When Jacob Kenner couldn’t secure enough Commencement tickets for all the family members that were scheduled to come for his son’s graduation this Sunday, he made a call to the Office of Alumni Relations.
He told them that when he graduated from GW as an undergraduate in 1970, the Kent State shootings forced a cancellation of the Commencement ceremony. When he graduated with a master’s in 1973, the ceremony was again called off due to the Watergate scandal. So Kenner wanted to redeem the six allotted tickets per year that he missed out on.
“I told them, ‘I have 12 tickets still sitting there and I want them,'” he said. His son eventually obtained tickets for the almost 20 family members coming in for the ceremony and enjoyed one of the perks of being a legacy at GW.
Kenner, his son Daniel and wife Maureen mingled with other GW graduates and their alumni family members at the Legacy Reception on Friday afternoon as part of the Commencement weekend activities. Legacies are those students that have family members that have also graduated from GW.
Daniel Kenner said he loves the idea of graduating from the same school as his father and is proud to follow in his footsteps. He is even graduating from the same program as his father: theater.
“I had the opportunity to work with some of the same people (my father) worked with 40 years ago,” said Daniel Kenner, who after graduation will begin touring with a theater group called the National Players.
Andrew Hill, GW’s director of student and young alumni programs, said each graduating class has between 100 and 200 legacies. He sees this as a “good number of legacies, considering the price of GW.”
Hill said the motivation behind the annual Legacy Reception during Commencement weekend is to recognize the multi-generational connections at GW and give the numerous legacy families a chance to meet each other.
Carolyn and William Greaf, alumni who met at GW when they were working on their master’s degrees in the 1970s, were astonished to see the amount of changes that have been made to the University. They traveled from New York to see their daughter Ashley graduate from the Elliott School of International Affairs.
They said they were pleasantly surprised to see GW looking “more like a campus” and were impressed with the prestige of the academic undergraduate programs.
“We always thought of it primarily as a graduate school, because when we went here they didn’t have much of an undergraduate program,” Carolyn said.
Ashley Greaf said she doesn’t mind going to the same school as her parents, especially at a school where legacies are not as obvious.
“Going to GW I think it’s nice because you’re not always termed as ‘the legacy kid,'” she said.
The GW Alumni Association organizes two events for legacy families each year.
