Chancellor Harvey Perlman issued this Sept. 24 e-mail about enrollment growth and changes to commencement ceremonies.

For every good advance, there are always unintended consequences.

We are clearly benefiting from our increased enrollment, which has allowed us this year to avoid a budget cut and rather to make some investments in additional faculty.

One of the consequences, however, is that the Devaney Center no longer has the capacity to hold our commencement exercises as we have previously conducted the ceremonies. Particularly in the spring, the floor space is just no longer large enough, particularly under the watchful eyes of the Fire Marshal.

This past year we experimented with expanding the hooding ceremonies for PhD. candidates to include handing them their diplomas. With just the PhD. candidates, we outgrew Kimball and had to use Lied. Unfortunately, Lied will not regularly be available for the PhD.. ceremony. Therefore, beginning in December, we intend to hold two commencements at each of the regular times (winter, spring, summer), both at Devaney.

The first Graduate Commence-ment will be 3 p.m. Dec. 19, and will be for PhD. and masters graduates. We are hopeful we can make Devaney more intimate for this ceremony.

On Dec. 20 we will hold an Undergraduate Commencement ceremony.

I know this breaks with tradition and we will give up some of the benefits of having all students graduate together. The Commencement Committee has wrestled with these issues but they have been unable to come up with ways to make Devaney bigger or the Lied more available for the PhD. commencement. They even thought of asking me to redeliver my State of the University address at each commencement, thinking that would reduce the number of students and their families wanting to personally participate. That was, however, too much for any of us to bear.

I hope you will understand and support this change. It imposes greater burdens on all of us to now attend two commencements.

At the same time, commencement is the one celebration we have that clearly emphasizes our success and it is worth doing right.

My thanks to the Commencement Committee who has worked hard on this and to Athletics who has made Devaney available to us.