The scheduling of Vice President Mike Pence as the Pope-Shade Lecturer in February 2026 has begun to elicit internet protestations that reveal a number of commendable passions and some misunderstandings about the roles and processes of campus speakers.

An invitation to speak on campus is not an endorsement of that speaker by the University. With the exception of the commencement speaker, whom I select, guest lecturers and performers are selected by faculty/staff committees or academic departments. The senior leadership does not influence those decisions, but we strive to provide institutional support to assure these events are as successful as possible.

Tuition dollars are not used to support lectures or cultural events. The Student Government Association (SGA) allocates some student-activity funds to support their campus events, but the remainder of the speakers and performers who visit our campus are funded through endowments or other gifts.

As a living-learning community, we can’t become an echo chamber. We need to hear voices with which we disagree to broaden our world views and to sharpen our own perspectives and arguments.

As I said at this year’s opening convocation:

We have to be willing to ask difficult questions, we need to listen to countervailing voices and consider different perspectives, and we need to realize that we are not always right.

To do the right thing, we must also acknowledge that a legitimate, healthy diversity of ideas does not mean that every position or conclusion deserves equal billing or any billing at all.

This is the foundation of the academy: we observe, we hypothesize, we research, we experiment, and we subject our conclusions to repeated peer review. The Latin word for science, scientia means knowledge, those things we know through testing and review.

Scientia is knowing what is, and what is not. Anyone has the right to believe the sun revolves around the earth, but as a community of scholars, we should and do reject that uninformed view, but wholesale rejection of ideas because we don’t like them undermines academic freedom and threatens society.

During the past 8-plus years, we have hosted a wide range of speakers. A few were truly inspiring, most were meaningful and informative, a handful were disappointing. I agreed with many, wrestled with many more, and was offended by a handful. That’s how it should be. We almost always learn more from those whose views differ from our own. It is how we stretch our worldview and/or strengthen our resolve. That is the nature of an academic community.

In the 1980s, Senator Jesse Helms led an attack on the National Endowment of the Arts, noting that throughout its then 20-plus-year history, out of tens of thousands of sponsored projects, fourteen had sparked controversy. I penned an op-ed at the time bemoaning how few controversies there had been. Arts (and speakers) are supposed to make us challenge or affirm our beliefs and our boundaries.

The committees that assemble Susquehanna’s offerings each year reflect on what we have seen and heard over the previous few years, and they think about what we will learn individually and collectively from the visitors they bring to campus. When they have done their job well, some of us may be thrilled, some may be outraged, and all of us should become a little wiser.

This letter ran in today’s Daily Item (our local paper).

As we welcome thousands of college students back to the Susquehanna Valley, it is a good time to reflect on the ways our higher-education institutions and our communities make each other stronger.

Students on our campuses benefit from experiential learning opportunities throughout the region including internships, service-learning projects, and research in support of public and private entities ranging from environmental analyses to business feasibility studies. Many of them also work in our surrounding communities.

Students and their families patronize local retailers, restaurants, and hotels. These offerings make our campuses more attractive destinations, and many of our neighboring businesses thrive because of the patronage associated with our campus communities.

Higher education is the 5^th largest sector of Pennsylvania’s economy. The Commonwealth is the number 2 importer of college students in the country, and the educational offerings across the state are among the most diverse and best in the nation.

Pennsylvania boasts the state-owned PASSHE system, the state-affiliated institutions (Penn State, Pitt, etc.), numerous community colleges, and arguably the most impressive collection of independent (private) colleges and universities in the U.S.

The role of independent higher education in Pennsylvania is unique. These institutions educate 53% of all 4-year degree-seeking students in PA, 46% of all Pell recipients, 52% of all working-age adult students, and 55% of all minority students. They educate 69% of our nurses, 45% of our teachers, and provide 58% of the STEM degrees in the state.

This summer, AICUP (The Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Pennsylvania) released a new economic impact study assessing the financial benefits the independent higher education sector has on the Commonwealth.

This report, independently prepared by the Parker Strategy Group, shows that these 80+ schools have an annual economic impact of $29 billion, which includes $1.5 billion in generated state and local taxes, $5.3 billion in annual student spending, and over 195,000 jobs being supported and sustained throughout the state.

In our own back yard, the AICUP schools are Bucknell, Lycoming, and Susquehanna. Through direct spending and that of our employees and students, these three institutions have an economic impact of over $755 million, and they generate over $38 million in state and local tax revenue each year. We all benefit.

As a university leader, I am so grateful for the support and partnerships of our surrounding community, and we should all be grateful when each new school year begins.

Jonathan D. Green, President, Susquehanna University

These are the remarks I shared at our 168^th Opening Convocation today.

Convocation means to be called together – from vocare meaning voice or calling. We are called together to signal your entry into the life of this university and to celebrate the beginning of your matriculation. It is an opportunity to declare a new beginning and to be drawn together with one voice to affirm what we are called to do.

Students, you are beginning an extraordinary chapter in your lives, but in addition to your excitement, I know you are experiencing cognitive overload. This is a moment in your lives when you are likely experiencing the most concurrent change: a new community; a new role; soon to be new classmates, neighbors, and friends; will they like you, will you like them; a new academic experience with a different kind of faculty (you’ll soon discover how great they are), and a different set of academic responsibilities. For most of you, for the first time, home has just become a place different from where your family lives.

Right now, most of you are on auto-pilot. That’s normal, and it’s okay, but I want to take a few minutes to challenge you to make the most of this opportunity and to affirm why you made such a good choice in coming to Susquehanna.

