EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY GRADUATES 2,200 STUDENTS

About 2,200 candidates graduated Saturday from East Carolina University.

Phil Dixon, former chair of the East Carolina University Board of Trustees and a noted Greenville attorney and civic leader, was the featured speaker.

“This is indeed a celebration, a beginning and an end, for each of you,” he said to the graduates and audience gathered in Minges Coliseum. “Congratulations on your academic achievement and also on the friends you have made here.”
Dixon urged the graduates to be willing to pay the price for the goals they set.

“You, as graduates, have already invested four years,” he said. “Don’t throw away that down payment on your future. Find out what it takes to be the very best at what you do. There is a price that has to be paid; be sure you pay it.”

Setting goals, getting along with others and becoming disciplined, Dixon said, are also important factors to reaching success.
“Discipline is simply control; if you don’t control yourself, someone else will, or no one else will,” he said.

Catherine Rigsby, chair of the ECU Faculty senate, told the students that they benefit from freedom.

“The degree you receive is reflective of that freedom. You are now ready to take on your generation’s challenges,” Rigsby said.

Tragedies such as Sept. 11 and devastation caused by the recent hurricanes, said Rigsby, have created new challenges for the next generation and each person, she said, has an obligation to help create a world in which past wrongs can be righted.

“Each of us has a responsibility to reject prejudice and to heal wounds,” she said. “It will take each of us to rebuild levies. These are the challenges of your generation and there will be more.”