Selected Speeches

President's Report

March 17, 2023

Congratulatory Remarks

College of Agricultural and Life Sciences Commencement

Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering Commencement

In the face of unspeakable violence, we ought to start by telling the truth.

Here is the truth: The world has just witnessed the largest slaughter of Jewish people since the Holocaust. The videos are gut-wrenching. Stories make your stomach churn. Hundreds of innocent civilians are dead. Toddlers, teens, and grandparents have been taken hostage. Young women have suffered violence too terrible to speak. Families have been burned alive while hiding in their homes. Bodies have been mutilated as terrorists laugh and hand out candy in celebration of evil. Hamas’ terror attacks are heinous and deserve the condemnation of civilized people around the world.

Like you, Melissa and I are grieving and angry.

Here’s another truth: human life matters. Human dignity matters. This is a truth that we here embrace, and a truth that the terrorists of Hamas reject. We are committed to that truth. We draw our strength and inspiration from that truth.

Like so many Gators, Melissa and I are praying. We pray for the families of the dead. We pray for the victims who are in hospitals still fighting for their lives. We pray for the victims who are still held hostage. We pray for peace in an uncertain and dangerous world.

This is a fallen world. When evil raises its head, as it has in recent days, it is up to men and women of conscience and courage to draw strength from truth and commit themselves to the work of building something better – to the work of pursuing justice and peace.

The University of Florida is home to the largest number of Jewish students at any university in this country. We are proud of that legacy. We have Jewish alumni around the country and world who are also devastated by this terror.

As a community — the Gator community — we stand by you.

Well, thank you, Chairman. 

I don’t get nervous easily, but during that musical interlude you all were looking at the platform party and the music was happening right behind us. And Melissa and I have three kids. Our oldest daughter wasn’t able to come from Boston today. Our youngest son’s face was deep in a book, and as I looked out at the crowd, I saw my middle daughter and she was just doing this. And I think it meant, Dad, don’t try to find the beat. So I had a moment of nerves. Anyway, thank you all for being here.  

What an incredibly special day and what a wonderful and humbling time to have all of you show up to celebrate this special place, to celebrate the University of Florida, and the work that we have been, are doing, and will do together. There are so many incredible people who made the journey to come here. And I want to thank you all. Many of you have already been named, so I’ll do the lightning round.  

But first, I want to begin with our chairman, Mori, and just in public acknowledge his zeal and his relentless drive. The man is a force of nature. Nobody, nobody probably in the 170-year history of this place has ever advocated as tirelessly for the University of Florida as Chairman Mori Hosseini. I am up very early, but I go to bed relatively early as well. And there is never a night where Mori isn’t up later than I am or up earlier than I am for his avocation to advocate for the University of Florida. So, Chairman, it is a pleasure.  

I would like to acknowledge the rest of our trustees who’ve been able to make the journey today. It is no secret that around the country lots of folks join boards like their social clubs or resume padders. And it’s also no secret that that is not the way the University of Florida’s board works. The folks that are on this board are servant leaders, and they work tirelessly following our chairman in trying to figure out how to make a difference on behalf of our students, on behalf of our faculty, on behalf of our staff, on behalf of our ag partners, on behalf of our citizens, on behalf of this entire state. And so, I want to acknowledge those in attendance today: Olivia, Dan, Danaya, Rahul, Marsha, Fred and Anita. Thank you very much for the opportunity to partner with all of you.  

I’d like to acknowledge some members of the Board of Governors. You’ve already heard from Chancellor Rodriguez. I’d also like to acknowledge Tim, Charlie and Amanda. Thank you all for being here. There are too many faculty members to name, but as Professor Adams said, there are 6,000 we have on the SACS’ list that we submit every year who taught a course of instruction at the University of Florida last year; We have 6,000 faculty members. You are the foundation of the university, and it is a privilege and a pleasure to be on a team with all of you. I would also like to thank the staff that make this university go like the Gators who greet you at “The Swamp” before the games, the folks who feed our students in the dining halls, the early morning custodial crew in Tigert, who’ve adopted me as a part of the late third shift every morning pre-dawn. Shout out to Daisy and Sandra. Glad that you’re both here.  

