Pastides: 'Garnet-and-black passport' key to graduates success in uncertain world

University of South Carolina President Harris Pastides told graduates Saturday (Aug. 9) that their degrees represent a garnet-and-black passport to opportunity and citizenship among people with proud traditions and future plans.

In his ninth day on the job as president, Pastides told the newly minted grads at the summer commencement exercises for all eight campuses that he had much in common with them. A first-generation American, Pastides helped his parents study for their U.S. citizenship exam and became the first in his family to graduate from college – a public university, in fact.

“Earning your citizenship is actually very helpful,” Pastides said. “It compels you to remember the value of it and that it’s worth working for and holding on to. “You and I are also passport-holding citizens of the University of South Carolina family; that has been earned by us and is also very much worth holding on to.”

Pastides said that he accepted the honor of a university passport in the form of a faculty ID card, recently replaced with one labeled “president.”

The university awarded 1,050 degrees from the Columbia campus.

Also receiving degrees were the graduates of the university’s regional and four-year campuses: Aiken, Beaufort, Lancaster, Salkehatchie, Sumter, Union and Upstate. Earlier in the day, the university awarded 74 doctoral degrees at the Koger Center.

“Today, you are trading your student passport for one labeled ‘alumni,’” Pastides said. “It comes with a new set of rights and responsibilities that are shared with 240,000 living alumni,” he said.

Among the new university family members is Orangeburg native James G. Speth, environmental leader and Yale University dean who received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree. Speth, who attended this state’s public schools, earned a bachelor’s and a law degree from Yale and a master’s degree in economics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes scholar.

He is the Carl W. Knobloch Jr. Dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environment Studies. He is the author of “Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment,” published in 2004.

Among the university’s newest garnet-and-black passport holders is 57-year-old Janet Haigler of Pageland, the first graduate of the university’s Palmetto Programs. Established in fall 2007, the program is designed to give students at the university’s Lancaster, Salkehatchie, Sumter and Union campuses the opportunity to earn a four-year degree via distance education.

Haigler, who earned a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies, said she never would have been able to fulfill her dream of a college degree without Palmetto Programs. A wife, mother of three and grandmother of five, Haigler has been a long-term Central High School substitute, who has worked with special-education students.

“I am fulfilling a dream that I had,” said Haigler, who married after high school and earned a two-year business degree. “There was no way that I could travel to Columbia and earn my degree. So, when I heard about this program, I said, ‘I can do it.’”

Even so, juggling school, family and work hasn’t been easy. She’s worn her mother’s gold love-knot earrings for inspiration and a necklace with a small Gamecock charm for luck. And, when the going got tough in the last couple of months, she’d look at the cap and gown that she’d purchased earlier in the spring for reassurance.

Many of her family members were there to cheer her on. Son Jonathan, 34, who is in the Air Force and stationed overseas, watched the commencement ceremonies via the Internet.

And Haigler isn’t stopping now. She plans to pursue a master’s degree in education.