Administrators, faculty members kick off the 2025-26 academic year at Maryville College Convocation ceremony
Aug. 24, 2025
The Maryville College Convocation ceremony for the 2025-26 academic year was held at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 19, in the Clayton Center for the Arts. Below are remarks from Dr. Bryan Coker, president of MC; Dr. Liz-Perry Sizemore, vice-president and dean of the College; and Dr. Maria Siopsis, faculty chair and professor of mathematics.
Dr. Maria Siopsis’ Welcome
Hello everyone,
As the current faculty chair, it is my pleasure to continue the Maryville College tradition of welcoming the community to a new academic year.
I’ll admit, many of my duties as chair leave me stumped. But this one feels natural. I come from a family of experts at making people feel welcome. My parent were Greek immigrants. Their parents were refugees. They didn’t have a lot of material goods, but they always had a warm smile, a kind word, and space for one more in their home.
One way my family, and families across Greece show love and care is by giving the generous gift of well wishes. And they take it to another level.In the US, what do we say when we someone graduates school, gets a promotion, gets engaged, gets married, announces they are pregnant or has a baby? “Congratulations.”
But for Greek people, there are special wishes for each of these events:
- For Graduation or promotion: και σ’ανωτερα — may you continue to achieve at higher levels.
- Getting engaged: Καλα στεφανα may your wedding crowns be blessed
- Getting married: Να ζησετε — A wish for a long life together (with added wishes for health and prosperity and children)
- Pregnancy: Καλή λευτεριά — This literally translates to “good liberation” (and anyone who has been pregnant can appreciate that one)
- Birth of a child: Vα ζησει γερο — a wish for a long healthy life
- And even in the hard times, we have wishes: καλή δυναμη, καλο κουραγιο) — strength and courage.
For every event, a wish.
But the kind I treasure most now are the personal ones — thoughtful wishes offered by elders when they know they might not see you again for a while.
This summer, I was reminded of that by my 92-year-old Uncle Giorgos. One evening, before I left his house, he asked me if this was my last visit of the year. When it was time, he reached into his heart and he offered each of us something different :
- For me, health and an easy path forward.
- For my newly employed college graduate, continued success and happiness
- For my recent film school grad, a smooth road toward reaching his dreams.
- For my college student, steady progress and success in her studies and on the soccer field.
And then I remembered my grandmother — born around 1910, a child refugee. Her family could only afford to educate one child, so they chose her brother, who, they reasoned, would need to be the breadwinner of his family. My grandmother never realized her own dream of an education. She raised three daughters in a hard-working partnership with my grandfather and she was so proud of me for getting a Ph.D.
The last time I saw her, I had just been married a year. She looked me in the eyes and said: “The woman is the rock of the family.” Then she wished me strength. And … a baby boy.
In Greek, this kind of wish is called an ευχή (efhí). It also means “blessing.” And it’s not just a Greek tradition; across the world, people offer blessings to show love and encouragement. I asked some members of our Maryville community to share blessings from their own cultures.
- From Ghana: “Ensi mu yie” — may things work out for your good!
- From India in the Hindi language: saDA sukhEE rahO — “always remain happy”
- From Sri Lanka in Sinhala: “Obata jaaayen jayama wewa” — “May you have victory upon victory”
- From China in Mandarin: 愿你的学业比蜜甜，充满希望，一路前行。 — “May your studies be sweeter than honey, full of hope, and forward progress.”
Beautiful!
Wishes and blessings are a way to put positivity into the world, and since I have the mic, and you haven’t had your first class yet, I get to give you the first two “assignments” for the year:
- Remember the ways your own families showed kindness and care — and bring those practices into our Maryville community.
- Offer someone a well wish today. To a student, a staff member, a coach, a professor. Make it thoughtful, make it special. This year, I’m going to try to make it a habit — and you can hold me to it.
This is the perfect time for me to get started:
- To the Board of Directors: May your experience and wisdom guide the college to continued success and longevity.