We want to thank our students who are here today. We do this work because of you, period.  

And a hearty welcome to all of those of you who labor in Tallahassee. Lieutenant Governor, it’s a pleasure to have you here. State senators and representatives, some of you are regulars in “The Swamp” every home game. Some of you are showing up today, and so we’d like to acknowledge you and thank you. You represent the citizens of the state who pay our bills. And you’ve been incredibly generous, not just in your investment and in your time, but also in your wisdom. So, I would in particular want to say Jennifer, Chuck, Yvonne, Stan, and Keith, thank you all for being here and for the counsel you’ve given me over the last 7 ½ months. Commissioner Wilton Simpson is here as well, and we have Justices Canady and Sasso from the state Supreme Court. We welcome you.  

We also want to welcome some of our SUS Presidents Moez, Larry and Rick. It’s good to see all of you and not have it be on a Monday night Zoom where the chancellor says will be off in 45 minutes — and it never happens, sir. 

I also obviously want to thank those members of my family who weren’t ridiculing me during the musical performance. Hi, Mom. Professor Adams, so much of your stories sounded a lot like my mom’s. My mom grew up in rural Nebraska about 14 miles from where our house is now and had no running water, and the story of how her family functioned sounded a lot like yours.  

Melissa, so I will confess to this group at the outset that being at the center of attention makes my stoic,  German, Lutheran, Midwestern soul super uncomfortable. I am very uneasy. Pomp and circumstance are not a big part of life in rural Dodge County, Nebraska. And Melissa must have sensed this last Saturday morning in Jacksonville before the big game. And by the way, what a great first drive. Can we all agree on that? Last Saturday morning in Jacksonville, I was working a little bit on this event and obviously not enjoying myself as much as I enjoyed myself in most parts of my calling here with you, at which point Melissa looked over at me in her very delicate way, said, “Yo, dufus, it’s not about you. Quit apologizing for inauguration. So that was obviously true. She is right. Today is not about me. It’s far more interesting than that.  

Today is about the University of Florida’s last decade and our coming decade together. It’s about Gator Nation’s unbelievable accomplishments of late, and it’s about where we’re headed next. It’s about this state’s incredible opportunity, the unbelievable things that this community of students, faculty and citizens has been doing and will continue to do over the course of the years to come. That’s the purpose of today. 

Today is a celebration. It’s a renewal ceremony about our great and noble calling as a university together. But Melissa wasn’t done yet because then she also asked me, “so whatcha going to talk about: principles or program; values or vision?” I began to protest. This is a false choice. It’s an excluded middle. She was having none of it. And she replied very quickly, These people don’t have all day. There are refreshments for them afterward. You get 20 minutes, 22, tops. It seemed a little harsh to me; wrong even. Because, I’m not yet out of the puppy love phase about this place, about Gainesville, about the pine and palm, about the Spanish moss, about the dancing lights as I rode my bike from Dasburg to Tigert, predawn, this morning. And this campus looks glorious at 4:30, (although today at 40 degrees, it didn’t feel quite as great in shorts and a T-shirt).  

I’m still infatuated about every new research station I get a visit with Scott Angle. This place is still fresh and new to me. I’ve gotten to do hundreds and hundreds of tours and learning sessions so far in my 200 and change days on the campus. And yet I feel like I’m just getting started getting to know the glorious diversity of a place this interesting. 2,200 acres contiguous right here. 86,000 souls show up here every day. And I feel at 7 ½ months like I’m just beginning to open up a Christmas morning package about all that’s interesting. I had only spent a single evening of my life in Gainesville until 13 months ago, when I was invited to come down and candidate for this position. And so, so much of this still feels like glorious serendipity. I wasn’t looking for some university presidency in general. Instead, I was persuaded. I was pursued and moved by Mori and by Rahul and by a handful of you other winsome, tireless believers in this particular place telling me that this was not just a place, but a cause that I needed to join. 

