The Age of Acceleration; What is our Promise?
Inauguration Address – September 18, 2026 (AS DELIVERED)
You did see in the video that I was starting a new tradition? So, I have to put Otto in his place. I also feel I need to mention, if there is anyone from Panda Express watching, I think with all these mentions, I need an NIL deal with Panda Express.
Good afternoon.
They say no one succeeds alone, and standing here today, I understand that more than ever. Every milestone I've reached, every challenge I've overcome, has someone else's fingerprints on it.
That’s why I want to start with some expressions of gratitude. First to my family, Kevin Clarke, who has been a patient and forgiving partner on this journey with me for almost 30 years.
Thank you to my parents, Jim and Pam, who are here, my sister Wendy, her family, all my extended family who are here and not here today. Thank you.
I also want to acknowledge Syracuse University’s passionate and committed Board of Trustees, our Board Chair Jeff Scruggs. Thank you for entrusting me with this great responsibility. A special thanks certainly to Shelly Fisher and Lisa Fontenelli, co-chairs of the Chancellor Search Committee. And thanks to every member of that committee for your service and for your faith in me.
My professional journey has also benefited from people who, along the way, saw something in me that wasn’t always obvious, even to me.
People who challenged me when I needed it, people who showed up in ways I'm still grateful for. Mel Stith, you are certainly one of those people. You are a big reason that I’m standing here today. For more than 20 years, Mel has been a mentor and a friend. Thank you, Mel.
I also want to acknowledge and thank the 12th Chancellor and President of Syracuse University, Kent Syverud. For 12 years, Kent led this university with steady hands and a clear heart. His fingerprints are on everything that this university will become. For me personally, Kent’s far more than my predecessor. He’s been a mentor and a friend, and I’m honored that he’s here today.
I said there were many, so bear with me.
In a similar way, I also want to thank Steve Barnes, Dan D’Aniello, Ted Lachowicz, Dick Thompson, Tom Foley, Ray Toenniessen, Randy Blass, Larry Plummer, Maureen Casey, Ellie Komanecky, Janice Kellish, Ron Novak, Adam Hepburn, Jim Powers, and so many others who have shown up for me time and time again.
I also want to acknowledge my tremendous colleagues, past and present, on the university senior leadership team at the Whitman School, at the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families, and our Office of Veteran and Military Affairs.
And finally, to all of you, thank you.
I stand here humbled, forever grateful, and clear-eyed about what this moment demands of me and what this moment demands of all of us.
I have always been somebody who's been deeply curious about history, and more specifically, I've long been fascinated by the stories of people who changed history, both for the better and for the worse.
And that is partly why for years I’ve kept a YouTube playlist of consequential speeches delivered by leaders who left their mark on their time and on ours. Some of those speeches were carefully crafted in anticipation of a moment. Others were spontaneous and delivered in a moment, as a response to a crisis or to chaos or unimaginable loss.
For me, what those speeches have in common are themes that I’ve personally found powerful and personally instructive. While I realize I’m revealing a little bit of the nerd in me, it is true that I listen to that playlist often, killing time in airports, or on my drive back and forth to work.
One of those speeches – probably the one I replay most often – was delivered more than sixty years ago, on the other side of the world, by a young American senator who stood before an audience in Cape Town, South Africa, and offered words that I believe still carry weight today.
On that day, Senator Robert Kennedy told the audience: ‘Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build currents which can sweep down the mightiest walls.'
Now, Kennedy spoke those words in a country divided by the brutal walls and injustice of apartheid.
The walls we face today are not only walls of injustice, though those endure, but today we also confront a world divided by something no less urgent and no less demanding of our moral attention. That is a world transformed and changing so rapidly, so fundamentally, that the ground beneath our assumptions about the future shifts routinely and in ways that are unsettling.
These are walls of confusion and fracture and uncertainty constructed by a future that is arriving faster, I would argue, than our wisdom to meet it.
And so, the questions before Syracuse University in this moment – before all of us who care about this place – are both old and new at once.
The first is: in this moment, what does Syracuse University owe to the young people in our care? And the second, what do we owe the world that will receive them?
Look around. The world on and beyond this campus is not the world of a generation ago…it’s not even the world of a five years ago.
Artificial intelligence rewrites what it means to think and to create and to work. The climate does not wait for our policy debates before it acts. Democratic institutions that once seemed permanent now prove, with alarming regularity, to be fragile. And, the speed of information, and misinformation, has outpaced our capacity to distinguish one from the other.
