Professor Pamela Venz from the Department of Art and Art History, BSC’s 2022 Outstanding Educator of the Year, delivered the 2023 commencement address to 279 graduates at ceremonies on Friday, May 19. This version has been slightly edited for length. 

Forward Ever, be our watchword,

Conquer and Prevail! 

These words are from our alma mater, a poetic early 20th century call to action that became concrete and imperative over the course of this past year. They are intended to be inspirational, yet one tends to focus only on the foreground, if you will, the words themselves. What is left out can be found in the background, in the spaces between the words. For in those spaces lie the unsaid consequences of following the call of these words; pain, uncertainty, struggle, the stress-induced sleepless nights, and the grief we have all felt at some point over the course of this year. But also the persistence, creative problem-solving, determination, as well as the courage that was necessary to lead us to this moment today – a fulfillment of the call to action our alma mater demands. 

We gather this day in full celebration of our collective moment. We celebrate our survival as an institution – yes, incomplete though it may be with more work to do.  

But first and foremost we are here to celebrate you the class of 2023. who have endured a perfect storm, not of your making and out of your control – the forces of a global pandemic and the potential demise of your College that fought to distract you from your purpose. You have prevailed and now stand, with the honor of place as the 164th graduating class of Birmingham-Southern College and the 124th class graduating from this campus. Congratulations! We are so proud of your accomplishment and the strength and faith required to complete it. 

As I contemplated how to approach the daunting task of presenting a commencement address, one piece of advice I received was to use what you know. What I know is art, and specifically photography. I tell my students regularly that photography is not about reality it is about perception. When we view a photograph, we tend to assume a level of reality that is not actually there as each image is the result of a series of decisions made by the photographer that affect how a viewer reacts to and understands that image.  

And in considering the relevant connections of these thoughts to our purpose here today, I focused on an assignment that I give near the end of the entry-level course, Camera Mechanics, and Composition. This is the Word assignment in which I present a cup full of paper strips on each of which a word has been typed and students draw one blind from the cup. The word they draw becomes the basis of their project.  

Given the experience of contemplating the end of BSC and honoring the end of the class of 2023’s tenure here on the Hilltop, the first word that ran through my mind was transient, lasting only for a short time; impermanent, ephemeral, fleeting. The image that I was drawn to was created by Kelsey Collier, BFA ‘18. I found this photograph she created as part of her word project to be a beautiful, captivating, and expansive expression of transience. In the image we see the body of an insect caught in a spider’s web, bathed in a delicate light against a dark background. The insect is quiet, still, apparently the victim of the web and the web itself shows the damage caused by the encounter.  

On the surface a viewer might experience a huge “ick factor” response. Bugs are bugs, after all, and the image captures a moment of death for the insect. But out of the frame is a moment of life for the spider who lives to see another day, to mend the web and reproduce the next generation.  

Kelsey composed the photograph at eye level and closely cropped to emphasize the details she wanted us to see. The dark background allows the light to “pop” in the manner of a Rembrandt still life. The linear elements of the web and the insect become woven together in this light, creating a jewel-like image of the transient nature of life.  

But if you allow your mind to delve deeper into the photograph you can also see the strength of the elements that underlie the transient nature of the encounter: 

• The web, which is both delicate as the damage illustrates and strong as it successfully ensnared the insect.  
• The insect, which is also strong as its species survives despite an individual’s demise, yet delicate in its physical structure.  

• The light itself, which is delicate and fleeting, is the strength behind the visual appeal of this captured moment.  

It is a moment that itself no longer exists except within the “amber” of the photograph. Its impermanence is now made permanent by the magic of the photographic process, an artifact of life, death and beauty woven together by the creative eye of a young photographer.  

This balance of light and dark, life and death, strength and delicacy captured in a single photograph illustrates another word that came to my mind as I considered the messages to deliver today, that of transformation. Photography at its basic level is a process of transformation, capturing the transient and transforming it into a visual permanence.  

In a similar manner, your experience here over the course of four years has also been a process of transformation. You entered as teenagers, some of you sure of the path you were to follow, or so you thought, and others uncertain of which of the many paths before you would be the one to choose. Through the transient experiences of the day to day; the time spent in classrooms, in music practice rooms, art studios, science labs and on theater stages you have transformed into the young adults before us now prepared to leave and to begin your next transient journey beyond this campus.  

You take with you the artifacts of this transformation the knowledge gained in your primary fields of study, the skills each of these fields require but also the relationships created with your roommates, teammates, and classmates. Those relationships took root in the meeting rooms of student organizations where you have learned lessons of leadership and service, speaking, and listening, and in the offices of your professors who have pushed you perhaps further than you thought you could go yet have given you the tools and support to surprise yourselves as you reached the goals set before you. They have become role models for the continual creation of new and higher goals to work toward.   

This quest for knowledge never ends – “Forward, Ever, be our watchword.” These artifacts of your transformation provide the web that is the structure of what is truly permanent within this transient experience. That is legacy; it is heritage, inheritance but it is also consequence or aftermath. Yours is the legacy of this place, this time, and community, of service, dedication, passion, and courage. It is the legacy of those who came before you and of those will follow behind as you add your own actions to this legacy, for legacy requires action.  

