Sweet Briar College taps 141 graduates

By Darrell Laurant

Published: May 10, 2008

SWEET BRIAR — A strong but unseen bond existed Saturday between the guest speaker for Sweet Briar College’s 99th commencement and the youngest member of the Class of 2008, pulling at both with gravitational force.

That bond was China.

For speaker Anna Chao Pai, Sweet Briar Class of 1957, the connection was obvious. Born in Beijing, she is the granddaughter of a Chinese warlord, Marshal Chang Tso Lin, who controlled Manchuria after the Chinese Revolution in 1911 and was assassinated in 1928. Eight years later, Pai’s uncle, Chang Hsueh Liang, took Chiang Kai Shek hostage and forced him to agree to fight with the Chinese Communists against the invading Japanese.

“In return,” Pai told the 141 graduates and their friends and families, “my uncle released Chiang, believing he was the only person who could unite the Chinese. (He) was immediately arrested and kept in captivity by Chiang for the next 50 years. But he had helped to save China for the Chinese.”

Natalie Batman was captured by China in another way.

“I went there on my Junior Year Abroad,” said the Amherst resident, who graduated at age 19, “and studied in Shanghai. It made a big impression on me, and one of my goals is to one day go back.”

A home-schooled student, Batman enrolled at Sweet Briar at 16.

“At first, I chose it because it was close,” said the economics major, who is marrying in June, “but I really grew to love it.”

Batman and Mary Dance of Midlothian were named Presidential Medalists on a breezy morning that briefly threatened showers before the gusty winds that made grumbling sounds in the open microphone finally shoved the clouds overhead and out of range.

Meanwhile, Doug Jahnke of Toledo, Ohio, was looking to the sky for another, more poignant reason. His daughter, Laura Jahnke, was given a posthumous honorary degree, and Jahnke and his wife, Merilee, came to Sweet Briar to accept it.

“She was diagnosed with cancer in 2001, before she came to Sweet Briar,” Doug Jahnke said, “and she had to drop out at one point for treatment. She tried to come back, but then she got sicker. She was the sort of person who was friends with everybody, and everybody here loved her.”

Laura Jahnke died last year, and was honored with a standing ovation by the student body when her parents mounted the steps to the awards platform. As he walked back to his seat, Doug Janke gestured toward the gathering clouds with the rolled-up diploma.

Pai spoke at length about the experience of being an immigrant (she and her parents came to America in 1940, after the Communists took over in China) and expressed her opinion that bilingual education “retards a person’s progress through life in America.”

Her mother, Pai added, “was never able to accept being American. However, she did come to understand that she as a woman, in her time, had never been given a chance in China to develop her own sense of self, not to be given the knowledge and training to explore her own interests.”

Given that chance herself, Pai became a star athlete and student leader at Sweet Briar, then earned a Ph.D. in developmental genetics and taught for 30 years at Montclair State College in New Jersey.

It was the next-to-last commencement for Sweet Briar President Elizabeth Muhlenfeld, who has announced her retirement at the end of the next academic year.

Besides Batman, area graduates included Patricia Lynn Cooper of Monroe, Krystal Dianne Ellis of Rustburg, Angelica Marie Glover, Elizabeth Virginia Jensen and Emily Schwab Vermilya of Lynchburg, Rachel Gotwalt of Sweet Briar, Sebrina Dianne Hall and Ruth Ann Ratliff of Madison Heights, Mary Nash, Markieta Tinisha Rose and Jessica Maghan Latray of Amherst, and Susan Elizabeth Rodriguez of Appomattox.

Included among the master’s degree recipients were Anne Elizabeth Barrow and Kimberly Quynh-Khanh Gibson of Lynchburg, Angela Bennett and Julie Peters McAndrews of Madison Heights, Jenifer Louise Lowrey of Brookneal, and Jessica Dawn Wooten of Shipman,

The list of 131 women receiving undergraduate degrees also included twins, Briana and Brittany Dean of Wilmington, Del.