Today, we live in what historians might one day call the Age of Acceleration.
Change is no longer a season that passes; it is the weather itself – a storm really. And into that storm, Syracuse University sends young people, and we ask them to lead.
That is not a small thing. From where I sit, that’s everything.
And that is why, in this Age of Acceleration, a great university cannot allow itself to become a fortress against the present. A great university cannot settle to be a museum of settled questions.
Instead, in this moment, a great university, Syracuse University, must commit to something harder to build and more essential to maintain.
Together, we must commit to be a place where our students understand the uncertainty of the world, and more than that, a university that empowers our graduates to navigate that world with the tools and the knowledge and the rigor and the conviction that they build here. And for them to build those things here, we cannot shield our students from difficulty. Our job is to forge in them the capacity to engage difficulty. We are not here to give them certainty. Our job is to help them cultivate the courage to act wisely in the absence of certainty.
In other words, I believe strongly in this moment, the moral obligation of this place is to prepare our young people for the world as it is – not as it once was or not as we might wish it were. Fortunately, our history suggests that this university knows how to do that better than most.
Syracuse is a city that understands reinvention. This is a town that has known industry and loss and the long, unglamorous work of becoming something new. The salt that built this city's early wealth, the manufacturing that defined its middle century, the civic champions who have refused, in every era, to let this place become a footnote — all of that is a testament to the stubborn human preference for a future, over submission and surrender.
This university has been part of this city’s story since 1870.
The Maxwell School has shaped public servants and policy thinkers who carry Syracuse's name into halls of government across the world.
The Newhouse School has trained generations of journalists who hold power accountable, a function now more vital than ever.
The College of Law, the Falk School, the colleges of engineering and education and architecture and the arts, each of them has sent forth the kind of ripples that Kenndy described.
Many of those ripples are present in this Dome today.
All of that is to say that Syracuse University did not earn its place in the American story by standing apart from this country's struggles. It earned its place by engaging them, by opening doors when others kept them closed, by admitting veterans when others hesitated, by believing, stubbornly and often at a cost, that education is a force to be extended, instead of a privilege to be rationed.
For me, none of that history is nostalgia. For me, that history is instruction. That history is a compass.
So let me say now very plainly what I believe this institution must commit to being in the years ahead.
In this Age of Acceleration, Syracuse University must commit to being a place where intellectual and moral courage is cultivated as deliberately as analytical skill.
We must commit to being a place where our students learn not only how to solve hard problems, but how to sit with the discomfort of problems that don’t lend themselves to easy solutions.
The hardest challenges of this century – climate, inequality, the ethics of technology, and the health of democracy – will not yield to elegant academic formulas laid out in the pages of a textbook.
Those challenges will yield, if at all, to people, people who have practiced the difficult art of thinking and acting together even when they don’t agree.
For that reason, we must commit to being a place where the life of the mind and the life of the citizen are understood to be inseparable. At many schools, earning a credential marks an ending. At Syracuse, our focus must be on what that credential begins. Let me say that again. Our focus must be on what that credential begins.
We are here to produce graduates who carry the habit of inquiry out of these buildings and onto school boards and into courtrooms and laboratories and city halls and to the other ten-thousand ordinary places where the future is actually forged.
And to do that, we must commit to being a place that reflects the full breadth of human experience, because the problems facing this world will not be solved by any one kind of mind. The questions are too large, the stakes are too high, the blind spots of homogeneity too dangerous.
We need every perspective, every background, every way of knowing that we can bring together under our Orange sky.
Given that lofty aspiration, I want to speak specifically with equal directness and respect to the faculty of this university.
You are the living architecture of this place, and I truly believe that. It’s not the buildings. It’s not the rankings. It’s not the strategic plans that chancellors and provosts draft and file and only occasionally fulfill.
You are what Syracuse University actually is, in practice, on any given Tuesday morning.
What happens in your classrooms, your labs, your offices, your creative spaces – those conversations, those challenges, those moments when a student's mind cracks open and something new enters…that is the gold.
And now today, you are being asked to prepare young people for conditions that do not fully exist yet, for problems whose edges are still forming, for a technological and social landscape that may look unrecognizable by the time our freshmen earn their degrees.
I will not pretend that is not genuinely a hard thing to do.
But I want to name something that I believe, and that I think history supports:
The disciplines you represent, the sciences, the humanities, the arts, the professions, the quantitative, the interpretive…they are not made obsolete by a changing world. They are actually vindicated by it.
