For many years, beginning when I was in college, I went to a dentist whose office was within two blocks of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).  Whenever the opportunity presented itself, I would also stop at Chock full o’Nuts next door for a brownie.  (For those of you who have never heard of this chain, consider it a more vanilla Starbucks.)  And if I had extra time, I would spend some time at the MOMA.  I won’t say that this made visiting a dentist pleasurable but I always enjoyed the time spent at the MOMA.

In a typical year, I attend one Hofstra commencement ceremony in December and four during May.  The May commencement exercises have individual ceremonies for undergraduate, graduate, Law, and an Honors Convocation while the December ceremony has all of the above for midyear graduates.  Only one of our May ceremonies, the undergraduate ceremony, has been held outdoors regularly and for this year’s ceremony, the weather was perfect.  Not too hot, not too cold, nice breeze, not raining, no thunder and lightning.  For an outdoor ceremony, you could not have had better weather. And yet, within two weeks of this year’s ceremony we made a decision that going forward the undergraduate ceremony would be divided by colleges and schools into two separate ceremonies and would be held indoors in our comfortable air-conditioned arena.