SOUTH HADLEY — Instead of figuratively wearing their heart on their sleeves during this momentous occasion, the 2025 graduating class of Mount Holyoke College choose to literally wear their values on their gowns.

In the crowd of over 600 graduates that gathered at the Pageant Green on Sunday, lavender tassels, pins and flowered lapels representing solidarity with the transgender and queer community embellished most student’s graduate attire. A large collection of students donned keffiyehs in honor of the Palestinians in Gaza. Raven Joseph, joined by many of their peers, wore a stole of African Kente cloth, a type of colorful fabric, as a tribute to members of the African diaspora.

“The key to getting my degree was my support system, community,” said Sara-Cayen Abudo, a first-generation college graduate whose grandparents flew from the Philippines to watch her graduate. “There is no me without my friends, my family, my mentors, like everybody who believed in me, supported me throughout the whole thing. It might be my degree, but it’s also everyone’s.”

So before Gov. Maura Healey, Mount Holyoke’s keynote speaker for the college’s 188th commencement ceremony, even uttered a reminder to students to live by their values of equality and community each day, the graduates had already taken her message to heart.

“It may feel as if you’re graduating in the worst timeline. But the crisis of this moment, the challenge of this moment, also offers a huge opportunity,” Healey said. “It’s an opportunity to make choices that truly matter, not only to yourselves, but to the world. It’s the gift of a purposeful life, however you choose to build it.”

This particular class is no stranger to adversity. These graduates returned to their South Hadley campus as the world still grappled with the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, student speaker Tehani Chandrasena Perera said. The transition posed additional challenges to the usual collegiate academic and personal growing pains.

“We picked up the pieces of past traditions, learned how to build community in new ways and relearn what it meant to show up in person,” she said. “Yet, through it all, we’ve remained resilient and deeply caring.”

Much of Perera’s speech discussed beginnings and endings, from the rainy August day she arrived in South Hadley from sunny Sir Lanka to Sunday’s cloudy spring day that found her at the podium.

Many students started their day with their own full circle moments: Zoe Kaplan sat next to Ruby Antinori, who she met in her first-year psychology seminar, her mortarboard referencing a “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” quote she first heard in that very seminar. Nicole Fitzpatrick and Yuna Antal grabbed breakfast together for the last time in the dining hall before bumping into some alums.

“I was just kind of chatting with them about the feeling of being back in the dorms,” Fitzpatrick said. “That was really nice to kind of see the future and have that moment of solidarity.”

While Perera and her friends initially defined themselves with the college and its legacy, she realized that over the past four years of trials and tribulations, she and her classmate became so much more than students.

“We became people who really grew into ourselves,” Perera said.

For Amanda Lee Adams, that means growing into a leader for those with a mixed-race background. They chose Mount Holyoke over the other “Seven Sister” schools — a group of seven historically women’s liberal arts colleges in the Northeast, including Smith College — because Mount Holyoke’s prioritized teaching leadership. As one of the founders of the Mixed Identity Students Collective and their continued involvement in advancing critical mixed-race studies, they has embodied the type of leadership that Healey said is key to preserving democracy during this period of political turmoil.

“The strengths you forged in this community will allow you to not only survive this timeline, but to change it,” Healey said. “This is what you prepared for at Mount Holyoke, not to be passive, but to seize the agency that you have — to recognize that you have agency and to use it.”

Reflecting on her time as a lawyer in the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, Healey recalled the partners and families who fueled a lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law that denied same-sex couples the rights and protections of marriage. While the anguish of these couples who were denied retirement benefits, visitation rights to their hospitalized partners and even parenting children still stays with Healey, so too does the collective joy and power that flooded the community when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the state.

“I think about that today, because to me, that’s the vision of the democracy we work for, where the dignity and the worth of the humanity of each person is respected,” Healey said. “It’s not new or radical, but it’s rooted in our nation’s founding ideals, which were forged right here in Massachusetts 250 years ago.”

Healey too joined Mount Holyoke’s proud tribe of trailblazers after receiving her Doctor of Laws honorary degree. The other two honorary degree recipients are Tara Roberts, an influential journalist behind a podcast series called “Into the Depths,” and Elizabeth Weatherman, a powerhouse in the venture capital industry as a special limited partner of Warburg Pincus.

Healey promised the crowd that she would not discuss politics, but in today’s political climate, it’s nearly impossible to avoid when graduates move into the next phase of their lives as two starkly contrasting visions for the United States clash in the public sphere.

Specifically, higher education institutions embracing diverse perspectives of their student body, like the oldest of the Seven Sisters, have become a “domestic enemy,” she said. But Mount Holyoke, Healey continues, remains a beacon of hope for those who wish to preserve democratic ideals.

“For 188 years, we’ve known we are stronger when we include people rather than exclude them,” Mount Holyoke President Danielle Holley said, “and we will continue to make decisions based on our mission and our values for as long as we exist, which, as you know, Mount Holyoke forever shall be.”

The statement echoes the alma mater that ended the ceremony, officially transitioning the students to alums. As the graduates now join the Mount Holyoke community of 40,000 and counting, they too, “forever shall be.”

Emilee Klein can be reached at eklein@gazettenet.com