Graton resident is UC Berkeley's top graduate
Emma Shaw Crane will be delivering the commencement address at her graduation from UC Berkeley today.
CHRISTOPHER CHUNG/THE PRESS DEMOCRATPublished: Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 4:00 p.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 4:00 p.m.
Emma Shaw Crane says one of her most fundamental life lessons came unexpectedly when she was a young equestrienne riding competitively.
“I learned with horses you work best and most effectively when you love what you’re doing,” said the 23-year-old who, despite growing up in tiny Graton, seeks out the harder edges of the world, whether in Latin America, the Mideast, inner-city Berkeley or rural Sonoma County.
Perhaps that explains how this self-effacing young woman, who after graduating from Summerfield Waldorf School in Santa Rosa in 2004, chose to work with a non-profit in southern Mexico rather than race to college. She wound up dashing off her college application while recovering from typhoid and after four years was selected as the top student out of 6,800 seniors graduating today from UC Berkeley.
“I’ve always loved my coursework. It’s been really easy to do my homework. I’ve never been one of those people that had to force myself,” Crane admitted, sitting on her bed in a tidy, sun-drenched room in the Mango House, an international, inter-racial co-op house in Berkeley she helped found.
The woman who loved every minute of her four years at Cal was awarded The University Medal, meaning she not only finished her degree in Interdisciplinary Studies with a perfect 4.0, but impressed a judging committee of faculty and staff with her accomplishments and commitment to community and service.
“This is the most distinguished award that UC Berkeley bestows on its graduating class,” said university spokeswoman Marie Felde. “It’s more than valedictorian. It isn’t just the best grades. It’s having an exceptional academic performance and then showing what you’re made of.”
Of the 240 eligible contenders with GPAs of 3.96 or above, 42 applied. Crane, who has a Fulbright Scholarship to study the effects of race on HIV/AIDS in Colombia, was chosen based on her application, a short essay and letters of recommendation.
One of her many mentors, Ananya Roy, associate dean for Academic Affairs in International and Area Studies, described Shaw Crane as “brilliant.”
“But Emma is much more than her academic accomplishments,” Roy said. “Emma has a sensitive and human sense of the world. She is able to confront structures of power and patterns of social injustice. In doing so, she constantly rethinks her privilege, recognizing that she is able to avail of opportunities often denied others.”
The 5-foot 9-inch scholar today will address 9,000 fellow students, faculty, beaming families and, of course, her parents — Kaiser physician Dr. Tom Crane and social worker-community organizer-therapist Susan Shaw — at the university’s main commencement in The Greek Theater.
“Were amazed and delighted at Emma’s award,” her mother said. “We’re very proud of her passion, hard work and commitment to social justice and her intellectual capacity, but even more by the joy she has living every day.”
She will share the program with speaker Chris Gardner, a millionaire stockbroker whose story about lifting himself out of homelessness was made into the film, “The Pursuit of Happyness.”
Crane’s academic concentration at Cal was race, gender and political economy, with a minor in global poverty and practice. Determined not to be “a weekend activist,” she puts her strong beliefs into practice daily.
She was hired by Prison Radio, a project of the Redwood Justice Fund in San Francisco, to produce radio essays, traveling to Peru to interview political prisoners.
She has visited Palestinian refugee camps, witnessed the Hezbollah occupation of Beirut and volunteered at a non-partisan radio station during a semester in Lebanon, where she learned conversational Arabic.
While fellow global poverty students chose Third World locations for their work projects, Crane dedicated herself to the students of Berkeley Technology Academy or B-Tech, a continuation high school comprised mainly of minority youth expelled from regular high schools.
“I do think there is this national illusion that white America is a separate America from black America and Latino America and Pacific Island America,” said Crane, who worked under the auspices of the campus-based Poetry for the People program. “We all live in the same country. I had a student who almost bled to death because there was no health care to help her. To me that indicates that this is where I want to be doing work. And as a citizen I have the most power here.”
Crane didn’t have to travel to the birthplace of the free-speech movement to become engaged in social causes. Her parents were social activists. When she was 7 her family spent a year in Chiapas, Mexico, where her father was part of a forensics team with the group Physicians for Human Rights. They were there during the indigenous uprising, an experience that opened her eyes to injustices and suffering she perceived among immigrants in her own community when she returned home.
At age 12, she traveled to El Salvador with the Sonoma exchange program Seeds of Learning and found herself among a group of adults hearing testimony from women about the horrors suffered during the civil war of the 1980s. One of the “defining moments” of her life came when several women came up to her to speak of the babies they had that would have been her age — infants they were forced to smother to suppress their cries as terrified civilians hid from soldiers in a canyon.
At the moment, Crane is hoping to defer her Fulbright until next year so she can take advantage of another honor — a Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize — that will enable her to return to Mexico and Central America and continue her work giving radio workshops to women to boost literacy and development.
Someday she may go to graduate school or even medical school. But in the meantime she’s looking forward to a few weeks of just having fun — running, camping, dancing and decompressing — but never wasting time.
“If I’m here, I need to be busting ass and doing as well as I can,” she said, “because there are a lot of people who deserve to be here and are not.”
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