Chancellor Remarks at 2025 Convocation

To the incoming Class of 2029 and to all our transfer students:

Welcome to the beginning of one of the great adventures of your life!

The years to come will be exciting and unforgettable in the best possible way. It’s going to be great – great but not easy, not without its challenges. If it were easy, anybody could do it, and we wouldn’t have to spend the time to admit the very best students.

We will walk beside you in the years to come as you work toward your degree, and we will continue to be there for you after you have earned your degree, when at commencement – which will be here sooner than you think – you set off to make your mark upon the world.

It may be helpful for you to keep in mind that this campus was established for one main reason: to serve the people by discovering and transmitting advanced knowledge. We are in the business of figuring out important things and then helping you understand them.

That’s another way of saying that you are here to participate in an amazing scholarly community. In fact, as you know, you were selected to be here primarily because you have demonstrated that you have the talent and character to understand things even when understanding requires hard work and serious thought.

To help you better appreciate this fundamental feature of why you are here we have created what we call the “Anteater Virtues Project,” which identifies the key intellectual character traits that must be cultivated to be part of such a scholarly community, traits such as curiosity, integrity, intellectual humility, and intellectual tenacity.

Curiosity encourages you to seek out knowledge and explore a variety of intellectual interests. It’s the drive to find things out. Hopefully it’s also about the pleasure of being part of our world of wonder, where you are surrounded by world-class faculty who have dedicated their lives to better understanding their fields of knowledge. Don’t take for granted the fact that this is probably the only time in your lives where you will be immersed in such a community and so let your curiosity run wild! Ask questions. Wonder about things. Expand your interests. Find new passions.

The second Anteater Virtue, integrity, is about more than just avoiding plagiarism and other blatant dishonesties. Integrity represents the frame of mind you must have if you are genuinely interested in being part of a learning community – which means, by definition, that you are not here just to mindlessly or stubbornly proclaim what you think you already know over and over.

In other words, integrity means setting aside everything you might have learned from Twitter/X about how to engage with others. Instead of prioritizing quips, virtue signaling, denunciation of competing views, and ad hominem attacks we embrace engagements that go beyond the surface, exchanges premised on mutual respect, a presumption of good intentions by others (until proven otherwise), and a sincere desire to understand the best versions of competing arguments.

The virtue of intellectual humility conveys an expectation that we should be open to new ideas, be ready, willing, even eager to change our minds when confronted with better arguments and evidence. Intellectual humility asks you not to be arrogant about what you know, but to accept your own limitations and be receptive to learning from others.

There are places in every community, even our own, where certain views are considered sacred. But a scholarly community cannot be built on the norms and practices of a religious community. We are not here to identify eternal truths and then demand unquestioned obedience to accepted wisdom. In a scholarly community, every so-called truth must be considered contingent. Think back over centuries and ask, At what point should we have said we know all that we need to know about social justice, the natural world, or artistic merit and therefore are justified to shut down all dissenting views? The answer, of course, is that there is no such point where we would have benefited from shutting down discussion and debate. Yes, let us have strong convictions, but let us not assume that our understandings are unassailable. We must be willing to subject every idea to discussion and debate, even the views we hold most dear. This willingness to embrace intellectual humility has been, for centuries, the cornerstone of progress in science, social thought, artistic practice, and the healing arts.

Finally, intellectual tenacity bolsters your desire to keep pursuing an intellectual interest, even when you encounter obstacles or other challenges. It means having respect for your own convictions and seeing things through to the end. We are seeking advanced knowledge, not easy answers, and tenacity is an inevitable feature of this journey.

When it comes to the work we are doing to acquire and transmit advanced knowledge, we see the value of others not on the basis of whether someone else agrees with us, but on their mastery of the required disciplinary knowledge, on the quality of their arguments, evidence, or performances, on whether they engage in discussion and debate with respect and integrity.

We also must expect our claims and conclusions to be evaluated by other experts, who are encouraged to find weaknesses in our arguments and conclusions. The members of our faculty face such scrutiny all the time from other leaders in their fields when they are subjected to peer review, and so it is no surprise that the quality of your arguments and evidence will also be relentlessly scrutinized. And it turns out, after years of facing such scrutiny, you will leave here a more mature thinker. THIS is the most lasting gift that we can offer our students.

Among other things, this means that, over the next few years, some of your cherished views may be challenged. This is not violence against you. Exposure to challenging views cannot make you unsafe here because the whole point of you being here is to be exposed to ideas. And so, when you are confronted by disturbing ideas, we will support you, but that support consists of empowering you to more effectively engage our world of ideas, not shielding you from ideas that make you uncomfortable or make you mad or that you think are wrong.

As the great University of California president Clark Kerr put it, “The University is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas.”

This is why we cannot, and will not, censor or punish people merely because they express ideas we do not like. Even if you think the idea is disrespectful. Or hateful. Or dangerous.

We will protect against harassment and incitement and true threats and other actions that are not protected by free speech principles. But we will not treat the mere expression of an idea as something to be punished or censored, and we will protect members of the campus community, and their invited guests and speakers, from efforts to silence them through disruptive activities.

This approach is different than what you might have experienced in middle school or high school, where restrictions on speech are more commonplace and acceptable. But the rules governing the expression of ideas are different at universities where we are committed to fostering in our adult students a mature independence of mind.

There are many places where you can spend these years of your lives and never have to worry about being exposed to ideas you disagree with or maybe even abhor. But a university is not one of them. If you believe some viewpoints are especially harmful or dangerous you are free to use your rights of free speech to denounce them and explain why they should be ignored or resisted. But you are not free to do what I am not willing to do, which is to take it upon yourself to silence the expression of certain views on this campus.

I want you to hear this from me now, because hardly a week goes by without this issue arising at some campus somewhere, and before it arises again at UCI, I want you to know our position.

As we officially start this journey together let us commit to learning as much as we can from each other, and beyond that, let us commit to support each other as human beings engaged in a common enterprise to generate and transmit knowledge for the benefit of all people.

In a world where too many people seek out that which divides us, let us remain united in our noble common purpose, and let us go that extra mile to deepen our understanding of each other, to build bridges, to talk rather than yell, to debate rather than fight, to love rather than hate, to protect rather than exploit.

Let us model for the world how a diverse community can live and work together in peace, without fear of violence or intimidation, even when we do not always agree.

I end these remarks by invoking the official motto of the University of California.

You may know it. It’s a Latin phrase: Fiat lux. It means, “Let there be light.”

I think it is a wonderful motto for one of the world’s great institutions of higher education. I hope it will inspire you.

Pursue that which is illuminating. Shed light on fascinating and important questions. Be a vessel through which enlightenment eradicates the darkness – the darkness of ignorance, the darkness of intolerance.

You are here to do great and important things. It’s time to get started.

Again, welcome to one of the great adventures of your life. A vast landscape of inquiry and discovery lies before you. We are all looking forward to walking this path with you.

Fiat lux.