The faster the world moves, the more essential it becomes for us to understand where we’ve been.
The more complex the ethical terrain, the more urgent the habit of moral reasoning.
The more noise in the information environment, the more valuable the capacity to distinguish signal from static.
Your obligation, then, is not to chase the present and every passing disruption. Instead, your obligation is to hold the line on rigor when rigor is inconvenient. It is to insist on nuance when the culture rewards simplicity.
To do that is the highest form of service to this institution. It is, in fact, one of the highest forms of service a person can render because it is uncommon, and because it is contagious.
That obligation, however, comes with a caution.
That caution is to remind you that your students will learn not only from what you teach, but they’ll learn from how you teach. They will learn from whether you show up with curiosity, or simply with the answers. They’ll learn from whether you treat your own uncertainty as a liability, or as an honest feature of intellectual life worthy of display.
And for that reason, I want to ask one more thing of you, something that for some of you, you might find uncomfortable, and potentially humbling.
The challenges of this Age of Acceleration will not respect disciplinary boundaries. They demand collaboration between people who do not always share a vocabulary, let alone an ideology.
So, I am asking you, as a faculty, to be willing to reach across those boundaries and differences with generosity and with grace and with civility.
I’m asking you to see the colleague in the next building not as a competitor for resources or recognition or a point of view, but as someone whose way of knowing for them is as valid as your own. And I ask this because the students who will do good in the world will be those who can think and engage across those lines and boundaries and ideologies. Make no mistake, that capacity is taught, in part, by watching whether or not their professors can do it too.
And finally, my last request: Believe in the students in front of you.
Believe in them not in a sentimental way, but in a demanding way, in a way that genuine belief requires.
Hold them to standards that honor their potential. Refuse, on their behalf, the soft comfort of lowered expectations.
The world they are walking into will not be gentle with them. The greatest act of care we can offer is to prepare them honestly for that reality, so they leave here with the conviction that they are equal to the work ahead.
Finally, I want to say something equally direct to the students that are here today, and to those students who will arrive in the years to come.
You are inheriting a world that is harder than it should be.
The challenges arrayed before you and your generation are formidable, and they’re arguably unprecedented. It would neither be honest nor kind for me to pretend otherwise.
But I see you. I’ve walked with you on this campus. We’ve shared meals in dining halls and at Schine. I’ve sat in your classrooms.
I am not afraid for you. I am in awe of you.
You are people who are not waiting to shape the world. You’re already those people.
So here is my ask of you. Do not mistake this university as a shelter from the work that you’re inheriting. Use this place. Use this place as a proving ground for that world.
Take the class that unsettles and challenges what you may think you already know. Sit in a room with a person who sees it differently than you do. Choose the harder argument over the comfortable applause line. And recognize that doing all of that is not extra credit. That is actually the real work. Every respectful conversation that you have with someone who has a view different from your own, every project that you undertake that reaches beyond the boundaries of your own certainty, every moment you choose rigorous engagement over comfortable dismissal, every time you extend a hand to someone struggling – those are the kind of ripples that Kennedy spoke of 60 years ago.
Small, perhaps. Maybe even invisible in isolation. But they cross, Kennedy told us, and I believe him.
They cross and they build and they become currents. And currents move things.
In the years ahead, this university will face choices.
Choices about where we invest and grow and what we let diminish. About whom we welcome and how hard we work to keep them. About whether we have the courage to ask, again and again, whether we are doing enough and then do more.
I do not stand here with all the answers. But I do stand here with a promise:
We will ask the right questions, together, with honesty and without fear. We will not mistake comfort for excellence. We will not mistake tradition for wisdom. We will not mistake the way things have been for the way things must remain.
Instead, we will engage the world as it is, in all its speed and strangeness and moral complexity. And we’ll do that knowing that is the only honest starting point. And because we understand that, engaging what unsettles us is not capitulation, but instead, it is the precondition for transformation.
You cannot shape what you’re not willing to touch.
And we’ll do all this because we know one thing for sure. We know that each time one of our graduates goes out into the world and acts with courage and knowledge and care and clarity, they send forth a ripple.
And at our best, Syracuse University is where those ripples begin.
For me, there is no more important work in the world than that, and there is nowhere I would rather do that work than here, with all of you, in this city, at this hour.
Thank you for the honor of a lifetime. Go Orange!
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