Many of you chose Susquehanna because we had a major that you believe equates with a job you think you want right now, or at least you did 6 months ago. For many of you, that will change, and that’s a good thing. We will help you to develop your sense of vocation — what can you do that will be most personally rewarding? What will bring you the most meaning?

Many of you chose Susquehanna because you believe you can develop the skills and knowledge to be successful in professional life. That is a fundamental strength of this university, but we will also help you to cultivate much broader skills and perspectives.

And, many more of you chose Susquehanna because we made it financially possible for you to be here. We were founded to provide an education to meritorious students many of whose families could not afford a 19^th-century college degree. Today, we are all able to be here because of extraordinary philanthropic generosity that has created this beautiful campus, expanded our offerings, and has continued to grow scholarship support over the past 167 years.

Many of those gifts came from individuals who would never meet you, but who believed deeply in the promise that you would bring to this great university.

At this moment there is a lot of enflamed rhetoric swirling around higher education, and many of the long-held values of Susquehanna and our sister institutions are being aggressively challenged.

• Some believe that a college education should be nothing but job training – that would be an immense loss. But parents, don’t worry, according to the Georgetown University Center for Educational Statistics, the return on investment of a college degree has never been greater than it is right now, and Susquehanna graduates are among the top 12% of all colleges and universities in the United States for lifetime earnings while enrolling one of the most economically diverse student bodies in the nation.
• Some believe that efforts to strengthen success and a sense of belonging for students with different foundations and experiences is unfair – We all benefit from this work. As Dr. King wrote “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
• Some believe that colleges and universities strive to be places of indoctrination – We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think. A study[1] published this year by the Lumina Foundation and Gallup found that “74% of bachelor’s degree students say their university does an ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ job of promoting free speech, including 73% of Republican students and 75% of Democrat students.”

Students, we are here, faculty, staff, and trustees to help you to become the best citizens, best neighbors, and best people you can become. We are here to help you to develop and expand your personal philosophies, to affirm those things that are most important to you, and to give you the tools to pursue and advocate for them.

That is our mission. Susquehanna University educates students for productive, creative, and reflective lives of achievement, leadership, and service in a diverse, dynamic, and interdependent world.

We are here to help you chart a course to your best life.

Great things, those things that really matter, that give our lives meaning, take a lot of love and a lot of time to make, but it only takes blink of an eye and a moment of neglect for them to fall apart. Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.”[2] We cannot idly turn away, hoping for better times. Love must win, but that demands courage, tenacity, and a deeply seated belief that doing the right thing is always the better choice.

The right thing requires us to explore our richly varied histories and life experiences openly and to recognize our moral obligations to meet each other where we are on the tragically uneven playing fields of our respective lives and to do something about it.

To truly thrive in community, we must be the most generous to those who need the most. We always have the choice to be the Good Samaritan who rescued and cared for the beaten traveler. It is hard, but we must resist the comfort of being the passersby who ignored the victim and much more the temptation to be the robbers who left him for dead.

When Gandhi challenged us to “Be the change we want to see in the world,” he surely intended that change to be for the common good, not personal gain. As scripture says, “For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?”[3]

Doing the right thing, means embracing legitimate science – facts – to drive our decision making.

We have to be willing to ask difficult questions, we need to listen to countervailing voices and consider different perspectives, and we need to realize that we are not always be right.

To do the right thing, we must also acknowledge that a legitimate, healthy diversity of ideas does not mean that every position or conclusion deserves equal billing or any billing at all.

This is the foundation of the academy: we observe, we hypothesize, we research, we experiment, and we subject our conclusions to repeated peer review. The Latin word for science, scientia means knowledge, those things we know through testing and review.

Scientia is knowing what is, and what is not. Anyone has the right to believe the sun revolves around the earth, but as a community of scholars, we should and do reject that uninformed view, but wholesale rejection of ideas because we don’t like them undermines academic freedom and threatens society.

Erasing our history dooms us to repeat the worst of it. Denying global warming doesn’t make it go away, and turning our backs to it -being indifferent – fundamentally diminishes and possibly eradicates our collective future.

This is where sapientia, or wisdom comes in. We need to cultivate our capacity to determine our best course of action, to understand how to apply knowledge, how to support each other, and we need to have the courage to make decisions for the common good, to do the right thing, to be better. This is why we are here.

When the founding fathers extolled the “Pursuit of Happiness” this is what they meant – doing the right thing in support of the flourishing of society. This must be our course if we are to hear the call of truth through the roar of our present discord. It is how we find our better selves. It is what it means to achieve, lead, and serve – to be Susquehannans.

At the laying of the cornerstone of Selinsgrove Hall in 1858, which was the founding of this great university, Joseph Casey stated, “Education, in its legitimate sense, includes not only the cultivation of the mental powers, but the proper training and development of the moral sentiments and faculties, and its true object is to ‘make us not only wiser but better…’”[4]

Today, I invite you to your graduation on May 19^th 2029. Each year, I give this charge to the graduates. Today, I challenge you to commit to doing all you can during your time at Susquehanna to be prepared to meet this charge to your fullest.

Achieve all you can for good,

Lead with honor and humility,

Serve with love and pride,

And always strive to be not only wiser, but better.

Welcome home!

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[1] Beyond the Headlines: The Reality of Free Speech on College Campus

[2] From an interview, with Elie Wiesel, U.S. News & World Report, 27 October 2025.

[3] Matthew 16:26

[4] Joseph Casey, Esq.: “Remarks delivered at the laying of the corner-stone of the Missionary Institute at Selin’s Grove, PA, September 1, 1858.”