Founders' Day Convocation: The Definition of a Founder
Photo by Haley Bordelon
Photo by Centenary College Marketing & Communication
On Thursday, February 17th, the Centenary campus body gathered in Brown Chapel for convocation in honor of Founders’ Day. As a part of the rituals for this annual ceremony: those gathered witnessed the processional of faculty, staff, and the Board of Directors, listened to the dulcet tones of the celebrated Centenary Choir, accompanied by Dr. Hollice Watson and Dr. Gay Grosz, watched President Holoman give recognition to those faculty & staff members commemorating milestones of service to the College, and celebrated as he awarded the Charleton Lyons Summer Research Award, the President’s Excellence Award, and Outstanding Teacher Award to Dr. Janai Sridhar, Dr. Katherine Bearden, and Dr. Kathrine Weeks respectively. The solemn rituals concluded with a keynote address delivered by retiring English professor Dr. Steve Shelburne.
Dr. Shelburne, whose biography in the program details his academic, cultural, and humanitarian contributions to Centenary and Louisiana, began his speech with technical difficulties. Any student at Centenary who has taken one of his classes and was told, “You’re going to have to speak up—I can’t hear you,” can appreciate the irony of being unable to hear the beginning portion of his speech. I know that I certainly do.
His speech, one of dignity and wit, questions the origin of Centenary’s Founders’ Day as an anniversary, the purposes of the rituals we use to acknowledge the day, and the implicit definition and significance of the term ‘founder’. The first mention of this momentous celebration in Centenary’s archives can be traced back to a previous article published by The Conglomerate on May 2nd, 1939, whose headline reads: “Students Celebrate Founder’s Day,” and underneath, a message:
Any Centenary Professor
Centenary College of Louisiana
Dear Teacher,
There will be no class today,
Respectfully yours,
The Class.
That first documentation of Founders' Day was a celebration at Fort Humbug (on E. Stoner Ave.), sponsored by the Student Senate. It featured a picnic (with brown bag sandwiches and cokes), games, a sing-along, and student campaign speeches for Student Senate (SGA: Can you guys bring this back?). According to the research conducted by Dr. Shelburne and archivist Brown—Founders’ Day essentially began as the college equivalent of high school Senior Skip Day, as this student-planned day was an acceptable way (and excuse) to take the day off of classes. Since 1939, we as an organized body have taken the irreverent merriment of the day away from its initial purposes and turned it into a dull, rarely student-attended convocation with its only allure being Trek credit and passport points.
Photo by Centenary College Marketing & Communication
This transition, Shelburne proposes, seems to have occurred in a twenty-five-year span, between the 1939 headline and the April 6, 1964 issue of The Conglomerate. By '64, Founders’ Day celebrations included a picnic (moved to a location on campus) and a speech made by Dr. Henry Bowden on the history of the College. (Though Dr. Shelburne never addresses this in his speech, I do wonder if the faculty and staff attended the 1964 picnic in their full regalia or perhaps just the funny little caps?) In comparison to our current practices of acknowledging Founders’ Day (the donning of robes and polyester maroon suit jackets in a poorly circulated and overly airconditioned chapel), the previous generations at Centenary seemed to have had the right idea of things. Speeches, games, and food—a proper, Southern gathering—all planned for the intention of student benefit.
We’ve gone from the days of a celebration in the form of picnics and games—to an hour-long convocation that takes up half of our lunch break on a random Thursday. To provide an explanation or a purpose for this event, Dr. Shelburne sought to contextualize the significance of the term ‘founder.’
“A founder is someone who helps establish some sort of institution or movement—political, social, commercial, educational—and who lays the groundwork for its durability. ‘Founder’ is also typically honorific: as I’ve already suggested, it singles out someone for special praise, usually for their animating ideas. A founder somehow embodies an animating idea and inspires others to pursue it.”
By this definition, Dr. Shelburne provides potential individuals who could embody the term ‘founder’ for the College. Those that provided the educational model for the College is based—Claiborne, Chamberlain, and Carpenter? Or the men with names like Butler and Saunders and Beauvais—who composed the first Board of Trustees? As Dr. Shelburne points out: “vagueness is sometimes a good thing, especially in a reoccurring event, since it allows freedom of topics and speakers. On the other hand, it undermines the ritual aspect of an event and leads to uncertainty about its intentions.”
As a current, modern-day student of Centenary, I propose that Founders’ Day has outgrown the staid ritualism of celebrating long-dead men. Instead, I encourage a more liberal understanding of the term ‘founder.’ While the work of those in the establishment of the College and its liberal arts educational model is something worth acknowledging—they have not been responsible for the College’s centuries-long run.
Photo by Centenary College Marketing & Communication
The honorees of the day deserve to be those men and women that embody animating ideas for the next generation of Centenary graduates. By our own records, we the students are the ones who started this long-standing celebration. We named the day, began the traditions that lasted decades, and spearheaded the documentation of the festivities. So, we as a body should reclaim this day, as we in many ways have found aspects of ourselves within this reverent pursuit of knowledge from mentors and professors. While the organization of and foundation of Centenary may be a debt owed to those men from centuries past—but it is those men and women who proceed and recede past us that have kept the school going. Staff and faculty, coaches, mentors, professors like Dr. Shelburne—who pour into the moldings of our mind, challenging, empowering, and the founders of our motivation and imagination and ambition—changing us the students forever, are those who are the founders of the future of Centenary College.
