ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Sunday, May 5, 1996                    TAG: 9605070008
SECTION: VIRGINIA                 PAGE: B-1  EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ELLIOTT SMITH STAFF WRITER 

GRADUATES TOLD TO SEEK THEIR `ROOTS'

GRADUATION SPEECHES, the speaker at Roanoke College said, are ``a brief, bittersweet purgatory between apparent education and presumed employment.''

On a day when most of the audience present at Roanoke College's commencement ceremony was looking to the future, the featured speaker decided to look at the past in order to offer words of wisdom.

Virginia Supreme Court Justice Lawrence L. Koontz Jr. addressed the 337 graduates on a bright but breezy Saturday afternoon on the front lawn of the campus, telling them that commencement speeches are a "brief, bittersweet purgatory between apparent education and presumed employment."

Koontz, a Salem native, looked at turn-of-the-century commencement speeches made at the college and applied what the speakers said then about education, service and government affairs.

"In considering these themes, and many others of those past commencements, one is struck by the truth of the sentiment, `The more things change, the more they remain the same,''' Koontz said. "There is not so great a chasm between our world and theirs. Their concerns remain our concerns."

Koontz challenged the graduates to shape the world they are about to enter.

"What advances will our common vision bring to the future?" he asked. "We can speculate but we cannot know. That is the mystery of life. But you have the opportunity not merely to observe those advances, but to steer them - even create them.

"Resolve yourself not merely to be consumers of that progress, but instigators of it."

Roanoke College valedictorian Melissa Guilliams, an English major, also addressed the audience, using a metaphor about a tree and its roots to help explain what makes a successful student.

"We usually don't notice the roots when we're admiring the tree, but we need to make it a habit," she said. "This would not have come without the support of family and friends."

The college also featured the dedication of a mace in the honor of Hartselle Kinsey, a 1921 graduate of the college.

The mace, which was created by Susannah Wagner of Ashland, features a sterling-silver headpiece, a maroon glass globe and six engraved medallions representing subjects Kinsey valued - chemistry, liberal arts, international flags, "quarens qualitatem" (seeking excellence), wildflower mountains and the college's bell tower. A mace was used in the Middle Ages as a weapon, but has now become a symbol of academic authority.

"Let us use this mace to break through the armor of ignorance, greed and malice," said the chaplain, the Rev. R. Paul Hendrickson.

Two honorary degrees were also awarded. The Rev. Theodore F. Schneider received the honorary Doctor of Divinity and James C. Turk received the honorary Doctor of Laws. The senior class gift funded the construction of a new Main Street entrance for the courthouse.

LENGTH: Medium:   61 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  ERIC BRADY/Staff. Derrick Boykin, of Baldwin, N.Y., is 
          hugged by his brother Bennie Boykin after receiving his bachelor of 
          arts degree Saturday at Roanoke College. color.