So,  here’s the deal. Here’s why. Here’s why I joined. In a nutshell, here’s the vision. I believe, somewhat like Jason Kelly saying that the digital revolution is going to upend higher education in the next decade. I believe that most of higher education doesn’t understand the pace of what’s coming. And yet I also believe that a partially orderly transition that builds on, rather than jettisons, 800 years of legacy of helping young people transition from full-time dependency in your parents’ households out into the independent living of adulthood through an educational institution is to be preferred over a more chaotic abandonment of this great 800– year– old institution. Not just the University of Florida, but the university over the course of nearly a millennia.  

And to our specific purposes today, I truly believe that there is no single institution in the nation better positioned to simultaneously question the old with humility and embrace the new with an entrepreneurial zest about partnering more and faster. I don’t believe there’s any institution better positioned than the University of Florida. Why? 

Why is this a unique time? The digital revolution through which we’re living combines the migration in computing from mainframes to desktops to laptops to mobile handhelds now, to emerging wearables and soon to implantables. It combines that mobility with the collapse of the cost of marginal computing eventually toward free, or at least toward a cost and price so close to zero that it won’t be worth us bothering to measure. This is free math for everything in life. Data nerd. Yes, sir. This is probability for every field. It means that every single thing that can be reduced to a series of steps ultimately becomes free for everyone. It means that all things and all tasks that are intellectually routinizable can become cheap commodities. It means that many subfields of economics will move from evaluations of tradeoffs and environments of scarcity to the psychological and anthropological and sociological and philosophical and theological riddles of navigating cornucopia of abundance, which is great, but also makes it a lot harder to discern meaning. 

It will mean robots building us robots. It means that the era of super tools is upon us. The implication of this new era for both the discovery and the teaching and learning enterprises are truly hard to overstate. The only analog that I can think of is the century that followed the Gutenberg revolution when a couple hundred copies of the Latin Vulgate Bible first rolled off the baby printing press in the 1450. The world was literally remade. There was a revolution in printing. There were a couple of hundred Bibles that were broadly available. And it isn’t hyperbole to call Johannes Gutenberg the man of the last millennium as a result. Although his printing press revolution spawned actual revolutions, political and religious, as well, for our purposes, perhaps the most important “what came next” chapter of the story was the deeper cleavage that cheap print produced and enabled between the concept of a library and the concept of a school, which used to be mostly the same thing. 

The democratization of information and then the broad dissemination of knowledge upended land and sea, creating whole new arts, whole new sciences, whole new economies and whole new republics because of that printing press. I think that what comes next now with the digital revolution still in its infancy or its pre-teen adolescence at its most mature right now is disruption at that kind of scale or bigger. As a historian, I’m well aware that one of our professional obligations is usually to be boring at parties. Yes, historians can give a great talk or tell a stem-winding tale when we’re given the podium, but in casual conversation by the hors d’oeuvre table, usually we’re supposed to say there is a lot more continuity than discontinuity in almost every era. The words unique and extraordinary and especially and atypical are probably an exaggeration. Usually, we should be substituting words like common, typical, regular, and not unique, we should be substituting those terms all over the place, the historian usually says. And in truth, we self-on-the-throne narcissists usually do tend to think the moment in which we’re living is extraordinary and atypical and special,  primarily because we like to think of ourselves as extraordinary and special,  and we’re at this moment. And often, it’s thus the historian’s job to provide historical context, to do some bubble bursting and to offer humility. But that’s really not the moment we’re at right now.  

We are blessed to be living at one of the most interesting moments in all of human history, on the cusp of lots and lots of fields and domains of life being made new. And so this should be an extraordinarily fascinating moment to be in the teaching and learning business; That is, to be in higher education. This shouldn’t be daunting. This should be exciting. But somehow there’s a weird paradox. At this moment, which calls for maximal dynamism, too much of higher education wants to resist change. Too many institutions are complacent in their passive assumption that the values of the 10 or 15 most exclusive, maybe exclusionary, institutions of higher education are the model not just for 1950 or 1980, but still for 2050 and 2080, too. I don’t think that’s right.  

