Good afternoon. President Garibaldi. Board Chair, the remarkable graduating class of 2019. To all of you, your families, and your supporters, congratulations!

I have a daughter just completing her second year of college, so you give me hope that she may actually make it through. And not just make it through, but to do so with joy, passion, and distinction, as you have so impressively done.

In the children’s classic science-fiction story, A Wrinkle in Time, Madelaine D’Engel describes a tesseract, a device in which you bring together two far away points in time – as if you were holding a string at both ends with your arms outstretched and then brought those ends together in front of you.

The tesseract makes me think of your trajectory. What if you were to go back to your younger self – say fifteen years ago – and try to imagine where you’re sitting today and all the distance in-between. Suffering through the endless drama of dealing with your mother or brother or sister or dad. Clawing your way through the hormones and bad relationships that filled up middle school. Navigating the anxieties of getting into college.

And then, college itself: sweating through final exams, hauling yourself to obnoxiously early classes, swallowing tough losses on the athletic field or court, negotiating through friendships that were way too complicated.

I don’t know about you, but I would have, all those years ago, been unable to imagine that all of that was possible.

But here you are today, and all those events have molded you into what you are and where you’re headed. Hence, the tesseract – the two points in time reconnecting. Through your determination . . . your unwillingness to give up . . . your refusal to sacrifice your dreams . . .  you have transformed the inconceivable into the inevitable.

You have collapsed time to your vision. It is not science fiction. It is your new reality.

And what is truly inevitable is that you are poised to make a difference at a time when our world desperately needs you to do that.

Let’s consider that world for a moment. One where enduring structural racial inequities and injustice impede full opportunity for too many of our citizens . . . where changes in climate are swamping our coasts, toasting our cities, and flooding our farms . . . where widening political fault-lines breed intolerance, paralysis, and division  . . . where the idea of civil civic discourse has become a quaint, idle fancy . . .where we seem impotent to check the power of technology platforms to broadcast and amplify falsehoods, hatred, and distrust . . .  where artificial intelligence is walking into every workplace in America checking out whose job is next to go.

I know that sounds daunting and too terrible to contemplate. But it doesn’t need to be.

The only way to enter that world, in my view, is to be armed with clear, unshakeable values that activate in the presence of challenges like these. That sounds a bit generic, I realize. But let’s focus the proposition by viewing it through the lens of the education you’ve received at the University of Detroit Mercy.

This university is deeply grounded in the meaning of citizenship – of living in fair and just relationship to others. The institution itself stands as a beacon of that value, reflecting through its administrators, faculty, staff, and – most importantly – its students, a commitment to ethical action that carries well beyond its campus.

You have given meaning to and valorized the University’s articulated commitment to leadership, service, and community. Whether by engaging in deep scholarship with trusted faculty . .. or volunteering at one of the University’s health or counseling clinics . . .or helping high school students prepare for college . . . or joining hands with city residents to beautify and strengthen the Livernois-Six Mile neighborhood

You and your classmates have cast in bright relief the power and reward of what the journalist and ethicist David Brooks has termed the “radical mutuality of service” – to your institution . . . to one another . . . to the city of which you are a part. And the nature of that value – that commitment – is such that it will follow you –no, propel you – as you build careers, families, and lives of community engagement.

I want to underscore just how powerfully the University’s value of citizenship has contributed to the enhancement of neighborhood resilience . . . the affirmation of community identity . . .  and the acceleration of economic opportunity that have propelled the renewal of Detroit, even as the city fought through a crisis of political corruption . . . weathered an economic maelstrom . . . and endured a nightmarish bankruptcy.

That value of citizenship has helped put in place the building blocks of an equitable, broad-based recovery that will spread from the commercial corridors of downtown to the front porches and storefronts of our neighborhoods.

In a word, the University and every student in it has been part of Detroit’s second chance. You have studied here . . . You have partied here . . . You have dedicated tens of thousands of hours in service here . . . You have chosen to care here.

Just consider, that within a single mile of this campus:

·        We are seeing the reimagination of Marygrove College into a campus that will house a dazzling new community pre-school, a pathbreaking K-12 school operated jointly by the University of Michigan and the Detroit Public Schools, and a graduate education program.

