Holding out against gloomy skies and persistent rain, hundreds of umbrellas filled Wallace Wade Stadium during the University's 156th commencement ceremony Sunday.
Friends and family looked on as President Richard Brodhead acknowledged more than 4,000 graduates on a dark and chilly Mother's Day morning.
Commencement speaker Barbara Kingsolver, an author and National Humanities Medal recipient, urged graduates to embrace a sustainable lifestyle and reject common definitions of success.
Her most recent book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life," recounts her family's life of producing and eating their own food. She wrote the book with her husband, Steven Hopp, and her daughter, Camille Kingsolver, a rising senior.
"[This] will be the central question of your adult life: to escape the wild rumpus of carbon-fuel dependency, in the nick of time," she said. "You'll make rules that were previously unthinkable, imposing limits on what we can use and possess. You will radically reconsider the power relationship between humans and our habitat."
From dorm room to Central Campus apartment, Kingsolver said collegiate communal living is a stepping stone to a lifetime of community life. She added that the "big, lonely house" metaphor for success should be re-evaluated because those with the most community are happiest.
But some students said the speech fell short of expectations.
"[Administrators] said they chose her because she knows a lot about Duke, but her speech ended up being about the environment," graduate Sruthi Thatchenkery said. "I don't think that was the best speech to give to Duke students."
Other students, like graduate Daniel Pu, said the speech was long and confusing.
"I think most of the people weren't paying attention because it was raining, no matter how good it was," he said. "The weather wasn't really conducive to listening and everyone was just complaining most of the time."
Preceding Kingsolver's address, student speakers Matt Zafirovski and Kyle Knight presented a comical, conversational speech to graduating students. The pair delivered a dialogue about campus life, recounting stories from their first days of college as freshman roommates-such as when Knight, who grew up in a small town and didn't own a cell phone, first received a University-issued iPod.
"I tried not to laugh at the time; I just plugged it into his computer and programmed iTunes," Zafirovski said. "I wondered whether Kyle was playing a joke on me. Sometimes I still do."
Zafirovski and Knight were both active on campus and abroad-Knight traveled to Nepal to study social stigma surrounding disabilities and Zafirovski studied in Chicago for a summer, learning about the city's inner-city schools.
"We are an ambitious and driven group, and we should be proud of our audacious goals," they told fellow graduates. "But our success will also be defined by how well we maintain a healthy perspective on our work, by how well we build relationships through support and generosity and by how well we remain present and aware as we grow and change."
Anecdotes and jokes aside, Knight and Zafirovski advised their peers to "be aware and be present," a message graduate Kristina Mahoney said was fitting for the occasion.
"I thought the student speakers were amazing and in tune with the Duke community," she said. "They presented great messages for the future."
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