ENMU holds sunny ceremony

PORTALES - The first outdoor graduation ceremony for Eastern New Mexico University in more than 50 years was expected to have a few glitches, as Chancellor Patrice Caldwell told a Greyhound Stadium crowd.

She wasn't concerned about a lightning strike, said she'd simply talk faster if there was rain and said that any passing train horn was simply the railroad's way of saying, "Way to go, Greyhounds."

Records show ENMU had an outdoor graduation ceremony in 1965, but the ceremonies were soon moved indoors where they've remained the past six decades.

Other than the heat, little went wrong Saturday as the Portales campus held its first in-person commencement anywhere since the COVID-19 pandemic began in the spring 2020 semester. The ceremony lasted about 2 1/2 hours, with Lt. Gov. Howie Morales delivering on a commitment made last year to be the keynote speaker.

Roughly 400 students made their way to the turf of Greyhound Stadium, selected for its vast outdoor space, and many understandably didn't find their way back to their seats after receiving their diplomas, as the cloud cover left and the temperatures approached 80 degrees.

After all, they'd spent their college careers experiencing a different kind of heat.

"For most of us, just making it here is a challenge," Morales said of the graduation stage. "What you have done over the last 14 months is extraordinary. In some cases, I can't even imagine how that was done."

Morales referenced a Winston Churchill address to the students of Oxford. Churchill spent hours working on his speech, and was so moved by the audience he just said, "Never give up," four times and left to thunderous applause.

"You guys aren't that lucky," Morales said, "because I have a little more to say today."

In his address, Morales spoke of the state being ahead of the curve nationwide on COVID-19 vaccination and asked people to focus on how to view the positives of education instead of the learning loss from the pandemic.

Along with Morales, the university selected a quartet of student speakers covering various majors and experiences.

Vincent Goodman, who plans to attend optometry school in Tennessee, said he was never a bad student but got a wakeup call when he bombed a test early in his sophomore year.

"I expected an A," Goodman said, "and I didn't work for it."

Goodman said he committed himself, and never saw a repeat of that incident on his way to a 4.0 grade-point average.

Leah Fraze never had particular interest in agriculture until meeting her husband Braden, and she now leaves the university with a bachelor's degree in animal and dairy sciences and works at Prairie Lake Veterinary Clinic in Clovis.

"Eastern helped me find myself," Fraze said. "It helped shape me into the woman I am today."

Raven Lente said she spent her years in art classes never knowing why instructor Greg Senn would always ask students what grades they believed they earned and why, because he rarely told them if they were right or wrong.

"He kept asking not out of instructor pride," Lente said, "but mainly to force us to start being critical of our work without the guidance of anyone else."

Tanner Carter, who finished a business degree while playing basketball for the Greyhounds, told fellow graduates that Saturday should not be the peak of their stories.

"Our success lies not in our past accomplishments," Carter said, "but our ability to be persistent and overcome every major obstacle in life along the way."

Caldwell closed out the ceremony - her first in-person Portales commencement since becoming chancellor 13 months prior - by welcoming students into the alumni association and asking them to come back to visit in the fall semester that would include events and athletic competitions to go with in-person classes.