Dan Gediman, co-creator of the “This I Believe” radio and book series, delivers the Convocation address on the historic Quad on Sept. 6, 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

For ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ 2016 Convocation speaker, college was “the perfect time to take stock of what I most enjoy doing and the things that brought great joy to me and that really intrigued me — and to sculpt out of that raw material a career that I’m still in today.”

Dan Gediman, a renowned radio producer and co-creator of the series of books and radio spots, offered that encouragement to the 499 members of the Class of 2020 during a wide-ranging and personal address on Sept. 6, 2016.

Gediman’s career reflections and their lessons for the new students formed the centerpiece of an hourlong Convocation ceremony on Sept. 6. The event served not only as a welcome to the new students and the new school year, but as an introduction to the ethos of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community in the context of This I Believe.

Under milky skies, Gediman shared the Coram Library stage with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ President Clayton Spencer, Student Government President Adedire Fakorede ’18 of Newark, N.J., and Multifaith Chaplain Brittany Longsdorf.

Members of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Class of 2020 listen to a Convocation speaker on the morning of Sept. 6, 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

The first in Gediman’s series of This I Believe books was assigned to the incoming class as its Common Reading, an initiative that helps introduce the first-years to the prevailing values at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Borrowing the title and concept from a 1950s CBS radio series and book adaptation, the latter-day This I Believe project gives people from all walks of life a channel to share their essential philosophies with the world.

Gediman related a conversation with Spencer just minutes before the Convocation processional. “We only can see when we get older and we look back on life: the journey that we took to get where we are today.”

His journey was a serendipitous one that seemed to illustrate the Louis Pasteur quotation “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Gediman recounted, for example, how he decided to attend Antioch College because of a long conversation with the legendary Boston disk jockey Charles Laquidara: If the young Gediman wanted to be in radio, the WBCN personality advised, he should start by attending a school with a great campus station.

A first-year student holds a copy of the Common Reading assigned to the Class of 2020. Dan Gediman, co-editor of the “This I Believe” books and executive producer of NPR’s “This I Believe” radio program, delivered the Convocation address on Sept. 6. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Gediman also explained how a grant proposal that he submitted, almost capriciously, as a college senior ultimately led to his first national gig for public radio. And how, making ends meet as a street musician after funding for his radio documentaries dried up, he happened to meet his wife.

And how a bad case of the flu in 2003 led him to resurrect This I Believe: Feverish and bored, he read the book adaptation of the 1950s radio program hosted by journalism icon Edward R. Murrow. “I was utterly transfixed and transformed” by the book, Gediman said.

With producer and series host Jay Allison, Gediman created the This I Believe radio series for NPR in 2005, and he continues to produce and under the TIB brand.

Often in his career path, Gediman said, “fate intervened.” (That happens.) But the liberal arts education at Antioch equipped him to make the best of all those twists and bumps in the road, Gediman said (including meeting his wife, because a charismatic professor had encouraged him to develop his interest in music).

Although Gediman entered college with no clear idea about what he wanted from an education or from life, Antioch helped him develop two youthful passions — for radio and music — central to his professional and creative life. (In addition to his TIB work, Gediman is a singer-songwriter with four records to his credit.)

His education gave him “a taste for curiosity, a taste for reading, a taste for studying,” and a taste for following facts to see where they lead, Gediman said.

“This is an amazing journey that’s in front of you, and you have no idea where it’s going. You can think of that as something terrifying or you can think of that as something amazingly exciting.”

“I’m sure you came here with certain expectations on the part of your parents and guidance counselors and various advisers.” Yet, Gediman urged, “Just be open-minded. . . . Taste everything that a liberal arts education has to offer.” He added, “I want you, if you get nothing else out of my talk today, to not fear failure, to not fear setbacks.”

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ President Clayton Spencer, Convocation speaker Dan Gediman and Dean of the Faculty Matt Auer react to a light moment in Student Government President Adedire Fakorede’s greeting to the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Class of 2020. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

In her opening remarks, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ President Clayton Spencer offered a special welcome to the Class of 2020. “I love the ring” of that number, she said.

“It suggests a sharpness of focus, a clarity of vision,” she joked. “So we’re delighted that you can see so clearly that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is where you belong.” (In that case, one wondered, were members of other classes more likely to make spectacles of themselves?)

More seriously, she advised the newbies to “dive into your courses, branch out to make friends, be deliberate in thinking about how you move through life on this campus — because it’s great practice for figuring out how you wish to move through the world.”

If Gediman’s name is on the This I Believe dust jacket, it was the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ president who set the book in the Convocation context. She suggested that the premise of the TIB project — the celebration of core beliefs held by all kinds of people — is analogous to the liberal arts campus.

“The variety of perspectives is great, and the unity lies in the realization that knowledge and feeling and experience begin to take shape in front of us as we move through the world,” she said. “And over time, if we are awake and aware, they come to consciousness as a set of values that guide us. In the liberal arts, we sometimes call this living an examined life.”

In view of the “downright frightening” state of current political and social discourse, she added, “This is a particularly important moment to pause and consider how one develops a personal belief system, and how that process interacts with the values and belief systems of others.”

