Retiring lecturer, longtime faculty member Jan Taylor to deliver a message of reflection at Maryville College Baccalaureate service
May 4, 2026
As the Maryville College Class of 2026 prepares to step across the Commencement stage and into new post-College Hill lives, they will pause first for one of the institution’s most meaningful traditions — a moment designed not for celebration, but for reflection.
Held on the eve of graduation, the Baccalaureate service, scheduled for 3 p.m. Friday, May 8, invites graduates, their families and the campus community to consider the significance of the moment — not just as an ending, but as a beginning shaped by purpose, questions and the values cultivated during their time at Maryville College.
For longtime faculty member and soon-to-retire lecturer Jan Taylor, who will deliver the 2026 Baccalaureate sermon, there are a great many similarities between the seniors who will fill the Ronald and Lynda Nutt Theatre of the Clayton Center for the Arts and her own Maryville College journey, which will also soon come to an end.
“We share the experience of entering a transition period, and perhaps we are thinking, in different ways, about the same question: ‘What do I carry forward?’” Taylor said.
For Taylor, who has spent years teaching and engaging students in conversations around communication, innovation and the ethical implications of emerging technologies, the invitation to deliver the Baccalaureate sermon — the title of which is “As If It Were Nothing at All” — is both an honor and a natural point of reflection at the close of her career as a Maryville College educator.
“I’ve had a couple of big projects in the last third of this semester, so finding time to think about what to say has been a challenge,” she said. “Of course, I wanted to say yes, because it’s an invitation that prompts reflection.”
That spirit of contemplation — grounded in meaningful questions that don’t always come with easy answers — will shape a message built on storytelling and centered on the kind of learning that extends beyond the classroom.
“The message is built around stories,” Taylor said. “The thread running through them is what it means to face the harder, more sustaining work of learning to evaluate yourself, once the rubrics and grades fall away. I hope students leave with at least one question to hang onto for a while.”
Taylor’s perspective has been shaped in part by her work in recent years exploring artificial intelligence and its broader implications — work that, she said, has prompted her to think more deeply about what it means to live and work with intention.
“Spending the last several years thinking about artificial intelligence has taken me beyond ‘what can AI do?’ to ‘What should humans do?’” she said. “That’s a vocational question, a spiritual question, and it’s one this graduating class may spend their lives answering, and perhaps the rest of us, too.”
Even as graduates prepare to leave campus, the habits they’ve developed as undergraduates receiving a liberal arts education — curiosity, openness and a willingness to engage uncertainty — will serve as essential tools on the long journey ahead.
“I might guess that graduating seniors are a bit anxious, as I have been when starting a new chapter of my life,” she said. “Many will take on new responsibilities. Many face uncertainty. But uncertainty can prompt curiosity and openness to growth.”
That understanding is rooted not only in her own experience, but in what she has learned from students over the years — lessons that continue to shape both her teaching and her message.
“Students have taught me about the significance of figuring out what and who to pay attention to,” she said. “They’ve taught me about how belonging and social bandwidth enhance learning.”
Those insights align closely with Maryville College’s long-standing emphasis on preparing students for lives of “doing good on the largest possible scale,” a phrase Taylor interprets not as a call for immediate impact, but as an invitation to sustained, meaningful work.
“In my experience, scale is almost never where good work begins — it’s where good work sometimes ends up, after a long time of not thinking about scale at all,” she said. “Focus, do the work in front of you, do it well, do it honestly. The accumulation of that kind of diligence has a way of becoming something that seems impossible on day one.”
As she prepares to deliver her final address to graduates, Taylor returns to the moments that have defined her time at the College — not singular achievements, but shared experiences of learning, challenge and growth, from one-on-one meetings with students that ran long because the conversation demanded fresh thinking, to a colleague whose simple advice when she found herself procrastinating was one question: “What are you going to do about it?”
“Everyone needs a friend like that,” she said. “What all of it points to is this: our learning community enlivens us when we’re willing to meet the hard moments.”
In addition to Taylor’s sermon, the Maryville College Baccalaureate service will include a scripture reading by Austin McKee’26, president of the MC Student Government Association and a double major in Writing Communication and Sociology from Maryville, who will read from Matthew 14:23 and Proverbs 4:23. The program will also feature the traditional Remarks from the Senior Class by Josh Cornell ’26, senior class president and a double major in Political Science and Environmental Studies from Chattanooga, Tennessee (as well as the 2026 winner of the Carl ’63 and Jean McDonald Outstanding Senior Award). Stephanie Holt ’26, an English (with teacher licensure) major and Isaac Anderson Scholar from Lenoir City, Tennessee, will lead the assembly in the Prayer of Thanksgiving and the Lord’s Prayer. The service will also feature music by the Maryville College Concert Choir, two members of which will be featured vocal soloists (Ella Morse ’27 and Kalli Wilson ’27) on the choral anthem, “Only in Sleep” (text by Sara Teasdale and Eriks Esenvalds).
The Baccalaureate service will be held at 3 p.m. Friday, May 8, in the Ronald and Lynda Nutt Theatre of the Clayton Center for the Arts. The service is free and open to the public.