CHARLOTTESVILLE -- For the 180th time, excited students graduating from the University of Virginia gathered for Final Exercises.
Behind them yesterday, thousands of parents watched intently as U.Va. President John T. Casteen III conferred 6,280 degrees upon the members of the cheering, beachball-lobbing crowd.
A different kind of familial support was the theme of yesterday's Finals Address.
J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a judge on the 4th U.S. Court of Appeals and a 1972 graduate of the School of Law, told the graduates that while his father encouraged him to seek higher education, the man never agreed with his career choices.
His father disagreed with his choice to attend Yale University in Connecticut as an undergraduate because he was convinced that a Southerner couldn't get a fair shake farther north than Princeton University in New Jersey.
He opposed his son's run for Congress as a 25-year-old Republican candidate, advising him to wait his turn. And when Wilkinson graduated from law school, his father encouraged him to enter private practice in Richmond.
True to form, that was not the younger Wilkinson's desire.
"There was something in me that really wanted to teach in a classroom, and that classroom was at the University of Virginia," Wilkinson said.
His dream, inspired by the 1939 schoolteacher movie "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," landed him a windowless office next to a public bathroom and a paltry starting salary of $16,000. Wilkinson, now 64, said his father's heart sank when he came to visit the office and heard a toilet flush nearby.
The disagreements continued through the 1970s. Wilkinson briefly left law to edit the editorial page at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk and eventually accepted a position as the deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department.
Despite clashing over his career, he and his father became very close later in life, Wilkinson said.
"I can see now that the fact that my father and I fought over so many things was a manifestation of how he cared," Wilkinson said.
The U.Va. graduates had their own stories of parental acceptance. Al Lucia, who received an undergraduate degree in history yesterday, has changed his plans a few times during his academic career. He said he started out studying aerospace engineering as an undergraduate and now plans to go to graduate school for sports management.
Lucia, 22, said his parents have been supportive of his changing desires. He plans to do the same for his children.
"I believe you've got to let them go on their own path," Lucia said.
Sometimes, that path can take much longer than anticipated. Diane Morse, 53, earned a bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary studies yesterday, 35 years after she took her first college credit.
Morse, who has been attending classes while working at U.Va., said her parents always were supportive of her educational efforts. She has continued that tradition, encouraging her daughter to take online classes and her son to seek a doctorate in education.
Wilkinson told the graduates that looking back, he and his father did agree on one aspect of his education.
"It seems fitting on this wonderful day in your life that the last words be those of my father," Wilkinson said. "He would want you to know that in choosing the University of Virginia for your education, you have chosen the very best. On that, he and I are in complete agreement."
Tasha Kates is a staff writer for The Daily Progress in Charlottesville.
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