LEWISTON – Rain held off just long enough Monday morning for about 450 graduates of Bates College to receive their degrees in traditional outdoor commencement exercises. Umbrellas blossomed over hundreds of family members and friends who watched the ceremonies, but it was only a light rain in the last half hour.

Stephen L. Carter, nationally acclaimed scholar, teacher, social critic and novelist, delivered the commencement address. He told the Bates graduates they have attended a college with “a strong tradition of activism for social justice,” and he said they carry a heavy responsibility.

“Today, when you receive your degrees,” Carter said, “you will be graduating into what we might describe as the reasoning class, people who are trained to use their minds.”

Such a class is not superior or discriminatory, he said. It’s not the special province of the rich or the white or the male.

“The reasoning class is open without regard to ideology and it’s largely closed to those whose most important task in life is fitting in and hiding in the crowd,” Carter said. Like skills in painting, basketball, community organizing, welcoming the stranger or loving the enemy, all of which are “important and valuable skills for human existence.”

Carter told the graduates, “You are going to become part of the vanguard that leads the world, instead, to a better understanding of the way of applying human reason to the problems that divide us and threaten us – a way of drawing into reasonable conversation thoughtful people with whom you disagree.”

“Human reason is one of God’s great gifts to the human race, and it does us no credit when we under-use it,” he said.

In her first commencement exercise as Bates College president, Elaine Tuttle Hansen bestowed degrees on the graduates and presented honorary degrees.

Carter, who is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, was one of four recipients of honorary degrees.

Donald W. Harward, sixth president of Bates College, who retired last year, also received an honorary degree. Bates created 22 significant new facilities and two dozen new academic programs during Harward’s tenure.

An honorary degree was given to Carol Bellamy, a life-long advocate for children’s health and rights, eight-year director of UNICEF and a former director of the Peace Corps.

Dr. Eugene Baunwald, who fled Nazi-ruled Austria as a child in 1939 and became the premier cardiologist of our time, received the fourth honorary degree.

This year’s graduation continued to reflect the significant international composition of the college’s student body. Graduates represented Brazil, Italy, Turkey, Ghana, Kenya, Israel, Germany, India, Malaysia, Cyprus, South Korea, Slovak Republic, Spain, Bahamas, Iceland, Mauritius, Latvia, China, United Kingdom, Vietnam, Austria, Taiwan, West Indies, Bolivia, Republic of Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Nepal, Bulgaria, Tajikistan, Netherlands, and Albania.

There were 47 graduates from Maine, including Adrian Sirius Anderson (magna cum laude), William Benjamin Karz (cum laude), and Ryan Joseph Weaver (cum laude), all of Lewiston; Laurie Susan Bryant (cum laude), Turner; Joanna Irene Farrar, West Paris; Jonathon Thomas Mellen and Sara Anne Miller (cum laude), Farmington.

The commencement exercises took place in front of Coram Library and a buffet lunch was served for all graduates and families in the Clifton Daggett Gray Athletic Building.