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AMHERST, Mass. – The Graduate School at the �������� Amherst conferred 2,016 advanced degrees this afternoon at a Commencement ceremony at the Warren P. McGuirk Alumni Stadium on campus.

Graduates and their guests gathered late this afternoon for the commencement ceremony, which was moved outdoors this year due to COVID-19 safety protocols. A photo tribute to the graduates was also part of the ceremony.

Student speakers Alisha Jean-Denis and Ellen Smithline spoke during the 45-minute ceremony, which also included brief remarks by UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy.

The chancellor said, “Each one of you, through proficiency in your discipline and an understanding of its value to the world, are prepared to seek out new solutions, push the bounds of knowledge, and pursue the truth. And when misinformation and willful ignorance are countered with well-informed, critical thinking, intolerance and authoritarianism no longer fester, but shrivel up under the bright light of truth. And in that space, under that ray of light, opportunities emerge to thoughtfully and productively push through barriers.”

Jean-Denis, who received her Ph.D. in social justice education, alongside her husband, Howard, who also received a Ph.D. from UMass today, spoke of the challenges graduates faced – a global health pandemic, racism, global divides and an important national election. She recalled the words of tap dancing legend Mr. Bojangles, in a conversation with her grandfather in 1949, who said, “It’s not what you do on the stage, it’s what you do after the stage.”

“While the stage might appear differently in your life, we are all witnessing the main stage of a global health crisis and the long-standing impact of racism,” Jean-Denis said. “Amidst the backdrop of a globally issued ‘stay at home’ order would be the ongoing rupture that Black feminist scholar Christina Sharpe theorizes when she writes ‘the past that is not past, it always reappears to rupture the present.’ It is these ongoing ruptures within our every day practices and our own passivity at times that witnessing interrupts. To perform witness is to be unsettled with what we think we know as truth and recognize the spatial colonial histories that exist between the Black body, the street, the hallways of schools and the knee on the neck, while we wrestle with questions of what it means to be human in a world that is anti-Black.”

Smithline, who is receiving her Ph.D. in nursing, looked back on the opportunities afforded her during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was a member of the UMass COVID Response Team that conceptualized, manufactured and distributed more than 80,000 face shields to local hospitals, skilled nursing care facilities, migrant workers and first responders in the early days of the pandemic. She also served as a nursing manager in the alternative care tents in Springfield, helping coordinate integrated care for homeless individuals who were diagnosed with or exposed to COVID-19. That experience opened another door for her as she became the director of nursing at Friends of the Homeless and Clinical and Support Options, Inc. Her dissertation focuses on emergency triage nursing.

“Our goal is to create a national nursing care model within the shelter to identify, treat and maintain both acute and chronic medical conditions and break down barriers of access to COVID testing and vaccinations,” she said. “A goal we are on the way to meeting as we have cared for over 500 individuals and had over 2,900 visits in six months. A validation that these needs exist. UMass gave me the tools to make this happen.”

Graduate School Dean Jacqueline Urla presided over the ceremony and remarked on the unusual circumstances facing the Graduate School commencement this year. She also praised the graduates for their resilience, solidarity and purpose.

“This year also made clearer than ever the inequalities in our society and the need to join arms, to help one another, to volunteer, to help alleviate suffering caused by the conjoining of our twin crises of the pandemic and racial injustice,” Urla said. “I know that many of you here today rose to the occasion and took time from your studies to participate in the efforts of mutual aid, helping in vaccine clinics, food banks, and mobilizations for social justice that took place across our communities.”

Urla also paraphrased writer Toni Morrison, recounting how Morrison worked for years at the editorial desk of Random House, where she read and discovered many talented writers well before they achieved fame, including Toni Cade Bambara, a Harlem/Brooklyn-based Black feminist and filmmaker. “Working with Bambara was a pure joy, says Morrison. She was a writer of intricately woven, almost musical, prose,” Urla said. “But what made Toni Cade Bambara so magnificent was not just her talent, it was not just her artistry, it was that she always knew the work she wanted her work to do. She wrote with purpose: to make the revolution she wanted to see, feel irresistible.”

Graduate students representing 56 countries and the U.S. were conferred their advanced degrees during the ceremony.