Advent Convocation

Professor Emeritus of Religion Gerald L. Smith shared the below remarks at the Advent Semester Convocation on Friday, sept. 12, 2025.

Advent Semester Convocation story | Full text of Professor Smith's remarks:

My Star Thou’lt Be
 

Vice Chancellor Pearigen, Madame Chair Dotson and members of the Board of Regents—I am honored by this recognition. I could have flourished here only because of this place, its people, and the incredible teams it was my privilege to lead. So, for all of us who give our lives to Sewanee, thank you.

Colleagues and staff, parents, students, alums, and friends: I greet you in the name of Sewanee—a Shawnee word that means lost, as in Lost Creek Cove; also meaning a person who starts out in one direction and ends up somewhere else. Parents of Sewanee students instinctively understand this: You want to go to Sewanee? Where is that?

I stand here as someone who started out as a Baptist in chemical engineering, switched to math, finally majored in English, rode circuit for the Methodists, became deeply influenced by Buddhists in Southeast Asia, became an Episcopalian, and ended up teaching Appalachian religion in a place none of my peers at Duke had heard of. I have always known what this word means. Sewanee may mean lost but it also means found—where I found myself teaching in a place unlike any other university in America.

I would suggest at this convocation that our name unlocks the essence of Sewanee—people who started out in one direction and ended up somewhere else. In 1857 on Lookout Mountain, our first founders thought they were founding a school for the white elite men of the South, a school they intended to support the culture of privilege and the enslavement it was built upon. They never imagined nor intended that their Sewanee would become a premier liberal arts school where more than half the undergraduates are women, where students of color have been present for more than 50 years, or that we would have international students representing 16 nations. Nor did they anticipate that their envisioned “diocesan training school” would become a major School of Theology.

Sometimes, thank God, people get lost and end up somewhere else.

Let me tell you a bit more about old Sewanee—what we might call Sewanee A&M. Agricultural and Military. In 1870, most of the instructors here were of military background and all students were organized as the Sewanee Light Artillery—the South’s little West Point on the Cumberland Plateau. Manigault Park was a parade ground complete with cannon and caisson and an ammunition shed. Students were in uniform and marched in drill with rifles, bayonets, and swords. The big social event in those days was the muster of companies on the parade ground. Where Hoffman dorm now stands was a wooden two-tier structure that housed cannon and caisson, a reviewing stand, and a special platform for a band to play at musters.

A footnote about the artillery. You have probably heard about “Ninety-nine Iron,” the undefeated 1899 team that beat everybody in the SEC—in one road trip. Well, there was another football team that deserves mention—the 1891 Sewanee Tigers who went on the road and beat UT 24-0 in Chattanooga. Word of the victory was telegraphed to Sewanee and the chapel bell was rung endlessly. Students assembled. Cheers were raised. Shouts of triumph echoed. The celebration carried on into the evening. A bonfire was needed. A big bonfire.  We don’t know the culprit or the genius, but someone built the bonfire under the artillery shed. No danger of explosion because the ammunition was stored across the road. Just an enormous tower of flame celebrating the victory over Tennessee—and the end of the Sewanee Light Artillery. Yea, Sewanee’s right!

The original dream of the founders was not a boutique liberal arts college. Far from it. Their plan was to build a German-style, all-branches-of-learning, major university. They almost pulled it off—law, medicine, pharmacology, nursing, agriculture, mining, engineering, and even business (one old map shows all of Louisiana Circle reserved for a business school). We might have been Auburn or UGA or UT. In Sewanee’s case, fortunately, our lack of money saved us.

It is possible to change your mind, embrace a different vision, outgrow or overcome your past. You don’t always have to burn your artillery shed or your ROTC building. You don’t have to try to be somebody else. Sometimes you just need to listen to your Sewanee Angel whispering, “There is a better way. Look to the future not the past.” Dream, believe, hope, desire. The future is not written in the stories of the past. The future is written in the clouds of wonder that swirl above us. It is written, even, in the Sewanee fog that surrounds us and heals our errors.

We gather today to affirm again our vision not only of who we are but of who we are becoming. And, specifically, we are here to celebrate the induction of these students into the Order of the Gown. Be very grateful for the OG and your gown. Without them you might be in uniform and marching. The OG is our oldest student organization. You are the inheritors of that long tradition of excellence represented on this campus by the Gown.

I had my own induction into this Order a few years ago and that is why I am wearing this gown today and not my regular doctoral gown. I got my first gown the night before I taught my first class. I taught outside a lot and that gown was in tatters. It even went on a few fire calls. One vice-chancellor suggested that I should retire it. Then a Sewanee Angel intervened. I happened to be walking next to Professor Willie Cocke as he exited his last faculty meeting before retirement. We were reminiscing about his long career. We paused for a moment and then he took off his gown and put it over my tattered gown. Professor Cocke’s gown is the one I am now wearing. I wore it until my daughter, Amber, earned her gown. I had Willie Cocke’s initials embroidered on it, then mine, then hers. Then she passed the gown on a few times to others. Gowns don’t belong to you they belong to Sewanee. Always keep them in circulation.

