DEERFIELD — The Class of 2021 certainly had its challenges, but they weren’t unprecedented, Deerfield Academy’s Head of School John Austin said at the school’s commencement ceremony on Sunday.
“I’ve never been more proud of a student body, a faculty, a community and a senior class than I am today,” said Austin, who has over 30 years of experience as an educator. “One thing is clear. You’ve been tested. You’ve been tested in ways I suspect will only become clear with time and perspective.”
While he acknowledged the difficulty of the pandemic and congratulated students, staff and families for their perseverance, Austin also reminded them that it was not the first viral outbreak in the history of the school.
Referencing historical records he found in the school’s archives, he told students of how the school had made its way through similarly difficult epidemics nearly 100 years ago, like when the school had to build its own quarantine space because the public one in Greenfield was full.
“History has a way of putting our striving into relief. It scales, it gives us perspective and allows us to see our own lives in the context of those who have been here before us. Deerfield has been here before,” Austin said. “As a class of individuals, your experience is unique and historic. And yet you also walk in the steps of those who came before you.
“Your place in the Deerfield story is strong and secure,” he said. “Truly, you have been worthy of your heritage, and we are very proud of you.”
The commencement speaker was William G. Kaelin Jr., a physician and researcher who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with two other researchers.
Kaelin spoke about his early experiences in school, where he had only average grades, and his eventual discovery of medicine as his life’s work.
Kaelin especially emphasized how opportunities came in unexpected ways.
Not only were his grades weak for most of his high school career, he said, but after he did improve his grades and applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study math, he didn’t enroll due to difficulty paying the tuition.
This ultimately led to finding that he preferred to work in medicine, he said, but that didn’t go smoothly, either. He was rejected from his first choice of residency programs.
“I’ve never met a successful person who didn’t have some failures, rejections, disappointments along the way,” Kaelin said. “When you’re doing science on the cutting edge, there’s a lot of frustration. Most of your experiments don’t work, or at least they don’t work the way you had hoped.”
Part of his success he credited to the respect for science that American culture had in his childhood, in the 1960s and ’70s. He warned that this respect has declined, and instead has been replaced by a movement of rejecting science in popular culture.
“We have to be very careful. I’m quite sure that young people today are listening and watching those messages in the same way that I was listening as a young boy growing up in the ’60s and ’70s,” Kaelin said. “We can celebrate American science, or we can celebrate the MyPillow guy. It’s our choice.”
Nicholas Baker, Rowe; Nasir Barnes, Deerfield; Nikhil Barnes, Deerfield; Benjamin Chen, South Deerfield; Piper Day, Greenfield; Shane McCarthy, Greenfield; James de Bruyn Kops, South Deerfield; Connor Flannery, Holyoke; Jason Hutchinson, Deerfield; Juliette Lowe, Deerfield; Thomas Lyons, Deerfield; Jaxon Palmer, Shelburne Falls; Abigael Persons, Deerfield; Bennett Pitcher, Deerfield; Madeline Poole, Leverett; Hannah Roche, South Deerfield; Jiamu Xia, Amherst.