Class of ’95 Experienced a Period of Much Change : CSUN graduates move on, better prepared for life’s realities, having seen a regional recession, a dramatic upheaval in campus diversity and much more.

Each year as faculty, students and administrators don academic regalia, questions dance like visions of sugarplums in the heads of ceremony participants. While students heave an audible sigh of relief, dreaming of their first apartment, BMW or step up the corporate ladder, their parents and teachers wonder if they are ready to take on the challenges of the world in the 1990s and beyond.

There is a prevalent belief that things have never been worse in this nation. There are reasons to hope that students graduating from Cal State Northridge know better: Many of them have gone through a transformation unique to the place and time.

Students entering as freshmen or transfers around 1990 have lived through dramatic changes in the erroneously described “recession-proof” Southern California economy. They have watched two dynamic new officials, a campus president and a provost, change the focus and disrupt the comfort zones across campus. They have seen a dramatic increase in the diversity of the student population.

They have fought for classes, watched student financial aid decline and used telephones to register and vote for student government officers.

The Class of 1995, at mid-decade, is only a few years away from a new century. This spring’s Northridge graduates may be more prepared for the future than many of us. Undoubtedly they bring more than lip service to an era of change--after all, they have lived it and survived it in a most dramatic fashion.

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The realities of an urban, multicultural, multigenerational and increasingly international campus were inescapable for the class of 1995. The classroom debates, the wars of words in campus newspapers, the controversy over athletics, Proposition 187, forums on affirmative action and conflicting standards of civility were merely rehearsals for the realities of full-time life post-academia. The luxury of time, encouragement to think something through, to problem-solve and to benefit from the safe harbor in which to make mistakes . . . all gone!

The graduates of 1995 leave with a profound sense that Northridge was a microcosm of our ever-changing world; infused with frequent contact with an American society increasingly characterized as coarsening. We have, collectively, grown calloused with the confusion of competing values, dwindling resources, class, gender, sexual orientation and political correctness.

As we attempt to move toward a “kinder, gentler nation,” who among these graduates will be the leaders in standing up for what is right, but not always profitable; for what is good for others, but not necessarily for one’s self; for education rather than punishment? Have Northridge students realized that we must each first learn to be leaders to ourselves?

I think so. I hope so.