When Willie Cocke gave me this gown he was not looking back. He was looking ahead. What we do here, precious as it is, is not about the past but about the future. Make no mistake, memory is important—vitally so. But we must be careful to distinguish memory from nostalgia. Memory grounds us as we move ahead. It ensures that we always know who we are. Nostalgia, as Christopher Lasch reminded us, deceives us and tricks us into thinking that we are not who we are. Nostalgia offers deception and not truth. Too long here our view of the past has been that of nostalgia—an imagined past that hides the truth of our history from us. That historical truth is important but also hard. We have not always been as good as we thought (or said) and there are shameful passages of our past that nostalgia would make us forget.

The temptation to see Sewanee—and its symbols—as unchanging is powerful. But we must not give into nostalgia or to the Hogwartian spell of these gowns. We have not always been a pretty and happy place—and a lot of our history was ruled by Muggles. But here is Sewanee, if not perhaps the shining city set on a hill, still a place familiar and not frozen; a place of covenants of trust, not contracts; a place of latent meanings that bear us forward and not backwards. Sewanee is not about nostalgia for a lost Eden (or Lost Cause); Sewanee is a broken field of dreams—far from perfect but called in every moment to be better than it was, to become more than it is.

As our newest members of the OG, this is the challenge you accept—a tradition with momentum to carry us beyond what we were toward what we must become. The gown is a great tradition and I hope you will see it as such. It is the emblem of your academic calling, a symbol of your belonging to a community of learned students reaching back hundreds of years to the gowns of Oxford and Cambridge. It is also the symbol of the bond between you as students and those of us who teach. We are, as it is said, in this together.

There is a good feature of the older Sewanee I want to recall. About 30years ago I made a bit of a media splash. I created one of the first paperless classrooms in the country. I was interviewed by ABC, CBS, Boston Public Radio, and Susan Stamberg on NPR. I was invited to teach at the Army War College. With that impetus I turned my office into what was called “SmithLab.” I scrounged a bunch of computers and gave a dozen students keys to my office. SmithLab ran 24 hours a day.

Then one day an ominous encounter. Both the dean and the provost appeared at my office door. My first thought was, “O shoot; I am in trouble.” No. Not at all. They said that they had noticed what I was doing with students in SmithLab and said they wanted to support me. And the dean said, “We are ready to put some money behind you. Order what you need for your lab.” Folks, that sort of thing does not happen very often, but that is the old Sewanee I want to get us back to.

That group of SmithLab students went from Sewanee to make data history—at Yahoo, CNN, the Pentagon, Amazon Web Services, Norton, and DARPA. One of them, Rayid Ghani, became President Obama’s chief data scientist. Rayid, C’99, is a current regent and there is a story about him in the most recent Sewanee magazine. He and Elena Eneva have come full circle at Sewanee: They are the architects and mentors of the Sewanee Data Camp—modeled somewhat on the old SmithLab.

I would say this to our new dean, to our provost, and to our vice-chancellor: You will never go wrong finding resources to turn this faculty loose to follow their inspirations with these students. In fact, you must find these resources. Sewanee has too long been a field of broken dreams. We have limped from tight budget to tight budget. While there is much here that has been good, we have never had the resources to be as good as we should be. Mr. V-C, we need another bonfire in Manigault Park. Let us burn the excuses, the hesitations, the rationalizations that have held us back in the past. Let’s build a bonfire that will make this Mountain a beacon, a light to this nation, once again. I say this not only to you, sir, but to all who love Sewanee—you parents, my colleagues here, our alums, our friends, our trustees and regents—IT IS TIME. Time to be done with lesser things. Time to support Sewanee at a level never before imagined. Now Sewanee people. Now. Build the fire!

I am a very old scholar. I was raised on a farm without electricity and have by the turns of years come to this moment. I was lost but found Sewanee 50 odd years ago. One or two of you are the grandchildren of my first students. Sewanee’s alma mater which we will sing in a few minutes has become motto and mantra for me:  “... through all my life, through storm and strife, my star thou’lt be.” These days and years, sunsets and stars figure deeply in my sense of being, of my sense of place. Let me end with this:              

            Sunset
Some days, some years 
I see darkness chasing down the sun
Against a blood red sky
And it seems all the world
Is lost in pain anger and strife,
That reason is gone
Along with all grace and civility,
And that I shall never see light again.
Yet as I sit here at the foot
Of Sewanee's old cross watching this day die
There breaks to eye and heart 
A bright star in the western sky
Brighter far than any star this night;
Brilliant, clear, un-shimmering,
A single, pure diamond-clear note of light
And I believe once again, dare to hope 
That all will be well and 
We shall yet behold all things good. Ecce Quam Bonum!