Gregg J. Marnane appears in the processional yesterday at CCRI.

The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez Ruben W. Perez

LINCOLN — You aren’t given a degree from the Community College of Rhode Island, the school’s Class of 2007 was told at commencement ceremonies last night.

You earn it.

A degree from CCRI is not just an academic achievement, Rhode Island Hospital president and chief executive officer Dr. Joseph F. Amaral told the graduates and the audience. It is most often earned by a student who has had to juggle work and family obligations as well as a course load to get it.

“No one had handed you anything on a silver platter,” said Amaral, the son of Portuguese immigrants, “or fed you from a silver spoon.”

Christian Potter, 29, a general studies major, was an example of that. The student speaker described himself as a “former drunken, couch-sleeping college dropout from a part of Providence where Hope is only the name of a high school.”

“I am a descendent of slaves and Irish immigrants,” he said. “I am the son of alcoholics and drug addicts.”

And now he’s a 2007 CCRI graduate with a perfect 4.0 grade point average who will attend Brown University in the fall on a full scholarship.

“Where else would I have had this opportunity,” he said.

He addressed an audience that packed the 5,000-seat CCRI gymnasium at the Flanagan Campus. Degrees and certificates were awarded in more than two dozen fields to 1,253 graduates. Amaral said the average age of a graduate was 31. Eighteen percent came from minority groups. And the average grade point average was 3.07.

The hospital executive drew huge applause, especially from the nursing graduates, when he talked of teamwork. A doctor may call the play, he observed, “but it’s the nurse who runs it.”

Potter spoke passionately about the mission of community colleges such as CCRI, how they are the place for people who don’t have the advantages of others, but still have the desire to succeed.

“This is where the working poor come to start their college career,” he said. “This is where the academically deficient become proficient. This is where a single mom can fit a class around her impossibly overloaded schedule.”

He used his success as a reason to protect the community college system. Potter’s mother and sister both died in 1999. His father suffers from a degenerative brain disease and Potter must take care of him as well as his younger brother.

Tuition increases are threatening to put a community college education out of the reach of the people who need and want it most, Potter said. CCRI should not be looked at as an expense, he said, but as an investment.

“We want to raise revenue by having better jobs that pay better wages and, in turn, pay more taxes,” he said. “… We aren’t asking for a bigger piece of that little pie. We want to help bake a bigger one.”

Amaral — who next month is stepping down as the head of Rhode Island Hospital, the largest private employer in the state — recalled growing up in Cumberland. His parents had come to Rhode Island from Portugal in 1950, he said. He learned English by watching television and from the girl who lived next door. It was education and hard work that got him to where he is, he said.

“Spectacular success is always preceded by unspectacular preparation,” he told the graduates. “But then, you know that.”

Jack R. Warner, commissioner for higher education, said that in a way, the graduates had already become teachers themselves while they worked toward their degrees.

“Others have been watching you,” he said, “your younger brothers and sisters, friends. They have seen, by watching you, that they, too, can do this.”

He ended his speech with a quote about needing to go out into the world to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. He told them to watch out particularly for the comfortable.

“They need to be afflicted,” Warner told them. “And you’re just the ones to do it.”

jhill@projo.com