‘Be a hero’

At Molloy College’s graduation on Monday, members of the class of 2015 were told to be heroes — everyday heroes.

Family members and friends crowded into Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum to watch 1,161 students graduate with associate, bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral degrees at the school’s 57th commencement. Valedictorian Victoria Sorrentino and Salutatorian Victoria Ciampo, both students in the Honors College, were the first to receive their degrees.

Joseph McNeil and Nancy Douzinas were presented with honorary degrees. On Feb. 1, 1960, McNeil and three other North Carolina A&T State University freshmen sat down at the lunch counter at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, N.C., and refused to leave until they were served. When they were not served, they came back the next day with 20 black students; the day after that, with 60; and the day after that, with 400. Sit-ins like this one spread to other cities, and played an instrumental role in ending racial segregation.

Douzinas is the president of the Rauch Foundation, which invests in ideas and organizations that help Long Island. The foundation funds the Long Island Index, which collects data about all aspects of life on the Island to help businesses, organizations and townships make decisions. The Index led to the creation of Molloy’s Energeia program, which trains community leaders to be “educated advocates for change,” Molloy President Dr. Drew Bogner said. “And whether they know it or not,” Bogner added, “their newly found dynamism is all, and can be traced back to, Nancy [Douzinas].”

Bogner told the new graduates about McNeil’s and Douzinas’s struggles and triumphs. McNeil and his friends did not set out to be great, Bogner said. They set out to do the right thing — to stand up for fairness and justice. “This is your calling as a Molloy graduate,” Bogner said. “Your call to be good, perhaps great, but definitely good. Your call to be right in your actions and with others, to be respectful of all, to see the humanity and potential in yourself and everyone you encounter, to be compassionate, to seek out truth and to inform yourself about injustices in your own community and the world. You are called to be heroes of the everyday world.”