Graduating seniors, graduate students, faculty, family, and friends will be coming together to take part in one of the greatest rituals of the college experience: the commencement ceremony. This year, Stevens will host its 146th Commencement Ceremony on May 23, 2018 at the Meadowlands Expo Center, a mere 15 minutes away from the Stevens campus (without traffic, of course).
While in recent years the ceremonies have been shifted to off-campus venues like the Prudential Center and the IZOD Center to accommodate larger class sizes and to avoid inclement weather (like the cataclysmic lightning storm that interrupted commencement in May 2012), many of the end-of-year celebrations were hosted on Stevens’s grounds since its founding in February 1870. The need for additional space was not always a concern — archived records from the Samuel C. Williams Library show that the very first class accepted to Stevens consisted of a mere 21 students and 8 faculty members. Even as class sizes began to grow in numbers, various locations on campus were utilized, such as the Eighth Street Parking Lot, Walker Gymnasium, Jacobus Lounge, DeBaun Athletic Complex, Canavan Arena, and the lawn outside the Stevens Castle before it was demolished in the late 1950s.
The Samuel C. Williams Library has also retained photos, commencement addresses, programs, and other ephemera as a way to document graduating seniors’ feelings of elation and liberation across the span of Stevens’s history. In the past, Stevens has welcomed commencement speakers such as Walter C. Kerr of Westinghouse, Church, and Kerr Company in 1904; Charles Edward Wilson, CEO of General Electric, in 1940; Dr. Leland Haworth, Commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, in 1961; and, more recently, Congressman Robert Menendez in 2005.
In its almost 150-year history, both the Stevens landscape and populace have changed greatly, but commencement is one such tradition that links all students. As our senior students prepare for the uncertainties and successes of the future, it is always helpful to look back into the past for perspective. The following images are “snapshots” from various commencement ceremonies over the years and have been included so that the Class of 2018 might feel connected to Stevens graduates of years past.
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