Janet K. Marcous, CPCS

As many of you already know, people who have been oppressed have experienced one obstacle after another, after the other, after the other, and the challenge is always then a way to get through it and still keep your integrity in place. No matter how hard I tried and no matter how good I thought I was, I was never good enough.

And later on, after I’d done a lot of my growing and rebellious­ness and what not, I decided to go back to college, and decided to come to UMass Boston and particularly CPCS (the College of Public and Community Service), because I wanted to learn how to enjoy learning. I’d never had that opportunity before. It was always very, very stressful, and it was never anything I really felt like I could just relax and just, “Oh, wow, let’s learn something good.”

And here, at U. Mass, I can remember feeling there was a sense of, “Oh, it’s okay. Maybe it’s going to be safe here.” Well my experi­ence with education in all the years were not safe at all because no matter what I did, there was always someone who looked down, always looked down. They never saw me for who I really was. So, when I came here to CPCS, there were three people in particular that really, really supported me a lot. I could add, “There’s a fourth. There’s a fifth. There’s a sixth.” David Rubin, Joan Arches, Vicky Steinitz, and I’m going to add Sarah Bartlett.

For me, U. Mass—I really feel this strongly—U. Mass really demanded academic excellence from everyone—and the College of Public and Community Service inspired all of us to tap into our determination as responsible human beings to one another and make the choice for social change. And CPCS is about social justice. So, when I think about all the obstacles, and thinking, “I’m going to go into CPCS at U. Mass—Hmm, who am I going to meet up with? What’s going to happen?” You know — I was very nervous.

So, I went ahead with that and learned that it was very safe because it’s okay to be different here. It doesn’t matter who you are, right? Right. And it really, really felt—I’m sure a lot of you know this feeling, the same just as—not to be a part of the solution is to be a part of the problem. I think, here, we’re part of the solution and that we bring that out when we graduate, or even before we graduate—there are many of us who are working right through college and still working and keep going, keep going—that we change the community for the better.

I would like all of you to think about the idea of becoming an ally. Do you know what “ally” means? It means connecting with someone else who is different from you, like salt and pepper, deaf and hearing, deaf-blind and deaf, and working together as a team to make change happen—will produce many more successes than trying to work alone, always does. [Applause]

You know what else it means? A commitment. It means a commitment to be courageous during time when you don’t think it’s going to go anywhere, and it does. It takes a lot of courage to be perseverant, hopeful, to keep going. It takes a lot of courage to get through the obstacles, not to go around them or over them, BUT through them.

Janet K. Marcous