Summary
Chancellor Mnookin's remarks to graduates at the Spring 2025 Doctoral, MFA, and Professional Degree Commencement Ceremony.
University of Wisconsin–Madison
May 9, 2025
Thank you, Provost Isbell and good evening, everyone. Welcome to the 172nd spring commencement of the University of Wisconsin–Madison!
Congratulations, graduates!
And let me add my personal welcome and thank you to the proud families and friends joining us from across the country and around the world — whether in person or virtually.
Graduates, let’s give them a round of applause!
For a number of you, there are also friends, colleagues, and family members you are missing today, whose love and support helped bring you to this place. We remember them as well.
Acknowledgments
If friends and family helped make this long journey possible, there is another group that made it incredibly worthwhile. The members of our faculty and staff whose support (and occasional, or even rather frequent, critique) helped you to meet the level of excellence required for a UW–Madison graduate degree.
Faculty and staff, will you please stand as you are able? Let’s give them a round of applause!
I want to call upon two groups of people for special recognition.
If you are receiving a graduate degree today as a member of the first generation in your family to go to college or earn an advanced degree, please stand as you are 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.
Some of you know that the Air Force ROTC just celebrated 75 years on our campus, and I want to make special note of one outstanding graduate from that program:
Lt. Col. Daniel Jackson is an Air Force pilot and historian who’s deployed nine times and has flown more than 1,000 combat hours. His research has helped to locate two U.S. aircraft missing in action since 1944, and his team is now in the process of recovering and returning remains to families that have waited 80 years for answers.
Today Lt. Col. Jackson earns a PhD in history, but Air Force duty called so he could not be here — let’s give him a long-distance round of applause. Dan, thank you for your service and congratulations!
Excellence and goodness
Graduates, you are here because you have completed an advanced degree. And every one of you has, I suspect, teachers who have deeply influenced you along the way. You will remember some of these teachers for many years. Sometimes you will realize only far into the future precisely how, and how much, they’ve touched or influenced you.
For me, one of those teachers is a man named Guido Calabresi. A law professor and eminent scholar, and then a dean, and later a distinguished judge.
He taught me in a required course in my first year of law school, and he was my own law school dean. I enjoyed his class, and learned a lot, but it was only many years later, when I became a law school dean myself, that I fully appreciated his leadership in that role.
Recently, Judge Calabresi, now in his 90s, made this observation about universities:
“A great place that trains leaders must train people who are not just excellent, but loving, kind, humane, and good.”
Now, this may not be an entirely new take on the role of universities. After all, Plato spoke about the character-building role of education more than 2,000 years ago. And Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1947:
“We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.”
But still, I think it’s an especially relevant observation in this moment. So, I want to speak to you today about not just excellence, but the extraordinarily powerful combination of excellence AND goodness.
You are stepping forward into a world marked by complexity and change, which are as old as civilization itself. But the pace of change continues to accelerate.
Within this acceleration there are immense challenges. Challenges to how we work … how we govern … how we educate … even how we relate to one another.
Yet, alongside change — and the stress and uncertainty it generates — there are equally extraordinary opportunities for innovation … for contribution … and — perhaps most importantly — for connection.
A generosity of presence
The poet David Whyte has written about what he calls a generosity of presence. This phrase has been on my mind this spring, because it speaks both to what universities like this one are uniquely able to cultivate and to what I believe our nation and the world very much need in this moment.
To build authentic connection to others requires a generosity of presence. A willingness to listen with the generosity and authenticity that creates the possibility of adjusting your own view, or someone else’s view, of an issue … but even more importantly, it creates the possibility of changing our views of each other.
That is the best way — indeed, perhaps the only way — to move forward at a time when building walls can feel a whole lot easier than building bridges.
I know many of you have felt that over the last few months.
On a campus that has welcomed students from around the world since our very first class in 1848 — and that takes great pride in the number of global leaders with UW–Madison degrees — we have had international students and new alumni, including some of you here today, living with concerns about the stability of their lives here.
And simultaneously, the future of the compact between universities like ours and the federal government to conduct scientific research is now in more doubt than it has ever been since its creation after WWII.
This too has, or threatens to have, an impact on a great many of you, especially those of you who may be looking to continue teaching or conducting research within universities.
