Summary
Chancellor Mnookin's remarks to incoming students at fall convocation.
University of Wisconsin–Madison
September 2, 2025
Thank you, Provost Zumbrunnen, and hello, new Badgers! I am delighted to welcome you to one of greatest universities in the world — the University of Wisconsin–Madison!
Students, you are a very accomplished group! Among you are:
- National Merit Scholars and high school valedictorians
- Eagle Scouts
- Debate champions
- And winners of major national research competitions.
And so much more. You’re:
- Standout athletes
- Talented musicians
- Community volunteers
And I’m just scratching the surface. Every one of you deserves to be here and belongs here.
Over the next weeks and months, you will get to know so many new people, so here’s my advice:
Go beyond a smile, a nod, or a “hey.” Ask questions. See if you can find the classmate who started a successful business in high school … or the classmate who organizes registration drives for organ donors … or the classmate who rehabilitates injured animals … or classmates who serve in the U.S. military.
All are here with you today. So dig a little bit beneath the surface and find out something that matters.
New students by the numbers
Let me tell you a little more about yourselves:
- There are nearly 10,000 of you joining our university this year — and 1,200 transfer students (let’s hear from you!). We also have about 8,500 freshmen (freshmen, make some noise!).
- We selected each of you from a record 74,000 applicants. You can be really proud that you were admitted in one the most competitive years in our history.
- We’re still finalizing numbers, but it looks like this year’s freshman class (for the first time since I became chancellor) represents all 50 U.S. states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.!
- I want to hear from you if you’re from one of the biggest states outside of Wisconsin represented in this class:
- #5 and #4 go together — the tri-state area — New Jersey & New York (and let’s not leave out Connecticut), where are you?
- #3 — Minnesota — let’s hear it!
- #2 — California — make some noise!
- #1 — you know who you are — Illinois, where are you? Congrats!
- We also have international students from around 50 different nations all around the globe — students, let’s hear it for our international Badgers!
- OK, Wisconsin — are you ready? If you’re from the great state of Wisconsin, make some noise!
- Welcome, all!
- And here’s something I’m really proud of: This freshman class includes more students who are in the first generation in their family to go to college than we’ve ever seen. If you are a member of the first generation of your family to attend college, please rise as you’re able — let’s hear it for them!
Pin & Selfie
Do you all have a pin that says “Badger 2025”? This is a brand-new tradition, and it’s special for Convocation — being right here, right now, is the only way you can get one, so I’d like to ask you to take a moment to put it on and then I want a selfie with all of you. Ready? (takes selfie with students)
Your first official UW portrait! I’ll post it on Instagram if you want to follow me there @UWChancellor.
Value and values
Tomorrow you will begin your first classes. As you do that, I want you to keep one important thing in mind:
Your education is in your hands.
For most of you, graduation day is about four years away. That’s 1,461 days. That’s quite a few days, but it will also go by in a flash. And what you do with those days will help chart a course for your life.
We’ll be here to help and support you, but it’s up to you to decide what you’ll do with this amazing opportunity. The ways you choose get involved. The deep friendships that you’ll make. The academic risks you take, the challenges you rise to, and the acts of kindness that you choose.
The math is pretty simple: The more you invest in your learning, and in your overall experience here at UW–Madison, the more value your education will have.
Pluralism
We want you to ask bold questions. We want you think deeply about ideas. And we want you to feel empowered to both agree and disagree with one another, and with your professors and with me.
And when you have strong views, we want you to disagree with respect for our common humanity. I would ask you to start out with curiosity and generosity rather than condemnation and judgment.
That’s true for the small stuff — like when you’re debating the relative importance of the engagement news about your favorite English teacher and your favorite gym teacher.
But it’s equally true for the bigger, harder conversations. There will likely even be days when the discussions you’ll have won’t feel super comfortable. But by engaging with a great diversity of ideas, you will learn something about yourself, and you’ll emerge with a stronger, deeper sense of what drives you, and what you believe and why.