- To our administrative leaders: May you lead with strength, intention, and creativity while holding true to the MC mission.
- To our staff: May you see the impact of your work on our students every single day.
- To my colleagues on the faculty: May we be models of lifelong learning and may we learn as much from our students as they do from us.
- For our students: May you be open to new experiences, find your place and your voice here, and always remember that everyone here is rooting for your success.
“Καλη αρχη, καλή δυναμη, καλη προοδος. a good start, strength for the challenges, and successful progress through MC and beyond.
Finally, from my heart, I’d like to leave you with my mother’s all-occasion wish — her go-to blessing: Ό,τι επιθυμείτε. “May your desires and dreams become reality.”
May this year at Maryville College be filled with learning, growth, and community — and may our wishes for one another come true.
Welcome to a new year at Maryville College.
Dr. Bryan Coker’s Convocation Address (“Beautiful and Complicated Appalachia”)
Good morning, everyone. Good morning, and welcome to the 2025–2026 academic year at Maryville College. It is a pleasure to have all of you here — our new students, our returning students, dedicated faculty members and staff, special guests, and members of our Board of Directors.
Our annual Convocation ceremony is a time of convening – a time of coming together, and specifically, coming together at the start of a new academic year. And as President, I have the privilege of addressing you, at this auspicious moment each year … I’ve touched upon various topics in my five Convocation speeches thus far … the first year, I spoke about us being “One Community,” another year I spoke about “connection” and last year, I spoke about “engagement.” This year, I want to talk about place — and specifically, this beautiful and complicated place that we call “Appalachia.”
One of my first and most vivid childhood memories is one in which I was with my paternal grandparents, driving along a country road in Western North Carolina, the place where I spent my first 18 years of my life… My grandfather stopped the car next to a kudzu covered embankment, and my grandmother took me on a walk, to the natural spring that had been her family’s water source as a child. She then gave me water to drink from that Appalachian spring — I remember the water being clear, fresh, and very cold … and of course, I remember thinking about my grandmother’s childhood, growing up there without indoor plumbing, and about her climbing down to that spring multiple times daily, just to get water.
I have so many other childhood memories of my grandmother — many involve the kitchen and her cooking — I often think about her cooking kale in the cast iron skillet on her kitchen stove – and that was before kale was cool. My grandmother cooked kale simply because it was affordable. I wonder what she would say about five-star restaurants now featuring kale, and places like Trader Joes selling kale chips. And of course, she typically served her kale with fried cornbread, made in that same cast iron skillet. Now, she referred to her kale as “salat” — previously, I was never sure from where the term “salat” came (I thought perhaps it was just her version of the word, “salad”), but I now know that it was a reference to “Poke Sallet” (which is actually different from kale, but let’s not worry about those details). I recall one time in middle school when we had to name different varieties of vegetables for a test, and I wrote down the word “salat,” spelling it the best I could. But my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Putman, was obviously not familiar with Appalachian terminology, and didn’t give me credit for that vegetable. It’s okay — obviously, I still passed the sixth grade — eventually.
I grew up in Rutherford County, North Carolina — again, it’s in the western part of the state, about 3 hours or so from here. Rutherford is a border county in Appalachia — it makes up one of the eastern borders of the Appalachian zone. My childhood is full so many rich memories — of people, of foods, of language, and of the land … there were towns like Ellenboro, Bostic, Henrietta, Cliffside, Sunshine, and Duncan’s Creek.
It has taken me some time to begin speaking overtly of my Appalachian roots, and to especially call myself “a Son of Appalachia.” I said it publicly for the first time just last spring, when my presidential portrait here was being unveiled, and those of you who were present will recall that I actually became pretty emotional after saying it. The fact that I waited 50 years or so to speak publicly about my Appalachian roots perhaps says a great deal about Appalachia and those of us who grew up within it, who left it, and who have worked to make our way in the world. Our nation has often been — and in many ways, remains — quite unkind to Appalachia…
Now, some in my family left Appalachia; they tended to say that they escaped Appalachia — and most of those escapees, if you will, in my family moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. And I clearly remember the dichotomy of our extended Southern family — there were the people and places of Rutherford County in Appalachia, and there were the people surrounded by the bright lights and tall buildings of the big city, in Charlotte.
