This year, I read, Vanderbilt held its commencement ceremony – “graduation” except in the official documents – on Alumni Lawn on the morning of May 9. A Friday in early May, in other words. “Chancellor Zeppos confers degrees and addresses the members of the graduating Class of 2013,” the VU web site says. I hope the undergrads had undergrad fun with that name.

Thirty years ago, Joe Billy Wyatt was VU chancellor, number six since the heady days of Landon Cabell Garland, the first chancellor, who received the Golden Oak Cluster from Cornelius Vanderbilt himself in a secret midnight ceremony. According to an unimpeachable source – Wiki, that is – Garland thought dormitories “injurious to both morals and manners,” which is amusing since Garland Hall, a dorm, is named after him.

Anyway, Wyatt had been in office for a year when he shook a lot of hands at the commencement ceremony of Friday, May 13, 1983. He’s pictured on that day in the image posted here, facing away from the camera.

The fellow facing the camera at that instant, one of the graduates, wasn’t feeling his best that morning, since he was still recovering from an earache that began a few days earlier after a short swim in the waters of Lewis Smith Lake, down in Alabama. As it turned out, graduation from VU marked the end of his formal education. At some point over the last 30 years he decided, “I’ve done been educated.”