- Well, here we are.
2020 Graduation Arizona State University,
17,000 graduate students, undergraduate students,
fantastic achievement just being here,
really, really exciting day,
really exciting moment,
but we're here virtually.
As you all know, we've all been either
on one side of the screen or the other,
back and forth, back and forth.
In fact, my eyes have gotten tired
from watching screens so much.
So many meetings, so many on-video interactions.
But here today, we're here to
really recognize the achievement of our students,
the faculty and the staff that have supported them.
This
moment, I don't think there have been many graduations
in the middle of global pandemics,
certainly not ones that are the result of such a
successful response to
maintaining a learning enterprise,
maintaining a teaching enterprise,
maintaining a discovery enterprise
in the middle of all of this.
This is a hugely important day.
Students' lives are moving forward.
They completed successfully their last term,
their last semester,
their projects, their activities
engaging in literally hundreds of thousands of
video interactions, engaging in
millions of minutes of
what we call Zoom time.
And so it's been a fantastic, fantastic moment
of opportunity and creativity.
I just want to say congratulations to all of you
that are graduates.
I want to thank you for your commitment to your families,
to yourselves, to your communities,
wanting to get ahead, wanting to move ahead,
persevering through all of the uncertainty,
all of the complexity and being here today to graduate.
I want to, for those of us that are viewing in on this,
your families, your friends, others in the community,
just say a little bit about ASU.
We're a front-line university, very much committed to
the idea that the success of our society
will be a function of great universities moving forward
that measure their success based on who they include
and how they succeed,
as opposed to measuring an institution's success based on
who they exclude.
This is the central theme of who we are.
So the 17,000 of you are representative of everybody.
The socioeconomic diversity, the ethnic diversity,
the cultural diversity, I mean, everything.
It's just tremendous.
You're the entire melting pot of the United States
and many, many students from all over the world,
in fact, more than 130 countries.
So this is a tremendous expression of who we are.
We're an institution that is very much dedicated to
research and discovery and solving problems,
but not for the benefit only of the academy,
but for the benefit of society more broadly.
And then the last part of what we call our charter
is that we are deeply committed
to the success of our community.
In fact, we've altered our culture in the last few years
to the extent that we've moved from the traditional
academic culture of being very faculty-centric
to a culture very much being driven by student centrism,
being driven by the student's success
and the student achievement,
followed by the community's success,
that is economically and socially,
trying to stimulate as much evolution as possible.
And then the faculty are the means.
They're the talent supported by our staff
that make all these things happen.
We're a big community.
We have 30,000 staff and faculty.
We're working on tens of thousands of research projects
ranging all the way from music and music theory
and creativity, to the deepest, darkest
astrophysics questions and problems,
to everything that you can imagine about COVID.
Just a little bit about COVID-19 and the virus,
we transitioned immediately,
went to a completely digital presentation format,
what we call ASU Sync.
We did this for all of our learners,
our K-12 students that are in the ASU charter schools,
our on-campus students, 70,000 to 75,000 students
who were on campus went from on-campus immersion
to synchronous immersion,
as well as our online students who continued,
as well as our digital high school,
our ASU Prep Academy that continued.
And so I'm very proud of our staff and our team
and you as students that
were able to make these adjustments as quickly as possible.
Now today is really a day,
and I think extraordinarily the case,
in which all of you that are graduating
should take this moment
visually or in a video scene or somewhere
just to thank your family members.
They supported you, they nurtured you,
they took care of you.
One way or another,
you were supported by somebody to be here.
Also I want you to thank and I'd like to recognize
everyone that's out there that's been a teacher,
that's helped this art and craft of enhancing learning
and driving the human spirit forward
and human attainment forward,
I just want to thank all the teachers that are out there
for all that you've done to really help us be here today
with these 17,000 students.
And then finally I'd like to thank and honor
the ASU faculty, 4,600 faculty members,
who are among the most creative, most energetic,
most innovative human beings involved
in the art of teaching and learning and discovery
that I think exists anywhere.
So I just want to thank all of you.
But I also want our graduates
to take the time to thank our faculty.
So,
I think there's a central lesson
of where we're sitting right now
and here's the central lesson.
COVID-19, whatever you want to call it,
global pandemic, whatever you want to call it.
This is a complex world.
We've matured as a species,
we've matured as a civilization.
We're now able to respond to
a global pandemic where we're working in a way
to help as many people
not be negatively afflicted as possible.
We're working to find ways to help people to move through
something like this which could be much more disastrous
than it has been up to this point.
And these forces have now clearly illustrated,
it's sorta like my dad used to say to me,
"Do I have your attention now?"
We need to be prepared.
We were not as prepared for this as we could be,
not because we were thoughtless,
but because we hadn't learned to
modernize some of our thinking.
We hadn't yet learned to make new things happen.
So my central message to you is to be prepared.
Prepared for what?
You need to be prepared to
enhance your learning.
You need to be prepared to
enhance your innovation capability.
You need to be prepared to enhance your voice
with new ideas and new ways of getting things done.
You need to be prepared to adjust.
You need to be prepared to create.
And so my message, my central message to you today
as a newly minted graduate of Arizona State University,
either undergraduate or graduate student is,
be prepared to do what's necessary to help us address
all of the complexities that our modern world really
confronts us with.
I want to say thank you again to all of you
that helped make this happen.
I want to say thank you to our faculty.
I want to say congratulate you as students.
And I want family members to really understand deeply
that we're totally committed to your student's success.
Not one ounce of energy was devoted
to any whining or complaining.
We just got it done and we're very happy to be here today.
So, let's now go off to the video for the year in review
Arizona State University Graduation 2020.