With commencement season underway, the El Paso Times is publishing UTEP President Heather Wilson’s recent address to graduates, “The Gardens at UTEP,” delivered on May 16.
Plato was a student of Socrates and a prolific writer who lived about 2,500 years ago. He also is behind the world’s first university.
Sometime in his 40s, Plato got a piece of land about a mile outside the walls of Athens. That’s where Plato started a school to pass on his ideas. The school was near a grove sacred to an Athenian hero, named Academus — it is where the words “academy” and “academics” come from.
Plato devoted himself to organizing an entire course of study for his growing number of students. His academy would become the model for every monastery and university in the western world.
Students flocked from every part of Greece to participate in seminar-style discussions and lectures, and to share meals. These discussions often took place in the garden.
After Plato’s death in 347 B.C., the Academy continued to flourish. It drew the best and the brightest students for 900 years, until it formally closed its doors in 529 A.D.
So, here we are, 2,500 years later, at a school in the western tradition that is a mere 110 years young, on the other side of the world from where Plato started the first academy.
And we are building another garden.
Over the next five years, our campus will continue to be transformed and improved, as it has while all of you attended.
We are demolishing the old Liberal Arts Building, which has stood on campus since 1961, and we will be restoring the arroyo that has been here long before the building, or UTEP, or the city of El Paso even existed.
The arroyo park will have a pavilion and gathering space for classes, terraced lawns, and a tree grove on its edges leading up to Texas Western Hall.
There are going to be areas to sit in the shade, and places to hang out with friends. Native desert plants will grow — you will see creosote bushes, yucca plants, and Palo Verde trees.
It will be a reclamation of the Chihuahuan Desert oasis that is our home.
If we do this right, like the arroyo that winds around Centennial Plaza, it will look beautiful, and like it has always been this way.
A bridge will span the arroyo that connects our new building, Texas Western Hall, to the Student Union, also being refurbished, in the style of the bridges of Bhutan.
On the entrance to this bridge, on the south side, we’re going to install a sculpture of an owl.
An owl is the symbol of knowledge, but this is a very special owl.
It was created for the El Paso public library Downtown, but it was the wrong size. El Paso artist Tom Lea, who was working on the library mural at the time, took this mistake to the garden of his home in east El Paso. When he passed away, Tom Lea gave his library to UTEP. It’s now here, with us.
And soon, UTEP will also be home to his owl.
Next to the owl in Arroyo Park will be the same quotation that is on the El Paso Library, from American naturalist John Burroughs. Burroughs wrote:
“I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for the nectar that I can make into my own honey.”
Tom Lea and John Burroughs shared an optimism, a love of books and learning, and a love of the natural world. Lea took pleasure in painting the desert Southwest, and he even immortalized our campus — with the Franklin Mountains as a backdrop — in a painting in 1985.
In his autobiography, Lea wrote that he lived on the east side of the Franklins. “It is the sunrise side, not the sunset side,” he wrote. “It is the side to see the day that is coming, not the side to see the day that is gone. The best day is the day coming, with the work to do, with the eyes wide open, with the heart grateful.”
History is a woven figure. From the first academy in a garden outside of Athens, to an arroyo with a new garden at a university created outside of El Paso, Texas.
Graduates, because you are here, graduating today, it means you found the nectar to make into your own honey. You found the knowledge here that you turned into learning and skills with special sweetness.
When I travel, I sometimes buy a jar of local honey to bring home as a souvenir. Because honey reflects the place and the flowers it comes from.
It’s unique. Just as what each of you have found here, and made here is unique to you and to this place.
Graduates, they call it “commencement” for a reason. As Tom Lea told us, the best day is the day that is coming.
May you always live on the sunrise side of the mountain.
Heather Wilson is President of The University of Texas at El Paso. These remarks are based on her recent commencement address.
This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: UTEP’s Heather Wilson delivers sweet message of garden, honey, knowledge
Reporting by Heather Wilson, Guest columnist / El Paso Times
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