Wilson Extols Teaching in Parting Words to Graduates

Closing out a week of rainy graduation ceremonies and seven occasionally stormy years as president of Cal State Northridge, Blenda J. Wilson delivered the final address of her tenure Friday afternoon as she prepares to depart for a job in Boston.

Speaking to 260 College of Education graduates and an audience of 4,000 seated outdoors under sunny skies, Wilson focused on the crucial role teachers play in California, where public education is in peril. Calling the College of Education her “intellectual home,” she ticked off a series of dismal statistics related to the state’s relatively low educational spending levels and its poor literacy scores.

“All students are being denied the kind of education that would prepare them to succeed,” she said. “A lesser institution than Cal State Northridge might find these statistics both daunting and depressing.

“Education is the single means by which a person can change the circumstances of their birth,” she said. “If you were born poor or deaf, or as I was in the 1940s, black and female, your opportunities and aspirations were rigidly circumscribed.”

Only the third president in the university’s 40 years, Wilson was also the first black and first woman to lead what has become one of the most diverse campuses in the nation. She announced in March she would leave CSUN to become the head of the newly established Nellie Mae Foundation, a Massachusetts organization devoted to education reform for disadvantaged children.

Adorned in her academic colors--Boston College’s red and gold--Wilson imparted the high calling and the great responsibility of teachers in the nation’s most populous state.

“Education has the power to enrich lives, plain and simple,” Wilson said. “Therefore what we do is noble and good.”

Wilson was already a national education figure when she arrived at CSUN in 1992, having worked as an administrator at Harvard, Rutgers and the University of Michigan at Dearborn.

She has said that her biggest regret during her presidency was that she had to spend so much time helping the campus recover from the devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake. Her efforts to speedily reopen the campus and secure more than $393 million in government repair funds earned her national praise.

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Wilson was also at the center of several controversies, including her decision to cut four men’s sports teams to comply with gender equity laws and a federal investigation of her handling of Federal Emergency Management Agency funds.

Gerri McDaniel, a Deaf Studies graduate, called Wilson an inspiration and a model. Wearing jeans and tennis shoes under her graduation robe, McDaniel praised Wilson for keeping her door open for students.

“I’ll miss her,” she said. “I think she’s done a great job and I admire her--it was probably hard to get to that position being an African American woman.”

Palmdale teacher John Porter, who received his master’s in special education, was thinking less about Wilson’s imminent departure than about his own journey.

“I’m just relieved its over,” he said. “Most of us are working during the day, studying at night, propping our eyes open during night classes.” Porter plans to enter a doctoral program in education administration.

Michal Temkin, the student organizer of graduation week, was glad to see the weather hold up Friday after four uncharacteristically cold and wet June days.

“Out of nine ceremonies, three had rain and two of them were cut short” because of the rain, she said.

The weather notwithstanding, 6,900 students received degrees throughout the week.