Summary
Chancellor Mnookin's remarks to graduates at the 2025 Winter Commencement ceremony.
University of Wisconsin–Madison
December 14, 2025
Thank you, Provost Zumbrunnen and good morning, everyone! Will you all join me in another huge round of applause for the amazing Class of 2025?
And how about a little more love and appreciation for the people who have helped you reach this day: Proud families and friends from across the country and around the world — here in person or virtually — thank you!
And to the faculty and staff, for the years of support, dedication (and occasional, or perhaps not so occasional, constructive critique) they have given to bring these graduates to this moment — let’s give them a round of applause, too.
There is another group I especially want to thank. If you are a Wisconsin resident and taxpayer, please stand up. We are proud to be a public university, and the taxpayers of the great state of Wisconsin have helped supported this great university for 177 years. Thank you for your investment in this state and in UW–Madison — please make some noise!
This day is also bittersweet for those of you who are missing people whose love and support helped bring you to this place — including our beloved Dean Emerit Linda Scott of the School of Nursing, who passed away just last month.
I also want to acknowledge the terrible shootings at Brown University just yesterday, and in Australia. I want us to take a moment to recognize all of those who we have lost too soon, even as we celebrate our graduates.
There are two groups of people here today for whom I’d like to ask special recognition.
If you are part of the first generation in your family to go to college or graduate school, please stand as you’re able and make some noise. Congratulations!
If you are a veteran or serving on active duty or in the Reserves — family and friends, I’m talking to you, too — please stand as you are able so that we may thank you for service.
Thank you all.
Two stories
Graduates, you are entering into a world defined by uncertainty and change. We have the disruption of AI … economic instability … political fractures and polarization … and the pace of change can be dizzying or even overwhelming.
To be able to meet disruption with confidence and curiosity, rather than fear and self-doubt, is an absolutely critical life skill.
I don’t have a plug-and-play formula to make coping with challenge and change any easier. What I do have are two stories from my own life about the things I have found essential to navigating through disruption and change. And I want to share those with you today.
The first is about a connection to ideas, and the second is about a connection to people.
A connection to ideas
One of the most compelling ideas I’ve found came from a classic book I first read as an undergraduate and re-read in graduate school called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Maybe some of you know it.
You know that “mind-blown” emoji? That’s how this book hit me.
Kuhn was writing about science, and about how our ideas about what’s true and known about the natural world can change dramatically. He rejected the idea that scientific knowledge always progresses in a linear, orderly fashion. Instead, he thought we tended to have periods of what he called “normal science,” and then periods of uncomfortable disruption, what he called paradigm shifts, when a very different understanding could take hold. Like when the Ptolemaic idea that the earth was at the center of all things got replaced by Copernicus’s theory that the sun was at the center of our solar system. Or when Einstein’s theory of relativity came along.
But there’s a point here, I think, that goes way beyond science and scientific change. Kuhn wrote that the moment when we are forced to abandon familiar models — the moment when the unpredictable and unexpected come crashing through and change everything we thought we knew — can also be the moment when transformative change becomes possible. That’s our invitation to start seeing something in an entirely new way. As he puts it:
It is as if [you’d] been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well.
Maybe you’ve had that feeling at times when things seem unsettled and even chaotic. There’s an insight here that goes way beyond the history of science, one that I remind myself of not infrequently: that in moments of disruption there can be extraordinary opportunity.
Your career plans may change. You may discover that the skills you thought would be not-super-necessary are absolutely essential … and that the ones you thought would be essential are not super necessary.
You may discover that moving away is no longer in the cards right now … or that a move is exactly what needs to happen.
So hold your assumptions lightly. Pay attention to the opportunities that the unexpected can sweep in. And keep your family and friends close.
They’re the signal through the noise.
Which brings me to my second story, about connection to people.
A connection to people
I’m here to tell you that your life probably won’t unfold in exactly the ways that you expect it to. There will be wonderful surprises along the way, joys and opportunities you can’t even quite imagine. And there will almost certainly also be disappointments and difficult moments. The relationships and friendships you have made in your time here can be a source of continued meaning in the years ahead, and a source of comfort in the face of challenge.
I graduated from college a long time ago — a very long time ago — more than 35 years ago. And candidly, I barely remember my own commencement ceremony. But some of the people I got to know then, some of my college friends, remain incredibly important in my life all these decades later. Here’s a picture of two of my very best friends and roommates in college. I met one of them, Maia, in the first week of freshman year, and the other, Judith, about a year later.
Our lives, now, have gone in very different directions. We live thousands of miles apart. And over the decades, the frequency of our contact has ebbed and flowed. There were times — years even — when our lives got so busy and disjointed that we were barely in touch with one another at all. But we all realized that our core connection to one another is both unbreakable and important to us. Now we take a trip together every year, spending a long weekend catching up on our lives, connecting with one another, having new experiences and creating new memories together. And I know that if at any moment I really needed something, they would absolutely, unquestioningly be there for me, and I for them.
Friends don’t prevent the storm from rolling in, but they anchor us through it. They comfort us … they challenge our assumptions … they offer fresh perspectives. And they listen patiently to our not-fully-baked ideas over jumbo orders of deep-fried cheese curds or on quiet walks along the Lakeshore Path at dusk, or maybe decades in the future, in places we haven’t yet been.
Our student speaker Jeeva Premkumar has a story to share along those lines in just a few minutes.
Some of you met those friends here right off the bat. And some of you will discover deeper friendships when life brings you back together with people you met here but didn’t get to know as well. So my advice to you is to hold on to these connections — and when they might ebb and flow over time and distance, remember that rekindling or deepening them as time passes will enrich your lives.
Conclusion
I hope that you have found at UW–Madison an idea or two that you’ll return to again and again, that will help you move through a world whose roads are sometimes straight and true and sometimes zig and zag.
I hope you have learned to see and embrace the new worlds of possibility that can emerge when the unexpected comes along and shuffles the deck.
And I hope you hold onto your deep connections with the people you have laughed and cried with here. The people who will be there in good times and bad, who will help remind you that when life feels like you’ve suddenly been transported to another planet where things don’t look quite like you expected them to — that’s a gift.
It’s your invitation to create something wonderfully new.
For some of you, the next step in your journey will take you away from Madison. But rest assured that no matter how far you travel, Madison will always welcome you home, and you will forever share an identity as Badgers.
Class of 2025, congratulations and on, Wisconsin!