This is part of the process you heard the provost call “sifting and winnowing” — it’s how new insights and discoveries come to life.
One essential ingredient in this process is pluralism — that’s a word you’ll probably hear a lot this year. It means we bring together people with many different backgrounds and points of view and identities (in other words, all of you) to discuss and debate ideas. You will learn from each other, from those similar to you and equally, you will learn from your differences.
Learning from one another will enrich you, and it will also connect you — to one another, and to the broader world. It will ground you in our community, and it will also let you soar. When you step into the unknown, when you take a chance on a hard conversation with empathy and civility, when you open yourself up to others, and when you embrace the unexpected, you just might find that you discover a new intellectual passion or make a lifelong friend.
Outstanding faculty
And, in your time here, you will have an opportunity to work with some of the top scholars in the world.
Slide: Prof. Oyola-Merced with students
People like Professor Mayra Oyola-Merced, who came to us from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and who is a much-beloved mentor to our undergraduates. She’s working on ways to improve how we predict severe weather — building on our long tradition of excellence as the birthplace of weather satellite technology.
Slide: Prof. Chevrette with headphones
People like Professor Marc Chevrette, who started here just this month with all of you. The undergraduates in his lab listen in on the chemical conversations between bacteria to help search for new antibiotics in some really unlikely places like the microbiomes (i.e., guts) of frogs, snakes, insects, and even freshwater sponges.
Slide: Bad Bunny & Prof. Melendez-Badillo
Or if you’re interested in history, you could take a class with Professor Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a Latin American and Caribbean history scholar who collaborated with Bad Bunny on his latest album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” [translation: I should have taken more photos] to create a narrative to accompany songs that celebrate Puerto Rican history and culture.
These are just three of the more than 2,000 renowned scholars on our faculty. All of them are eager to welcome you here!
Go Big Read
I got to talk to a few of your parents last week at move-in and several of them who were, themselves, students here back in … the late 1900s … said this place feels even bigger than it did then, and they’re right: We’ve grown!
You’ve heard about the ways we make the campus feel smaller and help you find your place here — but there’s one campuswide event that we make as big as possible. It’s a university-wide book club called Go Big Read.
This year it’ll bring all of us together to read and talk about an incredible new book called James: A Novel by Percival Everett that reimagines Mark Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, who was the enslaved man who escaped and accompanied Huck down the Mississippi River on a raft.
It’s a bestseller and winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it invites us to think about how the assumptions people make about us (and our assumptions about others) affect our lives. And how there are many ways of seeing, and being in, the world. You’ll receive a free copy on your way out today.
Many of our professors will incorporate the book into their classes, and the author will come and visit us and spend a day on campus engaging in conversations and giving a talk. I hope you’ll join us for that.
Conclusion
You are joining a university that produces Nobel laureates and Pulitzer prizewinners. Best-selling authors, star athletes, leaders of non-profits, and people who create meaningful and beautiful works of art, and so much more.
And this is also a place that’s pretty proud of its inspired goofiness. We plant pink flamingoes all over Bascom Hill and Jump Around and put a giant Statue of Liberty head on ice-covered Lake Mendota in the middle of winter.
You, today, are joining this wonderful community, and we are all stronger for your presence here.
From this moment on, you share a common identity as Badgers that I hope you’ll proudly claim for the rest of your lives.
And so a very, very warm welcome to every one of you! We are so happy that you are here.
Babcock & Bucky
To conclude our time together, we’re going to celebrate with one time-honored Badger tradition, and then invite you to join us for a second. The first is (of course) singing Varsity together and the second is (of course) Babcock ice cream.
We can’t do both at once, it doesn’t work so well, so we’ll sing here and then eat ice cream — courtesy of the Wisconsin Alumni Association — right next to Memorial Union at Alumni Park.
So thank you all for being here. Now please join me in welcoming one very special Badger … and On, Wisconsin!
(Bucky enters)