When one contemplates the end of something, particularly something impactful like a graduation, there is a natural tendency to reminisce. I felt that tendency as I thought about today and I wanted to highlight a few stories from your BSC legacy. These are stories you’ve inherited and which give you a template for adding your own stories to this legacy. They are just a few of the examples that embody some of the words I have used in this address and that I think are pertinent for you. 

I described the character of the work of President Daniel Coleman, the College administration, and the Board of Trustees this past year as persistence. It is a valuable quality found in many of our legacy stories.  

I chose two from the earliest years of our institutional parent, Southern University in Greensboro, Ala. In 1868, Julia Strudwick Tutwiler asked to enroll at Southern University, but was denied. She attended anyway, demonstrating persistence that also mean stubbornness. She became an advocate for education and prison reform in Alabama, the first and only woman president of Livingston Normal College (now the University of West Alabama), author of the Alabama State Song, and an inaugural inductee to the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame.  

Then 29 years later, her niece, Margaret Pickett, became the first woman to graduate from Southern University. Do not immediately accept “no” as the final answer to your life’s pursuits. Persistence is required to fulfill a call to action.  

I have used the word courage as I have addressed you today, and stories of courage are woven throughout our legacy. In 1965, during a time of social unrest and political turmoil, the first African-American students were quietly enrolled at BSC. They were not greeted with arms wide open — far from it, as the College, along with many across the country, had acquiesced to pressure to integrate. These students were not even included in the yearbook.  

It took courage to be the unwanted first, to be the first of those who deserved the educational opportunity BSC offered and who had been denied that opportunity for no reason other than skin color. But with courage and persistence, Skip Bennett graduated in 1967, the first African-American to do so, 50 years after the merger created Birmingham-Southern College.  

And while the welcome mat was not immediately rolled out, many white BSC students at the time took on the mantle of courage to support the change they knew was right. In 1963, Marti Turnipseed walked from the Hilltop to downtown Birmingham to become the first white student to join in the city’s lunch counter sit-ins. When she returned to campus, she was expelled. A year later, she was readmitted for her senior year, and remained focused on helping to right the wrongs she witnessed.  

We are not a perfect institution, but we follow the path toward perfection as today our student body is more diverse by percentage of the population than those of the University of Alabama and Auburn University, and very close to that of UAB.  

Courage is required, and its fruits are laudable. 

Over the course of 164 years, Birmingham-Southern has crafted a legacy of service and community that instills in its graduates an understanding of what we owe each other, a recognition that each of us are but one part of a greater whole that requires our engaged participation.   

Service to community, courage, and persistence describes the legacy story of Howard Cruse ‘68. He was known while a student to haunt the new theater and courses before the major was created. He also was known for drawing single-panel cartoons for the College newspaper as and for several local papers at the time that satirized everyone and everything from dorm life and classroom scenarios to fellow students and administrators to the civil rights movement in Birmingham.  

When he graduated, he moved to New York and took his love of storytelling and his talent for illustration and used the creative platform of cartoons and graphic novels to illuminate and humanize the gay community of which he was a part, and which was being ravaged at the time by the AIDS epidemic. In so doing, he inspired a generation of LGBTQ+ artists and earned the moniker of “the father of gay comix.” His reach was large, and his community well served.  

And just a couple of weeks ago, Kyle Whitmire ‘01, an Alabama political columnist was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary for “State of Denial.” His year-long exposé connected 150 years of a myopic presentation of Alabama’s history, which has ignored its full truth with the state’s persistent problems of inequality, limited education, and injustice. Courage, persistence, and service to community are the basis of good journalism, and we need good journalists like Whitmire who work for the truth today more than ever.  

Not all our stories leave such visible imprints. Many of those who embrace BSC’s mission of service do so in quieter ways or in smaller communities. Many leave the Hilltop to spend time gaining life experiences, and then come back to serve the community here that nurtured them and the larger communities of our city and state. You have had them as professors, program directors, library personnel, and coaches. They hold seats on our Board of Trustees and business boards across the state. They are doctors, attorneys, actors, and architects, ministers and musicians, scientists, artists, writers, and entrepreneurs, and a multitude of other occupations and professional titles. They work to improve the lives of those in the communities they call home fulfilling the BSC mission to do so.  

This place is special, and its hold on you will be felt for years after you leave today. Embrace this also as a part of your legacy. 

Now, I charge you with one more task: Make it your mission to put good into this world. I truly believe that if you do that, then good will come to you.  

I have seen this in action in my own life, but also this year through letters, articles, and testimonials, the good that Birmingham-Southern has put into this world was heralded.  

This faculty, whose selfless dedication to you and to maintaining the highest quality of research and creative scholarship in the most trying of situations this faculty puts good into this world. 

Our coaches who work tirelessly to bring new recruits to our community and who demonstrate the best attributes of sports as they build teams of strong dedicated young people put good into this world.  

The staff whose work is often unnoticed but whose commitment to making the day to day run smoothly, cleanly, and safely puts good into this world.  

And when the good that is Birmingham-Southern College was recounted in so many ways, that legacy of goodness gave us a second chance: A chance to prevail and remain for you and those who will follow you.  

Put good into this world. Use your persistence, your passions, your dedication, and your courage to put good into this world for goodness is the light that illuminates the darker corners of this life, that “pops” off the dark backgrounds. It is the light that others will follow. 

As the class of 2023, you are now challenged by the legacy of this College community to bear that light with you as you now leave to write your own legacy stories.