So, as anyone who follows my social media already knows from the photos I was taunting people with, I spent last week in Wailea, HI, at the wedding of a good friend from college. This was a solo trip for me, much to the dismay of SteelyKid and The Pip, who were still in school, and to a lesser degree Kate, who had to argue a case in NYC last Friday.

This fall will mark 30 years since we all started meeting each other, and we’re all rapidly closing in on 50. We’ve all been married at least once, and all have kids (the oldest of whom will be starting college in the fall). It’s kind of amazing, then, how many of us made the non-trivial effort to get to Hawaii on relatively short notice (the wedding date was announced in April). A couple of guys couldn’t make it because of other family conflicts, but one flew in for the pre-wedding events flying home after the rehearsal dinner, and another worked around a family trip to Japan to get there.

(It must be noted, of course, that we all have the immense good fortune to be successful enough to afford a short-notice week-long trip to Hawaii. I’m probably the least well-off of the whole crew, which means we’re operating in some pretty elevated strata of the income distribution…)

It was also striking how easily we all fall back into old patterns of friendship. My stress level, which had been pretty high thanks to the end-of-term craziness and the long-ass flight, dropped enormously pretty much as soon as I arrived and found the guys watching the NBA Finals in the bar by the pool. It was great to just hang out again.

Of course, I had to come back at the end of the week, making it just in time for Union’s graduation (news story), which is part of the reason this is a blog post. The combination of my wedding trip followed by giving the Class of 2019 a big send-off was a reminder of a point I regularly have to make in discussions with colleagues and on-line: a lot of the most important and influential things that happen in college happen outside of the academic context. The formal curriculum is great, don’t get me wrong, but for many students the most lasting influence of college comes from the deep and lasting relationships formed with fellow students during those years. The kind where thirty years later you fly halfway across the Pacific to see them get married.

This was my 18th year at Union, and I’ve never missed a graduation– I’ve come late to a few that coincided with my own college reunions, but never skipped one entirely. Even in cases where I’m not especially close to the specific class, it’s worth a bit of hassle to see the sense of joy the students have regarding their own accomplishments, and even more the joy they share with each other. I don’t always understand exactly what’s going on, but it’s fantastic to hear a big roar when a particular student crosses the stage, and to see the surprisingly diverse groups of students hugging and posing for photos together.

Those relationships are a critical part of what we’re offering to students, especially in the elite small college corner of academia where I’ve had the enormous privilege to spend so much of my life. It’s sometimes easy to forget how much that stuff matters, but graduations and reunions are a great reminder that the outside-the-classroom piece of the college experience is not something to be brushed off too lightly.