As summer slips quicker than financial aid through our fingers, some students are lucky enough to finally bring their college career to an end. Unfortunately, they won’t have the option of a summer graduation ceremony to celebrate their hard-earned achievements.
For the first time in more than 40 years, Portland State will not be holding a summer commencement ceremony—and doesn’t plan on holding one anytime soon.
In case you’re not familiar, PSU has previously held a relaxed summer ceremony for students who wanted to forgo the pomp and circumstance that comes with a stuffy event at the Rose Garden Arena. The nearly 700 students who attended last year were free to take off their caps and leave their robes at home, making for a more casual atmosphere.
However, the South Park Blocks ritual of sunshine and gaiety has come to an end, and some students are left asking why.
PSU Associate Vice President of Communications and Marketing Chris Broderick talked to The Oregonian last year regarding the final summer commencement. Some of the reasons Broderick listed for the discontinuation included overcrowding of the Park Blocks and hellish parking conditions.
The parking nightmare is probably one most students can handle at this point—after spending four or more years circling garages, searching for a tiny spot to shove their car into and wondering what exactly their term permit had actually bought them.
Hunting for parking on the way out of college might almost be a cathartic moment for many students who still hold on to a thread of fondness for the campus. It is even entirely possible that such a frustrating challenge could prove to be a rite of passage of sorts; a final moment of fury at the little injustices that come with college life and the instant of joy that comes with knowing it’s almost over for good.
Of course, there are always the out-of-town relatives and acquaintances who show up and are completely bewildered by the price of downtown parking, but that usually happens at the Rose Garden ceremony as well.
The limited space within the park offers a slightly more legitimate reason for canceling all the fun. The space is so constrained that PSU has been unable to provide chairs for everyone who attends and has had to create an overflow area in the Smith Memorial Student Union Ballroom to accommodate all the family, friends and random passersby who decide to show up to the ticketless affair.
Like so many other delightful things in life, the biggest reason the summer graduation ceremony was canceled was probably its expense. With the ever-growing audience and the rising number of graduates, the cost of hosting two separate ceremonies was likely more than PSU wanted to incur.
While in some ways it makes sense to hack the seemingly superfluous ceremony out of the budget, the value it adds to the community far outweighs the benefits of killing it for good. PSU is a college entrenched in community involvement; what better way is there to show the community what we have accomplished than by flaunting our fresh new graduates right in the middle of the city?
We also arduously endorse our sustainable, outdoorsy attitude here at PSU. We’re a bit different from most colleges with our vegan diets, well-used bicycles and female armpit hair. We celebrate our strangeness in many different ways, and taking away the summer commencement seems to be an affront to those values.
As students finish up the term and decide whether they want to march with thousands of others into a bleak indoor dome, some of us will think back longingly on the summer graduation we never got to have.