Adedire A. Fakorede ’18 of Newark, N.J., president of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Student Government, greets ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ newest students during Convocation 2016. (Josh Kuckens/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Spencer found herself drawn to a TIB essay by Iran native Azar Nafisi, a literary scholar living in the U.S. and the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. “I believe in empathy,” Nafisi wrote in her 2003 essay. “I believe in the kind of empathy that is created through imagination and through intimate, personal relationships.”

For Nafisi, Spencer said, empathy entails curiosity about the fate of others. “It is this urge to know more about ourselves and others that creates the shock of recognition, of our shared humanity.

“Without empathy, Nafisi insists, there can be no genuine dialogue, and we as individuals and nations will remain isolated and alien, segregated and fragmented,” Spencer said. “There is no better place than a residential liberal arts college to learn empathy, to practice the art of entering curiously and imaginatively into the lives of others.”

Welcomed with generous applause, Fakorede offered the formal greeting to the new class. His overriding message was an oldie-but-goodie that works for everyone but may be especially apt for 18-year-olds: “Just be yourself and people will like you.”

“Your real personality is what brings friends and family to you. And being yourselves is what makes our school the very wonderful, vibrant, and diverse community that we call ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.”

In her benediction, Longsdorf built a metaphor of plants growing in soil nourished by the wisdom and kindness of the adults on campus. She told the Class of 2020, “Learn to be alive and thrive in this light-filled place.”

President Clayton Spencer follows as the college mace bearer, Charles Franklin Phillips Professor of Economics Michael Murray, leads the Convocation 2016 Recessional away from Coram Library. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

“This I Believe” co-creator Dan Gediman.

What’s the essence of what you believe? What’s the philosophical DNA that shapes your actions and words?

And if you had just a few minutes to share your core beliefs with the world, what would you say?

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ incoming Class of 2020 devoted some time to such questions this summer. That’s because the 2016 Common Reading — the book that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ asks incoming first-years to read before the start of school — represents the core philosophies, in their own words, of dozens of Americans from all walks of life.

Running the gamut from former Secretary of State Colin Powell and computing mogul Bill Gates to a Massachusetts hospital clerk and a Yellow Pages ad representative in Texas, those 80 Americans were contributors to the NPR radio series “.”

The short essays that they read on the broadcast were adapted for a book with the same title. And nine years after its publication, the book This I Believe is the 2016 Common Reading at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ always follows up the summer reading assignment with programming during Orientation, and prominent in the programming this year is the Convocation address by Dan Gediman — an independent radio producer who, with producer Jay Allison, created “This I Believe” for NPR and edited the book.

Gediman will speak about This I Believe in the Convocation ceremony beginning at 11 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 6. College President Clayton Spencer, Multifaith Chaplain Brittany Longsdorf, and the president of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Student Government, Adedire Fakorede ’18 of Newark, N.J., will also offer remarks.

Classes begin the following day.

The Common Reading is designed to jumpstart first-year students’ engagement with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ both culturally and intellectually. Carrie Murphey ’06, assistant dean of students for first-year programs, explains that “This I Believe had particularly strong resonance with the Purposeful Work initiative,” a college-wide effort to help students harmonize their interests and beliefs with their life choices, especially in terms of career.

The essays in This I Believe inspire readers to examine their own personal beliefs, how they distilled them, and how they share them with others. “The book seemed a compelling choice, given the timing of the Common Reading, for first-year students as they consider their own guiding values and principles in preparation for four years of college,” Murphey says, “and for joining a community with many shared values.”

The longstanding Common Reading program was revised for 2016. Books being considered for the summer assignment are weighed against 18 goals that, taken together, describe a campus committed to diversity, community, mutual respect, and robust intellectuality.

The Common Reading is designed to jumpstart first-year students’ engagement with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ both culturally and intellectually.

This year for the first time, Murphey says, books were assessed by a committee comprising faculty; students working in the residence life program; and staff. Murphey co-chaired the committee along with Kirk Read, professor of French and francophone studies, and Margaret Imber, associate professor of classical and medieval studies and Read’s successor as associate dean of the faculty.

In addition to Gediman’s address, This I Believe programming for first-year students includes a debate by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ internationally known Brooks Quimby Debate Council, and pre-Convocation brunch discussions with guest staff or faculty discussants. In addition, some First-Year Seminars will incorporate the text into their syllabi.

The concept and title of This I Believe predated Gediman and Allison’s project by half a century. In 1951, a time of mounting political tensions in the United States, the renowned broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow and the CBS network originated This I Believe as a series of five-minute radio spots in which well-known Americans shared the essence of their beliefs.

Today, Gediman is executive director of This I Believe, a nonprofit that collects and presents the core personal philosophies of Americans.

That show lasted into 1955. Allison and Gediman picked up where Murrow had left off some 50 years before — but they opened their 2005–09 public radio series to essays contributed by Americans from all walks of life. (They also re-used essays from Murrow’s series for both their radio and book series.)

The initial This I Believe book spawned a series that’s now up to nine volumes, and an Essay Collection of more than 120,000 statements of belief can be found at

Today, Gediman is executive director of This I Believe, a nonprofit that collects and presents the core personal philosophies of Americans ranging from the famous to the previously unknown. A 25-year public radio veteran, his work has been heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Fresh Air, Marketplace, and This American Life. He has won many of public broadcasting’s most prestigious awards.