Hello, and good morning to you all.
I would like to begin with a round of thank yous:
to all the faculty who guided us in our academic journeys,
and to the staff who worked tirelessly
to keep us healthy and safe,
to the generations of student activists,
both past and present, who've fought for justice, inclusion,
and progress at this university,
and, of course, to our families and friends,
whose love and support kept us afloat
over the past four years.
As I understand it, my task today is one of closure.
I am to celebrate, to synthesize,
and to send off the past four years
and all that they've contained.
The first of these objectives is easy.
In your time here,
you've successfully navigated the 12-week semester,
traversed eight whole Dean's Dates,
and conquered the independent work process.
You've made cool art.
You've told groundbreaking stories.
You've advocated for change
and explored systems from the microscopic,
to the human, to the cosmic.
I feel very lucky to have crossed paths with you all,
and I can't wait to watch you guys save the world.
Congratulations.
Synthesis, as it turns out, is a harder goal.
The multi-ay extravaganza of graduation,
with all of its processions and ceremonies and funny hats,
positions this moment
as a kind of temporal inflection point.
In the narrow space between past and future,
we are invited to stand together
and to reckon with our collective experience of this place.
This shared reflection is valuable,
but it is also complicated.
In prescribing a particular emotional arc
of celebration and nostalgia,
the rituals of Commencement sometimes miss the complexity
and diversity of student experiences at this university.
When, halfway through sophomore spring,
the pandemic scattered us across time zones and continents,
Princeton came unmoored from geography.
For some students, it re-formed at kitchen counters
in childhood homes.
For others, it took shape in quiet dorm rooms,
or at odd hours of the night.
Abruptly, everyone's university experience felt acutely
and visibly unique, but, even outside of pandemic times,
there is no such thing as a universal student experience.
This is partly a matter of differences in the social
and academic spaces that each of us inhabits.
And it is also a matter of structural inequality,
since Princeton and institutions like it
often fall short when comes to supporting students
of marginalized backgrounds.
In other words,
I suspect that we all have complicated relationships
to this place, and to the idea of leaving it,
and I suspect that no two students' feelings
are entirely symmetric.
And so, in lieu of synthesis,
I want to offer reassurance, that there is no wrong way
to feel about this process.
Maybe, for some of you, today is a turning point,
a gateway to the real world, or a final celebration,
or maybe today is just a late spring Tuesday morning
in central New Jersey spent among friends.
Whatever this day means for you,
I hope that you get to hold space for your emotions
and experiences, as well as for those of others,
and I hope you find happiness within it.
This brings me to my final task, the valediction,
or the act of farewell.
I've never been especially good at dealing with transience.
As a child, I had this theory
that the more times you revisited a memory,
the further it would warp from its original shape.
To avoid this, I kept meticulously detailed written records
of everything from class field trips
to my middle school graduation,
in hopes of keeping the past as fixed as possible.
As I got older, I stopped doing this, but even now,
I keep catching myself trying to memorize the grandeur
of Fine Hall in late afternoon light,
or the mid-air acrobatics of the bees near First College,
or the exact spatial layout of my thesis lab.
I think that my impulse to capture these things,
to freeze time, is tied to my desire to build a clean
and linear account of my time as an undergrad,
to somehow make sense of it.
Taking stock of how you understand your relationship
to Princeton right now is important and worthwhile,
but memory is not a static representation of the past.
For most of us, the past four years have been messy,
and complicated, and formative.
Our relationship to Princeton,
and our experience thereof can, and probably will, change
with time and distance.
We will re-access, re-interpret,
and re-synthesize these memories, and that's okay.
Dynamic and critical self-reflection can
and should be a big part of belonging
to any institution as complicated as this one.
But this also means that today's act of farewell
is not so much a send-off of the past
as it is the beginning of new interpretive process.
A farewell is a noun, but it is also a directive,
fare, as in to travel, or to be.
Well, as in safely, successfully, in good health.
If faring well is an active process,
then the act of valediction is less a closing
of the past than a forward-looking prayer.
Tomorrow, we will disperse along highways and jet streams.
In our new homes, across countries and continents,
we will continue drifting forward, together, through time.
From our current vantage point,
the future towards which we travel is uncertain,
and honestly pretty bleak.
The earth is warming, and the oceans rising.
The legal frameworks meant
to protect marginalized communities
are swaying under pressure.
Globally, autocracy is on the rise,
and the free press under threat.
At the same time, activists, journalists
and artists are bravely working
to dismantle oppressive systems
while scientists and engineers combat public health crisis
and environmental challenges.
In other words, there is space for hope, for action
and for change.
And so, here is my valediction.
I wish you safe travels and gentle landings.
I wish you time for rest and time for joy.
I wish you the space for critical reflection,
complexity and change.
More than anything, I wish you hope, even, and perhaps,
especially, in the face of uncertainty.
I hope that wherever you end up,
you get to build communities founded on empathy
and radical compassion.
I hope you find healthy and sustainable ways
to advocate for progress and change,
and I hope that things get better.
I hope that, someday soon, we all fare well.
Thank you, and congratulations again, Class of 2022.
(audience applauding)