I recall some of my first trips to other parts of our nation, when I initially encountered negative stereotypes about Appalachia — I’m not going to give any time or oxygen to the specifics of those stereotypes today, but many of you know to what I am referring.
Like those escapees before me in my family, I ultimately left Appalachia, too — both literally and figuratively. I left for a number of other cities around the South and the Southeast, where my educational and career endeavors took me. I worked hard to lose as much of my accent as I could – and to take all those Appalachian pronunciations and phrases out of my lexicon. But now — later in life, as a self-identifying Son of Appalachia, I’m seeing things a bit differently…
When considering how to speak with you today about Appalachia, I did something that I don’t often do — I asked ChatGPT … yes, I specifically asked ChatGPT this question, “What is a definition of Appalachia for students at Maryville College?” Here is ChatGPT’s reply …
- Appalachia is a culturally rich and geographically diverse region in the eastern United States that stretches from southern New York to northern Mississippi. For students at Maryville College, Appalachia isn’t just a region on a map — it’s the landscape, heritage, and community that surrounds you every day.
- Appalachia is often misunderstood, but it is home to diverse communities working to preserve heritage, challenge stereotypes, and create a more inclusive and sustainable future.
- As a student at Maryville College, you’re studying in the heart of Appalachia, with direct access to its natural beauty, complex history, and living culture. This provides unique opportunities for learning, service, and engagement that connect your education to the wider region.
So, thank you, ChatGPT. Admittedly, that’s a pretty solid and relevant definition. All of you, at this point, have heard me speak — perhaps ad nauseum — about the region in which we’re located — my presidential installation speech five years ago had a theme of, “Of and For the Region.” More recently, I’ve characterized our location, here at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains, as one of the “world’s greatest learning laboratories” — and when I use that “laboratory” analogy, I’m speaking not only to the tremendous natural biodiversity of this region, but to the overall richness and countless opportunities for learning here in Southern Appalachia. But our efforts must always begin with a deep respect for the land, the culture, and foremost, the people … again, our nation has been quite unkind to Appalachia — in all our efforts, we must seek first to understand, and then to be understood.
Today I submit to you that the learning in which you can and will engage here at Maryville College and in this region is locally anchored, but is globally relevant. Again, it is locally anchored, but globally relevant. This region, this place will provide you with learning opportunities, place-based opportunities, like few other locations on this planet — the history, the people, the culture, the land, the stories of triumph and stories of tragedy, the tales of coal dust and red clay. And I believe the learning in which you engage here will take you far, preparing you for a variety of challenges and opportunities across the globe. Some of the greatest effects and consequences of our evolving climate are happening right here in the Southern Appalachian zone. The Appalachian story is one of indigenous histories, land-based identities, industrial development, labor movements, and economic shifts, including migration, displacement, poverty, and community organizing. Some of the greatest learning opportunities are ones that address issues such as rural health, food insecurity, education gaps, and environmental justice. Once again, your learning will be locally anchored, but globally relevant. I encourage all of you to embrace and respect the richness of this region — the people, the land, the culture, the histories, and the many complexities.
My friends, welcome to one of the world’s greatest learning laboratories. Welcome, my friends, to Southern Appalachia. I encourage you to open your hearts and minds to this beautiful and complicated place. May we go forth into this new academic year, recognizing and connecting with the many opportunities that surround us, endeavoring, as always, in the words of our founder, to do good on the largest possible scale.
Thank you all so very much!
Dr. Liz Perry-Sizemore’s Declaration of the Academic Year
Will you please rise as you are able for the Declaration of the Academic Year?
