 112 members of the Class of 2021, with Kenan Auditorium as a back-up venue. “I think we had a beautiful ceremony. I'm glad everybody got to see it before halfway through the ceremony, the storm came and we then had to move inside. That's why we had to restrict our numbers last year to four [guests] per graduating student.”
With COVID-19 easing, the 102 members of DA’s Class of 2022 will be awarded diplomas in a May 27 ceremony at 3 p.m. in Memorial Hall on UNC’s campus, and there will be no limit to how many family and friends may attend. Wilson noted that with 102 graduates, the Class of 2022 is smaller than recent graduating classes and has been smaller in number through the years.
Memorial Hall is an ideal location for DA’s graduation ceremony because it seats 1,400 guests and has a large-enough stage to allow the senior class to be seated comfortably there.
“Everybody can bring everybody,” Wilson said. “We really want the seniors to be front and center for the ceremony, because that is what everybody is there to see, so we're excited to be back in Memorial Hall.”
The keynote speaker will be Gabriel Bump, author and assistant professor in UNC’s department of English and Comparative Literature. Bump’s debut novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020 and won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.
In selecting Bump to speak at commencement, Wilson said “you want to find that person who can speak to the kids. I think that it's really about them, and you want somebody who can keep the audience entertained. Having an author like Gabe is wonderful. I've seen him speak before and I've read some of his work. He's just got that kind of energy you want for this day of celebration.”
Wilson said he also wanted a speaker “who had an authentic voice, and was close enough to remember what it was like, who knows what it's like to be a young adult in the 21st century. I think the challenges these kids face and what they've been through with COVID, it's important to have someone who sees that as sort of the big moment in their life and I think Gabe does that.”
Returning to a commencement that brings together the seniors and as many faculty, family and friends who want to attend “is the culmination of all these years of dealing with COVID,” Wilson said. “It brings closure to that experience in some ways, not that we're beyond COVID. It does represent for these kids, they're on the other side of something very traumatic from when they went home [in March 2020] for the end of their sophomore year and didn't see their peers for six months, to being here half time for their junior year, to finally, in many ways almost restrictionless now, but still cautious.
“I think that's the hopeful thing, that these kids are getting to see that they've endured something really traumatic and they've come through it,” Wilson continued. “You can see how they're moving around campus, they support one another. They've come together as a class, they've done some really positive things. I just think they're a stronger class for having endured this together.”