As a level set, there are fewer undergraduates in the Ivy League plus five or six Ivy-like institutions in the country, fewer undergraduates at those 14-15 schools than there will be butts in the seats in “The Swamp” a couple of hundred yards from here 45 hours from now. Truly only two-tenths of 1% of the 31 million 18- to-24-year-olds in America are in the Ivy League right now. And yet we talk about those institutions and the exclusivity of those institutions as if it’s the model for everything that’s happening in higher ed. I mean no disrespect to those institutions. Many of us got our degrees there. There are a lot of people laboring and studying in those places right now, doing important things. But in the same way that in 1450 somebody seemed to be really unique by being able to be in one of the canonical classrooms where a professor could lecture from the Bible because no one else had the Bible. But by 1470 or 1490 or 1510 or surely by Halloween, 1517, with Luther at Wittenberg, all of a sudden a lot more people had access to a lot more information and a lot of knowledge. And all of a sudden, there were a lot more interesting places on Earth than just a few dozen canonical, exclusionary classrooms. So, too, we are entering an era of radically more access to information, to compute, to knowledge, and to far more opportunities for schools to differentiate by creating more meaningful places, more conversations, more discovery, more coming of age, more formation.  

This place is different. This place is better positioned. You’ve been kicking butt, outperforming many of our former peer schools. You became elite, and yet decided not to become elitist. Average SATs: well north of 1400. It’s quite something, but no one here is mostly excited by the conversation of who we get to exclude.  

We’re interested in who we can uplift. How do we serve more? How do we do more life change? This place has somehow been relatively insulated against complacency and self-satisfaction, and that’s darn attractive. I believe that this is UF’s moment to set a standard in higher education. We would like to be a model for the 21st century, land-grant university, and that kind of major undertaking can’t be done by an individual. 

It can only be done by a community, by a culture that’s built by a partnership of students and staff, faculty and Floridians more broadly. You’ve been accomplishing big things. And I believe that we can build and ramp-off of the noteworthy legacy of 170 years, but especially the last dozen or so. I believe we can transform the student experience to deliver even more value, to increase social mobility in this state, and to equip Gators to solve tomorrow’s biggest problems. We can strive toward, as the chairman said, more radical practicality. 

We can be more excellent in research. We can do more translation of that research, because not just Florida but the world needs the University of Florida’s biggest brains to be tackling our biggest challenges and riddles. It is indeed an audacious vision, and it takes a partnership of the resolved and the committed.  

And to that end, let me offer a speed round of some of the pledges I want to make to this room, to this faculty, to this board, and to the broader community. And in keeping with Melissa’s admonition, these are just appetizers, just down payments on longer conversations over the coming months and semesters and years. I offer not a whole meal here, but just something to get us started. So a lightning field.  

First, we will make our practical majors even more practical for those who are looking for practical majors. Second, we will also, though, refine and innovate our core curriculum to ensure that all students wrestle with big questions and big enduring ideas. 

We want to expose them to content that is important and durable. A lowest common denominator core doesn’t work very well for those headed into STEM need to know a lot more and better humanities than most schools provide them with. And kids who arrived here last August or will come next August, not yet understanding the quantitative revolution through which we’re living, they need to be directly introduced to that revolution. 

We need more quality and more quantity in the curriculum for everybody. And that probably requires two differentiated courses. We will vigorously defend tenure, rightly understood as a critical tool for a university of this caliber for those fields where longer-term employment agreements make the most sense. And yet we will also refine and better define how majority teaching tracks as one of many pathways for a diverse faculty can also be a high and noble and rewarding calling. 

