The burden of generations

At universities and colleges across the US and Canada, May is the graduation season. With fanfare and pomp, graduation day brings festivities and commencement speeches, in front of students decked up in gowns, hoods, caps and tassels. In the pre-historic era before YouTube and social media, commencement speeches were just for graduates, their families, and the faculty in attendance. Now we get to see snippets of speeches from institutions across the world. Very few speeches are genuinely good, some are bizarre and cringy, and most are predictable. Unfortunately, all too often, the attention is on the commencement speaker, and not the students whose achievements the speaker is invited to celebrate.

Among the sea of students, dressed up in identical gowns, there are those who have a perfect GPA, and those who have won prestigious international awards. But in the same crowd, there are many who have carried an invisible but heavy burden throughout their time at the university: those who have never had a parent or a grandparent attend a university, who could not afford a consultant to help them with their application, or lived experience of a family member to help them adjust to the new life.
Within the past week, I got an opportunity to spend time with some of the first-generation students. One of my own students, who is from Egypt, comes from a small town. His mother is not educated, and his father farms on a small, leased plot. Money has always been tight in his family. But today, he not only has a master’s degree, but is about to have his first novel published from a reputable press in the US. At an event celebrating first generation students last week, I got to hear from several other students, including one who has had no one in his family ever go to college. His first year was particularly rough, not only because of adjustment to a new place, but also because of the pandemic. In his first semester, his grades were so bad that he was kicked out of the university. At that low point, through support of kind mentors, friends and most of all his sheer determination that he belonged at a university, he appealed his termination. The appeal was accepted, and he was allowed to come back. Three and a half years later, he is graduating this week with a degree and the opportunity to share his story with thousands of others who were in attendance. At the end of his speech, as he thanked his parents in Spanish, the language they are far more comfortable with than English, many, including me, were deeply moved. 
Stories like the ones above are not unfamiliar to my peers in Pakistan. We all know students who have had no one in their family go to university before. But even if we are aware, many like myself, often never ask ourselves the basic question. Imagine the shuffling of fate’s cards — do we have what these students have? Would we be able to fight the odds the same way these students have fought? In the absence of the privilege that I was simply born into, would I be able to carry the burden of generations that were unable to get higher education? 
Some people may answer the questions above with an inflated sense of themselves. I am not sure that I have the courage and determination that I see in these students. But not everyone is lucky to have the same level of courage, determination or families that risk so much for a fleeting chance at better education. Higher education is not simply an opportunity for economic empowerment; it is also a chance to seek answers — about the universe and about ourselves. We have to imagine, and implement, a system where these opportunities exist for everyone, and not just reserved for those who are born in the right families. And we have to celebrate those, who remind us of this promise of higher education. I believe the best part of being a professor is not the occasional chance to inspire others, but the joy of being inspired every day.