(Video transcript)
Good morning, and welcome new students, families, faculty, and friends. Welcome to Syracuse University. Whether you traveled two miles or two continents to join us here in this wonderful Dome, we are glad you're here!
To our new students, I want to start with something you and I have in common.
You are new to Syracuse. And while Syracuse University has been my home and my identity for nearly 20 years, in ways that matter I am new as well. This is my first convocation as Chancellor, which means that you and I, we are beginning this journey together.
We are both, this morning, brand new. I intend to treat that fact as an asset for both of us, and I'd ask you to do the same.
New beginnings have a way of pulling us toward comfort. Pulling us toward wanting some assurance that the unfamiliar will quickly become familiar, and that the road ahead will smooth itself out.
I certainly feel that pull too, in my new role. But today, of all days, I want to resist it, and I want to ask you to resist it with me.
There is a temptation, well-intentioned but, I believe, misguided, to think that a university's highest calling is to make our students feel safe from the world's hard edges. I reject that notion entirely. I feel strongly that Syracuse University’s greatest obligation to our students is far greater, and far more demanding than that.
The world our students will inherit is not a seminar where every voice is equally weighted and every outcome is fair. The world that our students will inherit is contested, is contradictory, and at times is profoundly unjust. When our students leave here, they will encounter ideas that unsettle them, leaders who disappoint them, and problems that will resist every elegant solution learned in the classroom.
No curriculum can sanitize that reality, nor should it be our objective to try.
What Syracuse can do — and what as Chancellor, I will insist we do — is to send our students out into that world with their eyes open and their spines straight.
At Syracuse, our obligation is to arm our students with the tools to think clearly under pressure, to lead with conviction while remaining open to the fact that they may be wrong, and to act with purpose even when the path is anything but clear.
Students are not at Syracuse to be shielded. They are here to be prepared. There is a profound difference between those two things.
The most important education our students will receive will not come from a moment of comfort. Comfort is a form of theft. It steals the very friction that makes you strong and makes you resilient. Look at anyone you admire. Somewhere in their story is a season of disappointment, a failure, a challenge not met, a year that did not go the way they planned. That experience was not incidental to who they became because no one leads from a place where they’ve not been tested.
You will become here because of those moments when you are challenged and uncomfortable - challenged ethically, challenged intellectually, and challenged personally, And we will know, as an institution, that we’ve been successful when in the face of those challenges, our graduates choose not to retreat. Instead, they choose to engage.
In a small but meaningful way, I saw that spirit in action this summer, when I had the chance to meet Ethan, one of your new student orientation leaders.
Ethan is a dual major in business and communications. When I asked him about the classes he’s taking this year, he told me he's enrolled in a course where he'll learn to sing and play the guitar. That’s clearly not a class he needs for either of his majors, so I asked him why he was taking it.
Ethan told me he wanted to force himself out of his comfort zone, to experience something that actually intimidates him.
New students: Be like Ethan. Be like Ethan because discomfort is where character is built. Discomfort is where leaders are made.
All this is to say that my promise to our new students, and your families, is not that your time here will be easy. My promise is that it will be worth it. It will be worth it because Syracuse University will prepare you not merely to engage and navigate the world as it is, but we’ll cultivate in you the courage and the resolve and the resilience and the capability, to change it.
So here is the theme I want you to take away from this moment: This convocation is not, as you often hear described at events like this, the start of the next chapter of your life. What it actually is, is the start of your sole authorship of that next chapter.
Because up to now, most of your big decisions had co-authors, and they were parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and coaches. That's not a criticism. That's what childhood is all about.
But starting today, you hold the pen. What you study, the friends you choose, what you stay up too late at night arguing about, the kind of person you are when no one from home is watching – those are all now your stories to write.
That's disorienting. It's supposed to be. That’s the whole point.
I'll admit, I'm holding a new pen of my own this year. Being Chancellor is its own blank page, and I don't know yet exactly how my chapter here will read either.
But, what I do know is this: shared uncertainty, met with resolve instead of dread, is how strong institutions and strong people are built. So, we might as well write boldly, together.
Now, I would be doing you a disservice if I made that sound simple. You are stepping into a world that is changing faster than any incoming class before you.
The jobs many of you will eventually hold don't fully exist yet. The tools you'll use to think, to research, and to create – they’re still being written here. Some of those same tools will be obsolete by the time you graduate. That can sound frightening, and honestly, some days it should.
But I'd offer this to reframe that narrative: No university with weight and impact should be in the business of handing you a fixed body of facts to memorize and carry out the door. Instead, we must be in the business of building your capacity to keep learning when the facts change. That is precisely what a Syracuse University education, at its best, is built for.
The specific tools will shift, but your ability to ask a sharp question, to sit with a hard problem, to work alongside people who see the world differently than you do, that's an enduring skill and an invaluable asset. Build that here. And I’ll say that again: Build that here. If you do, I promise you'll be ready for a world we can't even describe to you yet.
Now, to the parents and families up on level two.
You did the hardest and best part already. You raised someone capable of sitting in this dome today, ready to do this. What I'd ask of you now is something that sounds smaller but I think is genuinely harder: practice letting go, on purpose, a little at a time.
That doesn't mean disappearing. It means shifting jobs, from being the person who solves the problem to being the person your student calls after they've already tried to solve it themselves. Shift from managing their days to trusting the systems and the people here to help manage them while you’re at a distance.
The instinct to swoop in when they call homesick, or overwhelmed, or discouraged, that instinct will be strong. For them, resist swooping.
Ask questions instead. Let them find the answers, even when you already know what it is. That restraint, offered with love, is one of the most generous things you can do for them this year.
Thank you for trusting us, and trusting them, with what comes next. You have done your part exceptionally well. The rest of the story is theirs to write. Our job, together, is to help them write it well.
Students, claim this moment fully. Ask hard questions. Be like Ethan and take the course that scares you. Choose to engage rather than retreat, until it isn't effort anymore, and it’s simply who you are.
Let’s begin all that together. Congratulations and Go Orange!