Fairfield ushered in a new tradition this year with the first ever freshman only convocation. It was a very elaborate, ornate ceremony right from the onset when Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich, longtime writer, entered into the Quick Center along with department heads and major administrators such as Father Kelley, the president of the university.
This marked the end of a school-wide convocation that in years past had been lightly attended despite the school’s attempt to cancel classes that overlapped with it.
Dr. Orin Grossman opened by referring to the class of 2007 as, “the most academically successful” in Fairfield’s admission history.
As for the crowd itself it was nearly enough to fill the auditorium. While waiting for the ceremony they seemed to have a classic collegiate blasé attitude. One girl behind me told another how she, “had a cute outfit” for later on while the other complained that she was “starving.”
Soon after Ehrenreich took the stage however the crowd was entirely hers. The beginning ran almost like a stand-up act. One of the observations about college that resonated with the crowd was that college, “take(s) a bunch of young people at the height of their sexual capacity and tells them to study all night.”
The substance of the talk was her book Nickel and Dimed which chronicles her real life experiment of working low-wage jobs and living in surrounding areas. The book is featured in courses for upperclassman and completely required for underclassman.
She noted that the low-wage jobs people toil at in this country leave them financially in a state where they simply, “…could not get by.”
Ehrenreich noted that the luxuries that we seem to take for granted such as eating out once in a while are there because people are “slaving” to make them possible.
She concluded with a stirring call to arms citing that there has been a “new student movement on campuses today” of social awareness that she credited with the widespread campaign against sweatshop labor.
Ehrenreich was eloquent, humorous, and entirely accessible to the crowd. Her entire speech felt personal and warm almost as though she was having a one-on-one with every student.
After the convocation concluded Ehrenreich fielded questions from reporters back in the green room. She expressed bewilderment when asked if she understood the protests by University of North Carolina Chapel Hill students after they were required to read her book that they deemed too left leaning.
“Are you saying if I was not a liberal person then there would be different findings?” she responded much to the amusement of the reporters gathered.
In the end the university won over the freshman with a speaker who drew a standing ovation and got a new tradition off to a good start.
Ehrenreich is due to be remembered if for nothing else than for her quote reflecting on long discredited studies which used to suggest that studying caused woman to have fertility issues.
She deadpanned to the crowd that, “studying is not an effective birth control method.”
The crowd roared.
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