I am delighted on this typical frosty and Christmasy December morning  to introduce to you, on behalf of the English Department's Student Scholarship and Service Committee, two decidedly  "untypical"  young men who are the outstanding undergraduate and graduate students of the Fall, 2007, term.  First, however, I want to emphasize that  all of you sitting here today as graduates deserve tremendous credit for your successful efforts over the last four years.  Of all the committees on which we as faculty serve, this one is perhaps the most satisfying because we have the great privilege of identifying the best of the best and presenting them to their colleagues, friends, professors, and parents as examples of what you as ECU students are capable of achieving.  I am privileged to introduce to you the outstanding senior in your class and to the  Outstanding student receiving a Master's degree this semester.

It is always an enjoyable, but difficult, task to pick one or two students from among those who have done such fine work during their college undergraduate careers, and I will first read the names of the other students whose professors admired their work enough to nominate them for consideration as our outstanding undergraduate student.  They are Laura Anthony and Francisco Avalos.

Our outstanding undergraduate student today is Francisco Avalos.  Francisco cannot be with us this morning to celebrate his own award because he is in Indiana doing what he and his family have done almost all the time all their lives.  He is working.  His mother and father are here to represent him, and we will have the privilege of hearing his mother accept her son's honor in his stead and perhaps to say a few words about him.  However, before I introduce her, I want to give you some slight sense of the depth of this young man, inadequate as it will be.  I admit that until yesterday, I knew very little about Francisco except for his fine academic performance and the lasting impression he made on the professors who nominated him.  He was praised highly for his clear and incisive intellect and for his abilities as a writer.  Further, one of his professors emphasized that Francisco's consistently outstanding participation in class discussions was what most clearly demonstrated his intellectual depth and agility, his love of narrative, his judicious and heuristic reading of texts, and his easy familiarity with literary terms and techniques.   This is a stellar recommendation for a student whose humility prompted him, in his letter to our committee, to protest that "as for why I should be considered for the honor of being an 'outstanding senior,'  there is not much I can boast about."

However, there is another dimension of Francisco's character and achievement that is harder to articulate.  As I looked at some of his written work that he sent me from Indiana, I was amazed and moved at the quality of thought and breadth of experience in a young man who, after a long, restless, and sometimes grueling odyssey through many states doing many jobs, including  exhausting construction work, tried to find his calling at other schools, and finally arrived at ECU to study English because, as he says, "using and reading words are my true passion, and with this passion ... comes a sincere hope that those words can affect and help others."

Francisco's father emigrated from Mexico, and he and Francisco's mother worked for 20 years in industrial construction to support their family.  These  jobs took Francisco and his family to Texas, Oklahoma, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Georgia, Arizona, Virginia, Ohio, and Florida, finally landing them in the little farming community of Bear Grass outside of Greenville where they put down roots.  Francisco talks movingly of the different places and cultural traditions to which he was introduced: "Whenever we moved we'd always give a kind of goodbye to where we lived, whether it was an apartment, trailer, motel or hotel. Each place became a member of the family, a witness to our moments together ... . It was only proper to say goodbye, and I had a habit of leaving a token behind. Something to say that we had been there, [that] we had breathed, loved, fought, laughed ... lived.

Francisco has also traveled constantly by himself and thought deeply about the men and women he encountered.  He "witnessed firsthand," as he describes it, "the rigors of the blue collar working class ... [the] subculture [of] [m]en and women who travel the country building factories, power plants, chemical plants, food-processing plants, plants of all types, from the ground up. They are welders, and pipe fitters, and electricians, and iron workers, and insulators and mechanics, many with hardly any education yet experts at their work."  Francisco also saw hardship and witnessed the injustices that are perpetrated against those without money, power, or education. About his decision to enter ECU and then go into law, he says, "the gift of education cannot be fully appreciated until the lack thereof reveals its true value."   As a lawyer, Francisco wishes to advocate for the rights of the disenfranchised and especially to work for Latinos living in North Carolina.   As one of his professors noted, Francisco has social vision and a passion for justice.  And as we have seen, he surely has "the gift of thought and words."

