Prize Day celebrates the ‘triumphant’ Form of 2023

An unseasonably cold spring day couldn’t chill the spirits of the Groton School community this past weekend, as the “triumphant” Form of 2023 was celebrated and saluted at the school’s 138th Prize Day on June 4. 

Ninety members of the form graduated. Following a morning service in St. John’s Chapel, the community gathered for remarks from the keynote speaker, presidential historian Jon Meacham, Board of Trustees President Ben Pyne ’77, P’12, ’15, Headmaster Temba Maqubela, and student speaker Will Vrattos ’23.

Mr. Pyne welcomed the form, their family and friends, and other students, faculty, and staff by reflecting on the rich relationships he developed at Groton.

“The friends and relationships that one makes around this Circle really do last a lifetime,” he said. “It might not always seem evident right now or in the few years after you graduate, but I can tell you from my own experience that we’ve all made friends on this campus for life who will be there for us, in good times and in the challenging times. 

“It is palpable,” Mr. Pyne continued. “And rest assured that those relationships go well beyond your form to the other forms, to the great faculty and staff here, and certainly to the Maqubelas. So please embrace, relish, and enjoy these friendships. I know they will stand you in good stead in all the years ahead. We all need each other and, in the words of the Japanese author Ryunosuke Satoro, ‘Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.’”

Mr. Maqubela praised the students for succeeding despite interruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, and for seeing the challenges in front of them as opportunities.

“The triumphant Form of 2023. Here they are,” he said. “In my mind, they will always be known and remembered at this school as the form that awakened to their responsibilities. They triumphed over so much adversity and, in so doing, brought Groton back to its honored traditions.

“Groton has a long-established tradition of seeing silver linings in gloomy skies,” he added. “This form triumphed over the shadow that COVID cast over their most formative years. They pressed the reset button to teach the other formers some of Groton’s most important and enduring traditions.”  

Graduate Will Vrattos was elected by his fellow Sixth Formers to represent them as class speaker. His wide-ranging Prize Day speech covered such topics as the struggles for fulfillment and success, rogue sleepovers in the library, the wisdom of Spongebob Squarepants, and the special bonds only formed by shared experiences, however silly they may be. 

“When you’ve put fun before ambition, friendship over scholarship, you’ve made me proud to be a Groton student and proud to be your friend,” he said. “I will miss all of your foolishness, fun, and friendship, and I beg you all to keep seeking out the right moments to be an idiot, and to make a bit of difference by giving light to the lives of others.”

Following the awarding of prizes to outstanding form members, Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham delivered the keynote. The author of several No. 1 New York Times bestsellers, Mr. Meacham has written acclaimed books about Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Winston Churchill, George H.W. Bush, civil-rights icon John Lewis, and Groton’s own Franklin D. Roosevelt, Form of 1900, and himself a Prize Day speaker in 1931, when he was governor of New York. But it was the Prize Day speech of another Roosevelt—President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904—from which he quoted in his own address on Sunday.

“‘You are not entitled,’ he told an earlier graduating form, ‘either in college or in after life, to an ounce of privilege because you have been to Groton. You are, rather, to be held to an exceptional accountability. Because much has been given to you, therefore we have a right to expect much from you.’ So no pressure, guys.”  

Mr. Meacham looked back at the world eighteen years ago, when many in the form were born, and then ticked off the milestones of their young lives, from Barack Obama becoming the first Black president to the pandemic to the first insurrection against our nation’s capital.

“You understand history. You’ve lived through a great bit of it. And there is, I promise, so much more ahead,” he said.

Against that backdrop of history, and the fact that “as a nation we have made the American experiment in liberty worth defending,” Mr. Meacham looked ahead to the challenges facing our democracy, and the Form of 2023.

“We are at our best selves when we build bridges and not walls, when we lend a hand rather than clenching a fist, and when we act out of generosity and not greed,” he said. “In those moments, and they are few and sometimes far between, America gets much right. But honesty compels us to acknowledge that we get much wrong. And how could we not? We are a democracy, and a democracy is the sum of its parts, and we—the sinful, the selfish, and the self-satisfied—are those parts.

“I don’t need to tell you that the test of history awaits you,” Mr. Meacham continued. “You know that. This test will last through all the lengths of days. We are living in what may emerge as the maximum hour of danger for American democracy, for the threat comes from within instead of without. Ours is an age of declining trust and growing extremism, the spread of lies for power and for profit, the primacy of that impulse for brute power, and a deadly dearth of compassion and neighborliness.”

The good news, he said, was that young people like the Form of 2023 are stepping into the breach.

“You are extraordinary people. You have, as President Roosevelt pointed out, been given so much. You’ve done so much. It is a consoling fact for aging people like me that Groton has prepared you for lives of entrepreneurial and principled citizenship,” Mr. Meacham said. “Such citizenship has led to great change, and great change in America tends to come when engaged and creative people like you decide that the way things are isn’t the way they should be, and who then form the dispositions of heart and mind that reflect virtues of fair play and human decency.” 

  

Pointing to freedom fighters and change agents throughout American history, Mr. Meacham urged the graduates to study and emulate these role models and strive, as Theodore Parker once said, to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice.

“But note this well: the arc of a moral universe does not bend by itself. People must insist that it swerve, because the forces of reaction are an inevitable part of the forces of progress. If you remember nothing else, be a swerver. Insist that that arc swerve. And, then, it may bend.”

Following the presentation of diplomas, Mr. Maqubela implored the form to seek positivity.

“The world needs you to do the greater good,” he said. “Humanity needs you.”