- Well, as they say, here we are.
The fall 2020 graduation for Arizona State University.
It's wonderfully exciting to have everyone together here.
I want to welcome all of you, in this virtual environment,
to our virtual format
that we've got going here today.
Sorry that we can't be together.
I really wish that we could
because the energy of the room is just so powerful.
I really like to acknowledge, at the outset
of all of these graduations,
the recognition by our graduates to their families.
And so, if you're with your family sitting
or if you're with your family virtually,
hug them, kiss them.
Say thank you to your friends,
to others that helped you along the way
but also, beyond that,
I also like to recognize
and would normally in the graduation,
recognize all the teachers;
the K-12 teachers,
the community college teachers and instructors
who have really prepared our students
to be able to be here today,
to be able to graduate with us,
to graduate from one of the great universities
in the world, in fact.
And so, we're very excited
that families have given us this opportunity
to educate their family member
and that teachers have prepared our students
to be the great learners
that they really are able to be.
You know, it really is a moment in time here in 2020.
And, by the way, small joke on the side about 2020.
There aren't very many years
where there's two numbers together that are the same.
So, 1010, that was a long time ago.
And, I think that was a very unusual year.
And, 2020, two numbers together,
that's been a very unusual year
and we'll get through it.
And then, the next, I guess we don't have to worry about
because that'll be 3030.
And, so that'll be even further back.
And so, what I'd like to do, though,
is just put into context this notion
of something that I've seen all semester on campus,
with our students who are here with us,
and that is an unbelievable desire
just for their life to move forward,
their life to be able to be fulfilled.
And the students that I've talked to,
hundreds of students that I've spoken with,
many hundreds of families,
thousands of families that we've heard from,
constantly are just saying, you know,
"Let's just move on. Let's just move on.
I want my life to be able to move on."
And then they also say,
and I want to really appreciate our faculty here,
they just say, "Thank you.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you for helping us to move our lives forward."
And so, I just want to say thank you to our staff
and to our faculty for all that you have done
to help make this semester successful
and to help make it work.
Now, the class of 2020,
here in the fall of 2020,
is going through a moment in our country's history.
A very, very unusual global pandemic,
massive social progress, social transformation,
all kinds of new things that are moving forward.
And so, I take great pride in our students.
In fact, it's my main motivation
for being in the university business,
which is helping to work
to find ways for people to fulfill the full potential
of themselves as an individual.
The full potential of their family,
the full potential of their community
and the full potential of our country
or the country that they're from.
That is, all of us living here on Earth together.
And so, I take great pride in the talent
that our students have demonstrated.
I take great pride in the compassion
that our students have really brought to the table.
We've seen that. Students helping each other,
helping families and so forth and so on.
We've seen tremendous creativity.
This year, we've had student groups
build mobile, distributed PPE manufacturing systems.
We've seen huge student engagement
in our missions off Earth.
We've seen huge developments at the university
in sustainable systems, sustainable materials,
sustainable technologies.
And so, the creativity index at ASU
is literally off the charts.
Resilience, which is a really key word.
I hope that we come out of this pandemic
with a better understanding of the idea
of how to be resilient,
how to be adaptive, how to adjust,
how to help others,
how to make our lives more impactful,
how to understand that the world is imperfect, you know,
that the enemy of progress
is often said to be the pursuit of perfection.
The world is not perfect.
But our pursuit of making it a better place
is what really drives us.
But to do that and to get there,
we've really got to fully understand the entire idea
of resilience.
Now, going forward after 2020, here's what we know.
We know that the world is complicated.
We know that it is sociologically, economically,
technologically, biologically
and culturally a very complicated place.
The old world of living in isolated groups
and just throwing rocks at each other
and so forth and so on, that's over.
The old world of not being connected
to the rest of our species on the planet, that's over.
The old world of things moving slowly,
just every few generations there's a change
or every 10 generations,
there's a new way of something happening, that's over.
And so, what we really need going forward
is more graduates like you.
People who are, as we like to think of it,
trained as master learners.
People capable of learning anything.
People capable of being resilient.
People capable of helping others to understand.
I mean, one of the biggest things that we faced
in this pandemic
is a general lack of understanding.
A lack of understanding of science,
a lack of understanding of complexity,
a lack of understanding of interdependence.
How we're connected in ways
where we're interdependent in every possible way.
And so, what the world really needs
is you all as graduates
to go out from this institution
and to make your lives very, very impactful
for the short life that you have.
Lives are short.
And you only have one shot.
And you need to take this one shot
and move it forward
in every possible way that you can.
Now, I'm hopeful that as you move forward,
that you take these lessons that you have learned
and really be very introspective about yourself.
But take these lessons that you've learned,
in the middle of this pandemic,
moving your lives forward in the pandemic,
the things that have been going on around you
and that you sit back and you say,
"Now, how can I have even more impact
than I had thought about before?
How can my life be even greater
in terms of the overall impact that I have?"
And that starts with basically coming to the realization
that we need to make things much better
and work towards great improvement
in several parts of our society.
One; education, educational attainment
and educational awareness.
We're nowhere near where we need to be.
We're still not graduating everyone from high school.
We're still not graduating people from high school
that have the right knowledge
that they need to operate in the 21st century.
We're still not advancing in a way
where we have a deep understanding
of how dependent on each other we are.
How to make this democracy really work.
And so, what I really want to do
is I really want to ask all of you
to take a deep, deep, self-reflective moment
and, say to yourself
that the pandemic is really a moment in time
where you've asked yourself
what you want your life to mean.
How you can have more positive impact,
how you can more deeply impact people
and really work to move things ahead.
And so, I ask you to do this in a way
where you, in the next week or two weeks
or the next month,
actually write out your own charter.
We have a great charter here at the university.
Our charter is very, very critical to who we are,
where we're going and what we're doing.
Our charter says that we, and take a look at it,
that we will build our university based on inclusion
versus exclusion.
Excellence for us
is inclusion in the success of our students.
We're not measuring ourselves
based on how many students we exclude.
That's unbelievably important in our design.
That the research and discovery work that we do
is not just for the benefit of academics,
they're not just for books in the library
or journals in the library
but it's for the actual benefit of our society
in a measured way.
And also we say in our charter
that we're going to take responsibility
for the outcome of the communities that we serve;
the local community, the regional community,
the state community, the national community
and then the global communities that are out there.
That charter is what drives us.
It is our aspiration.
So I ask all of you,
particularly in this moment of deep complexity,
deep activated change,
what is your charter?
And, how will you live towards that charter?
And so, simple as that,
you're ready. You're graduates.
You're moving forward.
Your lives have been empowered.
You need your charter
like we have our charter.
We need you to move forward with your charter.
I just want to congratulate all of you and your families
on a very successful completion
in a very difficult moment of your degrees
here at Arizona State University
and go Sun Devils.