These are the remarks I shared at our 168th 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 19th-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 19th 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!
[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.”