·        We are witnessing the re-energizing of historically vital main streets – we opened the Detroit Collaborative Design Center’s Homebase on McNichols just ten days ago and Livernois’ Avenue of Fashion is increasingly being populated by restaurants, clothing stores, and other businesses run by resident entrepreneurs.

·        We are watching the Civic Commons project come to life, connecting the Marygrove and UD Mercy campuses through a pedestrian trail, newly-rehabbed housing, and Ella Fitzgerald Park;

·        We are rooting for the success of Mayor Duggan’s plans to stabilize and appreciate the value of the Bagley and Fitzgerald neighborhood’s housing stock.

And all of this is being done under the stewardship of the Live-Six Alliance, which was formed four years ago on this very site, with Dr. Garibaldi taking the lead role as Chair. His work has cast in bright relief the University’s commitment of thought, time, and treasure to being a full and disciplined partner in the community’s revitalization.

Service becomes a moral act of leadership. It puts values into action.

But I want to also suggest that undergirding the broad value of citizenship – the wide arc of radical mutuality – are a set of even more foundational values. Values that create a moral gyroscope that prevents us from toppling over into ethical and emotional incoherence. Values that compel you to look inward to excavate the unalterable bedrock of what you stand for .. . what you dream . . . what decisions you will make along your life-path.  

So let me hazard an hypothesis of some of those are:  

. . . That you will be animated by the pursuit of truth and the reinforcement of reasoned discourse, refusing to be drawn into a machinery of mendacity that wraps willful distortions and blind assertions of ideological certitude in inflammation and then amplifies the full package through echo-chambers disguised as intellectual inquiry;

. . . That you will enter into disagreements with others in a spirit of respect for difference, resisting the temptation to succumb to the emotional denigration of your protagonists through personal vilification;

. . . That you will continually recommit to dismantling the persistent and pervasive racial, social, economic, and political barriers that so shamefully perpetuate racial and ethnic division, impede pathways to equality and justice, and corrode compassion for the least fortunate among us;

. . . That you will embrace the power of a creative problem-solving that calls on community wisdom, intergenerational exchange, and embrace of diverse perspective and life experience, eschewing the false comfort of facile judgments and rhetorical hyperbole about complex and inter-braided problems;

. . . That you will seek to respect and celebrate every individual’s inherent dignity, worth, and decency, refusing to de-humanize and marginalize those whose skin pigment, gender, physical conditions, sexual orientation, or faith differs from your own;

. . . And that you will be nourished by an abiding optimism about the perfectibility of the human spirit and the power of faith and grace, not seduced by the dismal brew of a calculating and cruel cynicism placed in service of an unyielding pursuit of self-advancement.

Armed with these values, you can demand a workplace . . . a government . . .  a civil society . . . as good and just and effective as those people within it deserve.

Because we can make progress both big and small when we have a big tent – a tent that is inclusive of all our colors and beliefs and experiences . . .  a tent in which communities can secure the tools they need to fashion their own path . ..  a tent in which leadership is distributed among the public, the private, the nonprofit, the philanthropic, the civic sectors according to their strengths . . .  a tent in which leadership is defined less by power and position and more by care, compassion, and community cohesion.

For the skeptics out there, let me suggest that we know this can be true. It isn’t always, but it can be. . . . It should be.

In my lifetime, even if not in yours, consider the power of values-based change that led to breaking the despicable vice-grip of Apartheid in South Africa . . . to forging peace after a century of horrific blood-letting between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland . . .  to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of east and west Germany.

Each of these momentous advances was fueled by values– equal justice, self-determination, religious tolerance, human dignity. And these are the values that will fuel your change as well.

Although he was a Trappist and not a Jesuit, the theologian and scholar Thomas Merton once said: “The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.”

So don’t. Carry those values forged during your time here into the world to make the change you dream of. Accept nothing less. I think you will find that you can build something important . . .  Something that can endure . . . Something that recirculates your values into the shared water-system of a radical mutuality.

Let me make a down payment on our thanks to you all for what you will accomplish. You will make our world a better place.  I know you will. So thank you. And congratulations on this very special day!

‍