This year's Yale College seniors surely have memories so indelible that they feel like the "defining" events of their college years, President Maurie McInnis told graduating seniors Sunday.
After all, she noted in her Baccalaureate address on Old Campus, the Class of 2026 has done many notable things: They've researched quantum error correction, paleobotany, and Mesoamerican pseudo-glyphs. They've created health technology companies, musical technologies, and new technologies to help manage all the other technologies.
They've staged productions of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Fiddler on the Roof," and written original theatrical works about Nietzsche and a beauty parlor ("To be clear," she quipped, "those are two different productions.")
And the class was the first since the Class of 1908 to cheer the football team to wins over Harvard for four consecutive seasons.
"I'm sure you can recall these events with precision, because they're some of the defining events in your class's history, and they're the material with which you've already begun forming a community of memory," she said.
"But I promise you this. The way you remember your college years, and the way you remember yourselves and each other, is going to change. Because you can't anticipate right now how both these glorious events that I've just enumerated, and your perhaps more forgettable undertakings, will assume new meaning in some future moment."