It may mean fewer graduate students trained, or fewer postdoc or faculty positions. Fewer discoveries made. Fewer clinical trials leading to treatments and cures for diseases. And fewer university innovations spinning off into companies that create jobs and drive the economy.
To be sure, cuts to funding for research are not new — they’ve happened under Democrats, and they’ve happened under Republicans.
And a questioning of faith in democracy, something that we are certainly seeing now, is not particularly new either. That’s been building since you were children.
Seventy percent of the generation born before WWII considered it essential to live in a democracy. Fewer than thirty percent of Millennials and Gen Z-ers do today.
In short, this is a world that badly needs your intelligence, expertise, skills and talents, AND your generosity of presence. Because no matter what your background or beliefs, or political persuasion, you are graduating into a world that urgently needs not just your excellence, but also your goodness.
Character and pluralism
One of the things I admire about Judge Calabresi, my former teacher, is his equally deep commitment to ideas and to people. We need people equally committed to both, and as advanced degree graduates of UW–Madison, you have the training and experiences for precisely that.
We need people who can juggle opposing ideas, and people willing to challenge their own strongly held beliefs and assumptions, and to do it in a way that connects with others.
We need people who can discuss a polarizing issue with someone on the opposite side without needing to prove the other person entirely wrong. And people who understand that you can work together productively on something important without having to agree on everything important.
And let me be clear: This is not to say that all beliefs are equally valid. Truth, and rigorous engagement with evidence, matters, and matters greatly. (For me that’s foundational — after all, I’m a law professor and an evidence scholar!)
But we will not reach a place where we can engage with those different from us without a genuine, and generous, effort to understand their worldview. For a diverse democracy to flourish, and for the best new ideas, innovations, and inventions to emerge, we need to be able to work together, even when we don’t entirely agree.
You are ready for that. You have worked hard. You have debated. You have collaborated. You have had classmates from all over the globe, with a plethora of backgrounds, identities, and beliefs. You have learned from one another with generosity of presence, and you have shown us both your excellence and your goodness.
I’m pleased to say that the individuals we’ve selected to receive honorary doctoral degrees today — one a Democrat and one a Republican — are also living exemplars of this creed.
Donna Shalala and Jim Sensenbrenner credit some of their most important accomplishments to their ability to reach across the political aisle, or to connect with those different from themselves.
That is worth celebrating. And it’s also worth celebrating that universities like ours are one of the few places on earth where people of such different disciplines and different perspectives — people from small rural towns and major cities, of different races and genders and beliefs, come together in an intentional way.
To paraphrase Walt Whitman: We contain multitudes.
People like Shane Hoffman, who grew up in rural Wisconsin, a hunter and snowmobiler … and now a doctor.
Today Shane becomes the first person to graduate from the new accelerated program at our School of Medicine & Public Health aimed at addressing the dire need for physicians in rural areas. The new curriculum is condensed, streamlined, and focused on training physicians to work in rural areas of Wisconsin that are underserved.
Shane, where are you? Thank you and congratulations!
And Chris Caldwell, who today receives a PhD from the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. As a proud member of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin and president of the College of Menominee Nation, Chris added an important perspective to our work on climate change and sustainability.
President Caldwell, where are you? Congratulations!
As you head off into your next chapter, it may sometimes feel far easier and more comfortable to retreat into your bubble. I urge you not to do that. And I urge you to be wary of the easy acceptance of indifference and even cruelty toward people who are different from you.
Conclusion
The sociologist Eboo Patel, the founder of Interfaith America, who visited our campus earlier this spring, wrote this:
“Let’s think of America not as a battlefield where we defeat our fellow citizens, but instead as a potluck supper where we invite everyone’s contribution.”
That can be cacophonous at times, but it’s also necessary for the kind of sifting and winnowing that sparks new ways of thinking about problems.
And it works best when we cultivate a generosity of presence so we can live together with mutual respect even when we disagree.
So: Let us be united in holding fast to our dual commitments to excellence and goodness, just as my old teacher, Guido Calabresi, recommended.
Let us be generous about ideas, and generous with each other. And if you do that — and you are so very well prepared to do exactly that — I know that you will be entirely capable of navigating whatever challenges lie ahead. Go forth and build on all you have already achieved, and know that we, here at UW–Madison, will continue to cheer you on at every step.
Congratulations, graduates … and On, Wisconsin!