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Working with our wonderful graduate students is one of the great perks of teaching at ECU.  These scholars challenge us continually with their ideas and with their written work and keep us honest in intellectual exchange and discussion.  Again I will present to you the scholars whose professors thought enough of their work to nominate them for this award.   They are Lauren Furlough, Elizabeth Vick, Dawn Wilson, and Benjamin Worthington.

Our outstanding graduate student today is Benjamin Worthington.  Ben Worthington, who has taught full time at J. H. Rose High School in Greenville at the same time that he maintained a 4.00 grade point average in his Master's work in Multicultural and Transnational literatures in our department, was also surprised by his nomination for the Outstanding Graduate Student award this semester.  His teaching responsibilities, he felt, competed constantly with his campus activities.  My surprise, on the other hand, was to discover that there is only one Ben Worthington.

From the number, diversity, and quality of his achievements, I thought there had to be at least an entire company of Ben Worthingtons, each member performing superbly in the area assigned to him.  In addition to the many accomplishments I mention here, there are at least a folder-full that I am forced to omit.  Ben began his higher education at ECU as a North Carolina Teaching Fellow, served on that body's Inter-Collegiate Council and chaired it for a year while he tutored in outreach programs before graduating cum laude with a Bachelor of Science Degree in English Education.

For the five years following his graduation, Ben has been at Rose High School teaching tenth grade World literature, standard and honors, 12th grade Honors British Literature, and Shakespeare and Renaissance Theatre, an elective course that he designed.  In his spare time, he advised the model United Nations, the Scholastic Quiz Bowl, the Academic World Quest and was co-advisor to the Scholastic Debate Team this year.  He also received a grant to design curricula for units on Holocaust, Dystopian and Post-colonial literatures, completed a "Language Barriers Workshop" training program for working with ESL Students, completed training for 3 different certificates and received training in specialized instruction for poverty-stricken students, as well as training in instruction focused on students with learning disabilities.  I have in no way exhausted his Rose High School resume, but I haven't even begun to catch up with him at ECU as he made creative connections between his Master's work and his own teaching.

In his graduate courses Ben developed sophisticated interpretations of texts, and, according to one of his professors, wrote essays that made unexpected comparisons and took highly creative approaches to texts at the same time that they were thorough, detailed, carefully executed and copiously supported by close readings and research.  Another professor describes Ben as brilliant, poised, articulate and engaging, as well as hard-working and energetic.  By this time we recognize "hard-working" and "energetic" as crashing understatements.  These accomplishments were just those he managed in the classroom.

Outside of class, Ben worked in the University Writing Center, and operated the Online Writing Lab serving all distance education students in the university.  I was a bit relieved to learn that Ben took a leave of absence from Rose for the '06-07 school year, since simply reading about the activities I've mentioned, among many more, made me worry that he might vaporize from sheer accomplishment.  With all this spare time on his hands, he took two assistantships as well as finishing up most of his coursework for his degree.  With Prof. Patrick Bizzaro, he studied the advent and effectiveness of electronic writing consultation and developed a user survey to continue serving the Writing Lab's off-campus community.   Back teaching at Rose this year, he regretted having to give up his work with the writing center, but he continued to work with Professor Alex Albright, preserving original documents from the collection of Linda Flowers, the late North Carolinian professor, poet, essayist and critic.  In addition, he continued to assist Prof. Albright, who is the historian for the B-1 Navy Band, the first African American Regiment during WWII to receive a rating higher than mess.  Ben spent many hours transcribing oral documents and researching local and national newspapers to find original documents detailing the activities of the Band.

As Ben finished and defended an outstanding thesis on the difficult works of the Afro-Caribbean/British/American author, Caryl Phillips, he also assisted and is currently assisting his thesis director, Prof. Seodial Deena, in editing a collection of essays to be published early in 2008.  An article of his own will also appear in a forthcoming book of essays.  His thesis work on Phillips, according to his thesis committee members, takes a highly original position different than most published criticism on this author.  His thesis presents an eloquent, and meticulously researched and crafted interpretation that will result in publishable articles as he begins his Doctoral studies and eventually takes his place among the finest scholars of multicultural literatures.

Clearly, the sheer number of Ben's achievements is impressive, but more important is the breadth and diversity of his interests, the depth and quality of his thought and his ability to turn thinking and research into teaching and service.  Ben represents the finest that ECU has to contribute to the academy and to the community.