USA Graduates Urged To Live with Purpose, Integrity

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Posted on May 4, 2024

Michelle Matthews

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Dr. John W. Smith, who overcame childhood poverty to earn a track scholarship, a doctoral degree and executive leadership positions at two universities, urged University of South Alabama graduates Saturday to be a positive influence on others and pursue lives of integrity. 

“I really should not be standing here today giving this Commencement address, and as you hear a little bit about my life, I think most of you all will agree with me,” Smith said.

Smith, who twice served as USA’s interim president and also held leadership roles at the University of Central Arkansas, gave the Commencement speech at the USA Mitchell Center during two ceremonies honoring more than 2,000 spring and summer degree candidates.

Graduates who began four years earlier started at South in 2020, during the first fall of the COVID-19 global pandemic, when the pandemic limited in-person teaching and extracurricular activities. Saturday’s Commencement was the first in-person graduation for many of the students, noted President Jo Bonner. 

“Your being here today, graduates, says a lot about your resolve, about your perseverance, your resiliency and your resourcefulness,” Bonner said in his opening remarks. “When push comes to shove, nobody knows how to rally like a Jaguar.”

Smith spent 14 years at the University, including in roles as vice president for student affairs, special assistant to the president and executive vice president. During his tenure, he led efforts to reopen campus to full operations.

He shared his own remarkable story, beginning with his upbringing as one of seven children in rural South Carolina, with a three-point message to challenge the graduates to be successful in life and in their careers. 

“In my early years, we hoed and picked cotton for the person who owned our house,” he said. 

The house had one bathroom and one car for nine people. “We had one phone in the house, and it was attached to the wall. It was a party line,” Smith said, before explaining what a party line was for an audience who grew up with phones in their pockets and define the word “party” in an entirely different way. “The party line meant that we shared a phone with other people who lived on our road, and they could pick up their phone and hear our conversations.”

Smith reminded graduates they will not always have control over their circumstances. “But you do have control over how you respond,” he said. “Be an overcomer.”

Next, he implored graduates to make a difference, as his high school track coach did by buying him things he needed, like running shoes and vitamins.

“He knew my family did not have the means to do that, and he understood that at 5 feet, 11 inches and 120 pounds, I was probably not getting the nutrition I needed,” Smith said. “He stepped in and made a difference in my life.”

Another teacher sent clippings of his running success, without his knowledge, to her cousin, the track coach at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia. She knew he wasn’t being encouraged to apply to college, planning instead to work full-time at a grocery store. “She saw something in me that I did not, and stepped into my life and became a difference-maker,” he said.

The track coach at Berry contacted him, and Smith ended up graduating from Berry College four years later.

Then another mentor, the dean of students, asked him to stay and help start Berry’s first student housing office – the beginning of an almost 50-year career in higher education.

And his boss at Mississippi State University mentored him throughout his professional career. “He encouraged me and supported me to get my doctorate at Mississippi State, and he became my mentor, not just at work, but in life,” he said.

All of those people in his past “took a chance on me and changed the trajectory of my life,” he said. He challenged the students to do the same for someone else.

The last thing Smith asked the graduates to do was to be “a person of integrity,” which he defined as doing the right thing even when no one else is watching. Smith spoke of his father, who worked in a cotton mill inspecting rolls of cloth as they sped by. The work was tedious, but his father took pride in it.

“I will forever be indebted to my dad, who only had an elementary school education, but taught me a strong work ethic and to be a person of integrity,” Smith said. “You will have many opportunities throughout the rest of your life to cut corners, to do less than you promised to do, and to be focused on only what is best for you. It will often be easy in your own mind to justify your actions: ‘No one will ever know; everyone else does it; it will not hurt anyone’ …

“But you will know. You are not everyone else, and there probably is someone being hurt by your actions. You just don’t know it at the time. If you want to be successful in life, be a person of integrity.”

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