Last week, at the New Student Welcome, Vice President and Dean of Students Ben Stubbs asked new students to identify goals for their time at Maryville College, to write those goals on paper, to make paper airplanes, and to launch them forward toward the stage I’m on now. He also asked that each student help by ensuring that planes that landed near them — rather than near the stage — got an extra launch. The room erupted in noise and motion as hundreds of goals found their way to this place.
I’m sure every faculty member in the room has an interesting way of seeing this event from the lens of their own academic discipline. Dr. Shiyuan Xu, assistant professor of physics, can explain the physics of flight. Adrienne Schwarte, professor of art and coordinator of the Sustainability Studies minor, might help us think about aviation’s impact on landscape design. As an economist, I study how humans make decisions and how coordination happens, and to do that I use models. Models help us understand the world around us, and they can also help us understand how to effect change in that world when we hope for it to look different.
We often work with simple models. I’m not the first economist to note that at first glance, the plastic model airplanes people collect and build look superior to paper planes. But if we want to study flight itself, we can learn a lot more from paper airplanes. Imagine launching plastic model airplanes last Monday! Some of you would still be nursing bruises on the backs of your heads, and we wouldn’t have a lot of insight into flight.
If you’ve seen the movie Inside Out, you might remember the scene where Bing Bong encourages Joy and Sadness to take the shortcut through the Tunnel of Abstract Thought. It’s the scene where the characters flatten and become simplified, two-dimensional versions of themselves. It’s depicted in the movie as a dangerous space, but abstract thinking is important. Simplification, interestingly, can be a way of better understanding and appreciating the complexity of a matter. Whether it’s been put to you explicitly or not, you’re being asked to think abstractly in a number of your Core and major classes.
So last Monday, many goals took flight, thankfully on paper airplanes and not plastic ones. Was the experience identical to flying a plane? Of course not. Was everyone’s flight experience identical? No. But we did learn a bit about flight and about landing at our destinations, including that travel isn’t always easy, that we don’t always land where we want to the first time, and that it is often necessary to refuel.
The goals on most planes had to make a few connections in order to get to their final destination. The reasons for this varied. By choice for some and circumstance for others, some planes were closer to the stage than others. Some pilots were new to their jobs and others were old hands. Some hands fumbled because they were just exhausted from moving refrigerators up four flights of stairs earlier in the day. Some planes had to fly over some really tall bodies.
Airports rely on each other. For everyone’s goals to make it to the front of this podium — where President Coker will one day stand to give you your diploma (outside, weather permitting!) — students had to rely on one another. You had to make connections.
E.M Forster’s Howard’s End urges us “Only connect.” And interestingly, in his essay describing the characteristics of individuals who embody the values of the liberal arts, William Cronon states that these people seek to “Only connect.” We are all here to connect, and to learn how to better connect. As we help each other achieve our goals, how might we “model” connection for one another? Inquire. Listen. Encourage. Empathize. Support and empower.
How has inquiry helped you learn about yourself and others? In your life, what has listening looked like when it’s happened at its best? How do you know when you’re showing empathy? How do you support and empower with thoughtfulness and integrity? Your liberal arts education, as Cronon writes, “is about gaining the power and the wisdom, the generosity and the freedom to connect.”
So welcome aboard Scots Airlines, where we offer a variety of in-flight academic and extracurricular options to ensure that your journey, wherever it is to and whatever connections it requires, is a meaningful and memorable one that prepares you for a future of many, many more adventures and opportunities.
Your flight attendants are coming down the aisle to distribute your commemorative 2025-2026 academic year pin. These pins start a new tradition of honoring our shared aspirations for the year ahead. This year’s is to connect. Each year you’ll receive a new pin celebrating a new aspiration. We hope you’ll display yours proudly, perhaps on your backpack or your bulletin board, and that you will keep this token through graduation, where you will wear it proudly on your robe.
Please ensure that your seatbelts are securely fastened and that your tray tables are stowed because:
It is now my pleasure and honor to declare that the 2025-2026 Academic Year has begun.