WSU grads had help along way

OGDEN — Back in the 1950s when Gov. Olene Walker went to what is now Weber State University, female students wore dresses, not pants, and miniskirts "just didn't exist," Walker said.

Walker and others highlighted the differences between WSU then and now in a video shown Friday to the fall 2004 WSU graduating class in the Dee Events Center.

WSU exists in a different world, as WSU President F. Ann Millner said in her speech to an estimated 750 grads in attendance.

Students more often work in teams, they have to master technology and they can take classes over a computer. In congratulating graduates, she said, "You didn't do it alone; you had help along the way."

None would agree more than student graduate speaker Ryan Marc Uhrey, who focused his speech on the "faces" in the crowd.

"My mind is filled with faces," Uhrey said. "No, I'm not crazy."

In fact, Uhrey graduated with a cumulative 3.97 GPA, a double major in Spanish and German studies and he has plans to get a master's degree in translation and interpretation.

The faces he told fellow graduates to seek are those of people who have helped them become who and "how" they are. In the faces of graduates is the face of the future, he said. In those faces, Uhrey sees hope in a world of "decaying optimism."

Uhrey's words segued into the commencement speech by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen, who was awarded an honorary doctorate by WSU.

Christensen urged graduates to maintain humility throughout life, to solve problems instead of just complaining about them and to establish and uphold a set of standards that lead to success in life.

Christensen singled out drugs, alcohol, tobacco and pornography as temptations that might lead a person to follow the voice in their head that says, "just this once." And when that happens, he said, the door is open to become a "weaker and weaker" person until that person is "broken."

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E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com