PORTLAND (AP) – Richard Pattenaude, soon to be chancellor of the University of Maine System, told University of Southern Maine graduates Saturday that public higher education creates unimaginable opportunities.

Pattenaude, the keynote speaker at his 16th and final USM commencement, recalled growing up in a working class family in Seattle and said his parents’ desire that he go on to college led to academic achievement and a rewarding career.

“It is you, and the more than 15,000 other graduates I have congratulated on this stage, who remind me that public higher education opens doors … to opportunities we could not have imagined and to places we never knew existed,” he said.

Pattenaude, who is stepping down as USM president to become chancellor of the state system, said his formula for success was, “Worked hard, did well, had fun.” He repeated those words throughout his address, prompting the nearly 1,000 graduates to take up the chant.

Nearly 2,000 graduates received degrees at the University of Maine, where former Bowdoin College President Robert Edwards addressed the morning ceremony and author Tess Gerritsen spoke in the afternoon.

Emphasizing the importance of clear language, Edwards told graduates they are part of Maine’s “particular linguistic tradition” that includes the likes of Henry David Thoreau and E.B. White.

“Language and thought, their quality and precision, are closely allied, and this clear, robust use of the English language has been at the core of the peculiar contribution the people of New England have made to American democracy,” he said.

Gerritsen, author of a series of best-selling medical thrillers, said her Chinese immigrant mother’s belief in the supernatural helped inspire her writing, which often features dark, frightening villains.

Citing reports of people who appear dead but were really alive, Gerritsen told of a man who awoke on the autopsy table just before the pathologist was about to make his first cut.

“Yes, sometimes you do get a second chance at life,” the physician turned writer said, encouraging graduates to be open-minded about how their careers and lives will play out.

Commencement ceremonies were also held Saturday at University of Maine System campuses in Augusta, Farmington, Presque Isle, Fort Kent and Machias.

AP-ES-05-12-07 1601EDT