photo finish

It seemed like a big deal when the University of Oregon announced earlier this year that the class of 2010 would graduate on a Monday — instead of the usual Saturday after finals — so as not to conflict with last week’s NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships that ended Saturday at Hayward Field.

But if anyone was annoyed when the moment finally came, it didn’t show. And it didn’t seem to keep too many from attending, as the storied track stadium’s East Grandstand was close to full on Monday with cheering parents, grandparents, other relatives, friends and fellow students.

“I don’t care — we’re graduating,” said Krista von Stein, who was walking Monday morning with her best friend since grade school in Eugene and fellow graduate, Lindsey Rather. “I don’t care what day it is,” von Stein said.

As all graduates who participated in the main ceremony would do, the two had just walked a lap around the track and were now entering the infield to take their seats. Von Stein held a sign that said: “Thank you parents for all your love and support,” and Rather one that said: “Instead of bumblebees we’re bringing home bachelor’s,” a reference to a song they sang as children.

Rebekah Noble, the all-American track star from Spokane whose career was cut short by a foot injury two years ago, still got her moment at Hayward Field this year, graduating Monday with a degree in sociology. “I don’t care either way,” Noble said of graduation being on Monday. “It could be a Tuesday or a Wednesday.”

More than 4,300 students graduated from the UO on Monday, earning bachelor’s, master’s, law and doctoral degrees and other certificates from the school.

Not only was the annual spring commencement held on a Monday for the first time since at least the 1930s, but some old traditions were resurrected and some new ones created.

For the first time since 1954, graduates — wearing colorful green caps and gowns instead of the more somber black ones — began the day with a “Duck Walk” parade from Gerlinger Hall, down East 15th Avenue, and through a yellow “O” at the northeast Hayward Field entrance.

Students were encouraged to decorate their mortarboards. Graduates glued rubber ducks to them and wrote things such as “Hire me!” on them.

The day also was deemed a “graduation celebration,” not a ceremony. And the celebration continued into the afternoon with live music at the Erb Memorial Union amphitheater, and food booths on University Street, as individual department graduations went on all over campus.

Another change was the format of the main graduation — the first at Hayward Field and not at McArthur Court since 2000 — which focused more on short student speeches than the traditional long and often sleep-inducing ones by administrators and deans.

Even the talk given by keynote speaker Johnpaul Jones, a 1967 UO graduate and Seattle architect, was so brief it left you wanting more, not less.

Jones, an American Indian who not only designed the UO’s new Many Nations Longhouse that opened in 2005, but was one of the lead designers on the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., told the graduates that earning a college degree was a good start.

“You are just beginning your education,” he said. “You’re a baby, and you’re learning. You’re just getting started.”

Outgoing UO student body president Emma Kallaway told her fellow graduates to go out into the world and be “givers, not lenders.”

Despite 3,207 of the class of 2010’s graduates being listed as “white” under ethnic origin, the 90-minute program clearly focused on the diversity of the remainder of the graduates, with speeches given by a Sudanese native, a gay graduate who minored in queer studies and an American Indian, Rachel Cushman, from a low-income family in Portland who was not only the first in her family to attend college, but also spent a term living out of her car.

“I’m one of the lucky ones who didn’t drop out,” said Cushman, a member of the Lower Chinook Indian Nation and an ethnic studies major who plans to attend law school. “No matter how rough the road you’re on, never give up on your dreams,” Cushman said.