Retiring professor Kim Trevathan to lead MC Baccalaureate service on May 5
April 21, 2023
Maryville College Writing Communication Professor Kim Trevathan knows a thing or two about turning down the white noise.
Life, he believes, is a constant barrage of it: humming traffic, ringing cell phones, TV ads and news reports and constant chatter. And few things return him to center more than a paddle down the nearest waterway, where the only sounds are those of the natural world.
“Keeping Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise” will be the title of Trevathan’s sermon during the Maryville College Baccalaureate service, scheduled for 4 p.m. Friday, May 5, in the Ronald and Lynda Nutt Theatre of the Clayton Center for the Arts on the MC campus. A Baccalaureate ceremony is a tradition at many educational institutions, during which graduating seniors gather to mark the rite of passage that will take place shortly thereafter.
Commencement is scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday, May 6, on the campus grounds, weather permitting, and will feature speaker Dr. Russ Wigginton, president of the National Civil Rights Museum. The Baccalaureate services will be a more intimate and reflective affair featuring a speech drawn from Trevathan’s time in the woods and on the water.
“When I was asked to speak, I started thinking about the highlights of the last 23 years,” said Trevathan, who will retire at the conclusion of the 2022-23 academic year. “There used to be this nature-writing class I used to teach during J-Term, and it was three hours a day, five days a week, for three weeks. (Curricular changes in 2019 moved this mini-semester to May.)
“We went up to Whiteoak Sink in the Smokies one year, which is a beautiful place in the spring and interesting in the winter,” Trevathan added. “That must have been in 2005, and we got down there — it’s about a 2-mile hike down to the sinks — and we sat down and were snacking, and this silence just descended upon everybody. I didn’t say anything, didn’t say ‘shut up and listen,’ but they didn’t talk, and it lasted for about 15 minutes. It was kind of magical, this communal sort of silence that was contemplative, with no one giggling or looking at each other or laughing.”
The author of four books — Paddling the Tennessee River: A Voyage on Easy Water (2001), Coldhearted River: A Canoe Odyssey Down the Cumberland (2006), Liminal Zones: Where Lakes End and Rivers Begin (2013) and Against the Current: Paddling Upstream on the Tennessee River (2021) — Trevathan began his MC career in 2000, and alongside traditional fiction, nonfiction and journalism courses, he’s introduced his reverence for the land into his courses. One experiential learning class, “Words and the Land,” gives students an opportunity to explore the same serenity found in the wild places that have long inspired him and tune out the rest of the world for a while.
“I’m trying to explore that in the Baccalaureate speech, because we’re just bombarded with noise now,” he said. “It’s both literal noise and the noise inside our heads — self-doubt and all that stuff. Finding that pure silence is a blessing.”
In addition to Trevathan, the service will include scripture readings — Maddie Taylor ’23, president of the MC Student Government Association, will read from Proverbs 17:24-28, and Isaac Anderson Scholar Sarah Rackley ’23 will read from Ecclesiastes 3. The program will also feature the traditional Remarks from the Senior Class by Allie Osorio Candelario ’23, senior class president, a senior neuroscience major from Sevierville who plans to deliver a portion of her remarks in Spanish to “thank those immigrant parents who have made the effort for their first-generation children to attend college,” she said.
“For our families, this is a huge milestone,” she said. “They, unfortunately, had to leave their homes and families in their birthplace. These parents feel excited, just like any other parents do, but for them, it’s enhanced because many of these parents wished they could have finished school. That’s a huge thing that should definitely be recognized, not just by me and those parents, but by Maryville College and everyone else.”
In addition, she added, she’ll focus on how the senior class, the education of which was upended by the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of their first year, has overcome adversity and put in greater effort to stay committed to higher education during such tumultuous times.
“Because of COVID, we are moving forward,” she said. “We as a community are finding new ways of being inclusive — to our commuter students, immune-compromised students, etc. Some of us are interning with researchers who are trying to stop this from happening again. We have grown so much as a class and as a community.”
Baccalaureate services take place at 4 p.m. Friday, May 5, in the Ronald and Lynda Nutt Theatre of the Clayton Center for the Arts. (Lineup for students and staff members begins at 3:30 p.m. in the Lambert Recital Hall.)
The service is free and open to the public and will be livestreamed on the College’s Facebook page. Immediately following the ceremony, a Senior Baccalaureate Barbecue will take place on the Clayton Center Plaza, open to seniors, family members and their friends.