The View from the Chapel Stage
I’ve seen Wabash from a lot of angles.
In my 25 years at the College I’ve known Wabash men as a fellow student, a football player, a coach, an advancement officer, and now director of the alumni and parent programs team.
But I’ve never had a view like the one I had from the Chapel stage as I emceed last summer’s Big Bash Chapel Sing. Three hundred eighty-six alumni from across the generations returned for the reunion, and most of those were there when the time came to sing “Old Wabash” with their classmates.
A friend who didn’t attend Wabash asked me afterward why so many of these guys came back. I told him this: For four of your most formative years you live with these guys, compete with these guys. Four years of getting closer to these guys than almost anyone you’ve known outside of your siblings.
Then you graduate and—boom—it ends.
I think returning is our way of getting back with those brothers, those people we went through pledgeship with, or spent late nights working with on a theater production, or did all-nighters with cramming for a biology test. You triumph together, you struggle together. This place is tough, and it can kick your butt. You realize pretty early on that you can only get through it together.
There’s something about the rigor of the place when you are a student, the fact that it’s all male—you bare your soul, you talk about difficult things.
I love spending time with the older classes, where this bond is strongest. They don’t care how much money their classmates have made or what they’ve accomplished. It’s all about the relationship now.
Another reason so many come back: Students here see alumni involved with the College, keeping in touch with each other. They understand that when they graduate, they’re not leaving Wabash, just changing roles. No longer Wabash students, they become Wabash alumni. And the new role is just as essential to the place.
I don’t know that everyone at Chapel Sing would have put it exactly this way, but they sure were happy to see each other, and they sang “Old Wabash” like they meant it.
And in those few moments I stood onstage to call each class up front to sing, I had the best view in the house.
Steve Hoffman ’85
Director, Alumni and Parent Programs