PORTLAND - Auburn's Mark Coursey urged his fellow University of Southern Maine graduates to balk at tradition and seek new answers during his speech at the school's 128th commencement ceremony at the Cumberland County Civic Center on Saturday morning.

"If all of us here were bound by the rules and customs of the past, this auditorium would be almost empty," Coursey said in his speech. "If you were the wrong gender, wrong skin color, wrong religion, wrong age, wrong socioeconomic status or whatever else those who held that power deemed inappropriate, the hallowed halls of academia were closed to you."

Things have changed, Coursey said. At 40, he's the very model of a nontraditional student. He received a bachelor's degree in leadership and organizational studies from USM's Lewiston-Auburn College, one of 109 students from L-A College to earn degrees from USM on Saturday. He will be attending the University of Maine School of Law in the fall.

"I have taken 22 years to arrive at this day and this place," he said. "I took a route that was different than the tradition."

USM marked its largest graduating class ever Saturday, with 1,747 earning degrees. About 1,100 of those graduates attended Saturday's ceremony, along with an estimated 7,000 spectators.

Coursey was the student speaker, selected to represent all USM students. He urged fellow graduates to ask new questions and seek new answers.

"When we walk out these doors, we should refuse to abandon our search," he said. "We must make this quest for knowledge a part of our everyday lives."

In his keynote address, Pulitzer prize winner Roger Wilkins noted how much the world has changed since he graduated from college.

"Today, whatever our problems are, we have a vastly different and better country than the one we lived in in 1953," Wilkins said.

Wilkins noted how the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s have changed the country. He reminded the audience that in the summer of 1787, when Benjamin Franklin was asked what was created at the Constitutional Convention, he replied, "A republic, if you can keep it."

"It is now your turn to keep it," Wilkins told graduates.

Auburn native and USM alumnus Ray Stevens, a member of the Class of 1986 who now lives in La Jolla, Calif., was awarded an honorary doctorate of science for his commitment to the advancement of science and for his contributions to science education at USM.