2021 Spring Commencement

May 8, 2021

President McRobbie, Trustees, honored and welcomed guests, faculty, staff, family members, and our beloved students and graduates:

We first met at the start of your time at IU during Bloomington’s lovely convocation ceremony, and you have seen me since at events dedicating an astonishing number of new buildings during your time here, or congratulating you on your successes, or meeting with student groups. I will freely admit, however, that our most intimate relationship is, well… electronic. You have all, in your time here, gotten many, many—oh, so many! —emails from me.

I have written to welcome you back each semester, to wish you well in your work, to let you know how to find resources, to explain changes on campus or opportunities to engage with the arts or to volunteer or even to watch an eclipse. And I have written lengthy emails to you about other, much more serious, subjects: The First Amendment and controversial public art; ways of thinking about historical controversies manifested in our physical environment; the need to confront hateful ideas but preserve open discourse and tolerance; the importance of casting an informed vote and claiming your full citizenship in our democracy.

But I never thought I would send the email I sent in March of last year, advising you not to return to campus from your spring break because of the galloping devastation of the global pandemic. Nor did I ever expect to write the message that opened this year, one that began, “This will not be your typical welcome-back-to-campus letter.”

That message came in the middle of a hot and often acrimonious national conversation about reopening universities and colleges. Most of that debate last spring and summer was lopsidedly against reopening campuses. Some of the concern was about the lack of a testing infrastructure that could detect an outbreak, or a contact tracing system that could contain one if it happened.

But let’s be honest: Most of that discussion was about you. People watched the spring-break Florida beaches and predicted disaster. National television brought out experts to describe your petulant unwillingness—perhaps even your cognitive incapacity! – to do what was needed to open a campus safely. Pundits widely predicted you would fail to wear masks in class, even that you would do it intentionally and to make political points. “Colleges are Deluding Themselves,” a widely circulated Atlantic article flatly declared.

And yet, here you sit, in your caps and gowns, on the cusp of moving your tassel from right to left.

I’ll take that last point first. You will by now not be surprised to learn that I write emails to my colleagues as well. Lots of them. And in my email to the faculty and staff last summer, I started with first principles. IU Bloomington is a particular kind of institution, one that is comparatively rare in the broad ecosystem of higher education. Of the over 5,000 institutions of higher education, only 63 are classified at the highest levels of research, and we are among them. No one in any other sector of our world does the kind of work we do at research-intensive, residentially based universities. I believe so deeply in the mission of this kind of university that I, like many of my colleagues, have given my entire life to it. And the need to assemble, in person, defines a university committed to research and residential education.

On this campus, we do foundational research that advances the actual frontiers of knowledge, the kind of work on which all other advances are built. If humans solve the challenges posed by this virus, whether they be medical, social, behavioral, or equitable, it will doubtlessly be because of the foundations built within research universities like this one. Indeed, Thomas Brock, a professor of microbiology here in the 1960’s, made a discovery with the aid of his undergraduate research assistant that was essential to the invention of the process behind the gold standard in Covid-19 testing, the PCR test.

Much of what we do requires access to archives, studios, libraries, specialized equipment, collections, and laboratories—the very physical facilities that, with our classrooms, comprise a university of our kind. Without that access, much research grinds to a halt as does the education of the next generation of researchers and teachers, our graduate students. The creation of some kinds of knowledge stops altogether. The transmission of the skills necessary to create knowledge is seriously hampered. Much of what we lose is irretrievable, or retrievable only after making up for losses that could easily be measured in years.

In addition, this campus is founded on residential education. We believe in residential education because relationships among faculty, staff, and students catalyze intensive and powerful learning, for both undergraduate and graduate students. Students come from around the world to work with our faculty—particular faculty, actual individuals—and to study specific fields and disciplines that are unavailable elsewhere or available elsewhere with less quality and at greater cost. The communities of learning that we create and nurture on our campus are precious, and when you were forced from them that fateful spring, we were anguished to lose you.

For our students—for all of you— the necessary abandonment of our campus in the wake of the pandemic came with heartache and disruption that you well comprehend. I know many of you felt ripped from this community, your lives interrupted, and the lack of presence of your teachers and classmates a horrible loss that made a frightening and anxious situation harder to bear. That loss was absolutely necessary, and universities were leaders in this country in recognizing and acting on the risks. But we knew that by last summer, for you, our students, this pandemic had already been life-altering and life-defining, and a great many of you wanted desperately to return in some fashion.

Beyond that, there are classes, and even whole disciplines and fields, like studio art, science laboratories, and the performing arts, where the ability to do physical things using particular materials under expert supervision are at the core of advanced learning.

There were weighty values involved in deciding whether and how to bring our community back together again, and they were worth fighting for with every idea we could muster.

Second, the skeptics underestimated us. They were not wrong that we needed a testing and contact-tracing infrastructure to reopen, and they did not begin to understand how much more we needed to reopen safely. But this is a research university with the country’s largest medical school and two schools of public health. We assembled teams of experts from those schools and others, and got to work. Our faculty learned how to use new technologies, and our keepteaching.iu website became the model for over 100 other universities and colleges around the world. As a student told me recently, “The faculty and staff have done nothing but lift me up and stand by me throughout this time.”

We built testing laboratories and in the face of global shortages, we figured out how to supply them. The people who would usually be running shows at the Auditorium staffed testing sites. Our nursing and medical faculty and students jumped in to help—as did our facilities workers, who learned to clean everything to pandemic standards. We set up our own contact-tracing system, and a team to monitor daily the epidemiology of the disease in Indiana and in Bloomington. Dr. Aaron Carroll must have done hundreds of educational webinars—and in THIS zip code, his Ask Aaron webinar was as highly rated as any episode of New Girl or Cobra Kai. We met constantly with our partners in the city and the county. We made all our decisions based on the best science available. 

And finally, the skeptics wildly underestimated you.         

In all of my writing to you over the years, I have trusted deeply in your ability, honed in your classes and in your conversations with your faculty and classmates, to think with respect and openness, and to disagree with civility and reason. On a campus with over 40,000 students, that trust has been overwhelmingly justified. I know, through years of experience, that IU students are kind, thoughtful, public-spirited, and wicked smart.

With your faculty, you figured out how to get the most out of classes and labs and studios that were reconfigured to keep you safe. You played your instruments behind shields, danced with distance, and sucked it up and spit in that tube. You were peer educators and mentors, and resident assistants, helping other students through a year that included a turbulent election and a horrifying series of police shootings. In a normal year, over 20,000 of our IU Bloomington students give over a million hours of service to our communities. In this least normal of years, public service poured out of you: tutoring schoolchildren online for thousands of hours; helping nonprofits move their work to a virtual format; registering voters and doing voter education; working in rural communities and at shelters. Our medical and nursing students learned to give the vaccine, and protected thousands of people by giving it.

You took your fun outdoors to hundreds of events in Open Air Venues, and you did “Bob Ross and Breakfast” at the IMU.

Was everyone perfect? No. We are human, and humans are imperfect. But overwhelmingly, and fiercely, and courageously, you demonstrated grit and resilience and character. If, as the saying goes, reputation is what the world knows of you and character is what God knows of you, God knows a lot about all of you after this year.

In that first email of the year, I asked for your trust. I noted that you would be “operating on the faith of a shared future we cannot fully see, and said that to get to that future, we would have to commit to each other in every way we can.” You made that commitment with all your hearts.