Commencement 2025
Delivered May 18, 2025
Greetings!
On behalf of our entire University at Buffalo community, welcome to the friends and family joining us for commencement! We are delighted you could join us to celebrate your loved one for reaching this landmark.
I speak for all of us at UB when I say that we are every bit as excited as you are to re-joice in your graduate’s accomplishment.
With that, allow me to offer my heartfelt congratulations to the Class of 2025!
Graduates, as you mark today and turn your thoughts to the next chapter, allow me to share something that Nelson Mandela once told a group of students.
“Education,” he said, “is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” It is a simple, yet bold, declaration. And it is one that I hope you will carry with you as you determine the future you will paint for yourself.
How has UB prepared you for this moment?
If we have done our jobs, your UB education has put you in the center of a lively marketplace of ideas. Here, you have been trained to think critically rather than accepting what you’re told at face value.
You have been tasked with prizing inquiry, research-based evidence, and truth over speculation and assumption.
In keeping with our university mission, you have been emboldened to create, to innovate, to pursue new knowledge.
No doubt, the skills and attributes you have refined at UB will serve you in your chosen career. But, I would argue that they transcend professional development and workplace success.
By holding fast to principles of reason and integrity, you truly have, as Mandela said, the means to change the world. Again, a bold statement. But history—UB’s own history—bears this out.
From our founding as a private medical school, to our evolution as a premier public research university, a succession of ground-breaking research and scholarship has punctuated UB’s timeline.
The pacemaker, the heel prick test for screening newborns, smart concrete, the autonomous system used by the Postal Service to interpret handwritten addresses—all of these discoveries and so many others were made right here, at UB.
What’s more, each and every day, the alumni community you are about to join is expanding upon this profound legacy of impact.
Your fellow alumni have exposed corporate deception in Big Tobacco, uncovered water contamination in Flint, Michigan and shed light on health fraud.
They have decided landmark civil rights cases, documented the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and built bridges between the literary worlds of the East and the West.
They are founders and CEOs of companies and non-profits that contribute to both economic prosperity and social justice.
They include the biologist who led the first team to sequence the human genome, one of the first researchers to connect periodontal disease with diabetes and the chemist who discovered that AZT could be used to treat HIV.
As wide-ranging as these accomplishments are, they share a compelling common denominator. In contributing meaningfully to the local and global communities that UB serves, they uphold our mission of excellence and impact.
Now, as you graduate from UB, you become the newest standard-bearers of this mission.
Those of us gathered today greatly look forward to seeing how you will take what you have learned at the University at Buffalo, and apply it to the greater good.
To conclude, please allow me to once again congratulate the Class of 2025!