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By
Donald N.S. Unger
 Graduating senior Ed Dilworth has a longer
list of professional accomplishments than his peers in the
Class of 2002. He has started and run advertising agencies,
interactive agencies, and most recently, begun an entertainment
company, focusing on animation and cartoons. To be fair,
he has had a bit more time to achieve than his classmates.
He first came to Holy Cross in the fall of 1980 but left
in the middle of his senior year. He returned some 17 years
later, in the fall of 2001, to complete his degree. In the
stands, at commencement, will be his wife Michele and his
two sons—Patrick, 2½ and Edmond, 1—who,
together, are the main reason he decided to return and finish
his degree.
"When my sons were born," Dilworth recalls, "I
was reminded of how obsessed I was when I was little about
my father's life when he was younger, and it made me
think that if I was going to be able to tell my own boys
things like, ‘you need to finish what you start,' or ‘it's
important to do things the right way,' then I needed
to take a shot at finishing at Holy Cross."
The first time around, he says, the timing just wasn't
right. "While the reasons for my departure were administrative
and, in hindsight, pretty silly, I shouldn't have been
in school at that time, anyway. I was completely without
motivation academically. While I went on to attend other
schools, it was not until I returned this past year that
I really had any appreciation for going to school."
Fall semester 2001 was a radically different experience. "All
the professors were great," Dilworth says. "And
the students were amazingly engaged—really bright and
involved, much different than I remember it. But then, I
was a bit out of it when I was here originally."
He was particularly taken with Professor Bob Cording's
course on "The Bible as Literature." "It
would be a dramatic understatement to say I just enjoyed
it. This course was a life changer, not only for me but for
a number of other students as well. It should be a ‘must
take' for every student before they graduate."
Cording returns the sentiment. "I loved having Ed
in class," he says. "He brought his lifelong
quest for meaning—the sense that the life of the spirit
and the spiritual search for meaning doesn't begin
and end by the time you leave college; rather it's
a lifetime's work."
"It was also pretty amazing," Dilworth adds, "to
be taking a ‘Politics of The Middle East' class
during the Sept. 11 attack."
Assistant Professor Vickie Langohr, in the department of
political science, who taught the course, remembers him as
a student who brought strong analytical skills to the classroom:
"His business world experience showed clearly," Langohr
says. "I remember that at one point we were discussing
the vague terms of a U.N. resolution on the Middle East,
and I asked why both parties, the Palestinian and the Israeli,
might be unsatisfied with the resolution; Ed said that if
you compared it to a business contract, you could see that
the resolution didn't mean much, that it said things
like ‘may' and ‘should' and didn't
give any enforceable rights. If this were for my business,
he said, I'd insist on a renegotiation in clearer terms."
Coming back after an absence of almost 20 years, Dilworth
was surprised not only by how he had changed as a student
but also by changes in the institution as well. A variety
of support structures that were put into place in the 1980s
and 1990s were particularly noteworthy. He had come back
ready to campaign for changes that would make the school
more supportive of the students; he found that he was preaching
to the converted.
"The school had completely changed and was very active
in students' lives. The Assistant Deans' Office
was a big change, for example, and a welcome one. The student
life group was also very active in making sure that I was
set, and that everything was going well for me. And that
contact was consistent throughout the semester."
The student population had changed as well. And, as Dilworth
sees it, "The school is significantly better for having
a broader range of students than it had 20 years ago."
If the academic and personal timing was better this time
around, the commute was rather more strenuous: "I took
the red eye in from San Francisco on Monday nights and returned
on Thursday afternoons after class. I did that every week
for the semester."
Dilworth's completing his degree is not likely to
do much to change his professional standing. On a personal
level, however, both for himself and for his growing family,
his achievement will likely mean more to him now than it
would have in the spring of 1984.
"I guess in short I returned because I hated the parts
of my past and myself that led to leaving Holy Cross. In
order to purge them and demonstrate to my sons and maybe
myself the right way to do things, I felt the need to return."
Donald N.S. Unger is a free-lance journalist from Worcester, Mass.
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