We will better compensate and, probably more importantly, better support the best research team leaders. Critically, we will learn to hire faster. We have been given direct hiring authority and we plan to use it. We want to be able to make competitive offers and shrink the process of hiring from an academic year or a semester at fastest, we want to shrink that process to months and then weeks. We want to go out and identify the world’s greatest minds and invite them to come and join us in common cause with offers they can’t refuse. We want to buy their laboratories, hire their teams and bring them to Florida before the competition knows what hit them. We will become fast. We can commit ourselves, legislators and other electeds and the BOG, to radical transparency. 

We are blessed to be both the flagship and the land– grant university of this great state, alongside FAMU. And we take that twin responsibility seriously. To whom much is given, much is required. And we will tell the Floridians who pay our bills exactly what we spend the money on. We will tell our story. We will make it clear how research works, why research should sometimes fail in a portfolio strategy. But we want folks to know what we fund and how it will benefit the state.  

We will become more transparent in what we measure, and we will be accountable in how we work. We will pioneer new models of personalized educational delivery. We won’t be able to do this fast enough on our own. We won’t be able to stovepipe everything interesting that should happen in the next six and 12 months, not the next six and 12 years. And so we will partner far and wide, and therefore we will become faster culturally. We will promote internships and we will promote more study abroad experiences for Gators.  

And perhaps most importantly, we will work hard to live out the reality that souls cannot be compelled, only awakened and nurtured, enlightened and persuaded. We will be intellectually curious. We will challenge orthodoxy and embrace open inquiry. We will pull apart the best arguments with the best questions, and then we’ll build them back up and then we’ll start over again. We will question truth claims with epistemologies of humility. We believe that when people engage ideas critically and in good faith, we can actually increase not just understanding but empathy.  

We will reject every effort to deny agency to individuals. We don’t believe there’s anything interesting about compulsion. We reject zealotry that preaches de facto intolerance. We reject determinism that reduce humans to mere objects. We engage a wide range of opinions. We will challenge assumptions and refine arguments. We believe that free inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and good faith disagreement are indispensable to world-class research and world-class education. This university must be a place for big-hearted disagreement and open dialog because this will be our North Star. At the University of Florida, our work begins with the recognition of universal human dignity. As a nation, we need to do better. At Florida, we will seek to model some of this. The imperialism of mental health categories as superior to all moral categories has very likely led to a net social worsening of mental health. We can do better.  

We aspire here to promote resiliency and strength in our students. We want students who are tough enough and smart enough and compassionate enough to engage ideas they didn’t already hold. We know that they’re going to enter a world where they’ll have to encounter people that don’t already agree with them. We should start learning how to do it together as a community while they’re here. We do not deny agency to any members of the community by reducing them to some of their superficial characteristics. 

People are not widgets, and a university isn’t a machine that builds components. This is a garden that cultivates ideas and souls to grow toward the sun. The University of Florida exists to educate. Education is a higher calling than power politics or ideological zealotry, both of which are predictable and predictably boring. This is not a seminary, as important as seminaries can be. We are not in the business of catechizing, as important as catechisms can be. A university is not in the business of advancing either a theology of the right, or a theology of the left. A university is not in the business of saving or damning souls. We’re in the business of teaching people to be more curious, to ask better questions, and to solve more problems for their neighbors. 

We will do the hard work of learning, which requires honesty, self-reflection, self-criticism, and together, therefore, we can pursue excellence. At the end of the day, this is a community I have discovered of gritty pragmatists who want to build, create, discover, solve and serve. We do this for each other, for our system and our state.  

We’ve talked a lot about what is new in this, but I think it’s also critically important in a room like this, under a century old tower, and with so many folks who’ve served so many decades, it’s also a great opportunity to recognize that so much of what is new in our mission is not new. And so, over the course of the last month, I went back. Twelve people have had this calling before me, and I went back and was able to read 10 of the inauguration addresses that preceded today. And in it, I found echoes in our community of many, many important aspects of what it means to steward just for a time, but recognize the echoes before and the descendants that will come after know that we together need to pass it forward. And so I want to give you just a couple of insights over the course of the last century plus from those ten prior inaugurals.  

Nearly a century ago, President Andrew Sledd reminded us that students should understand the work will never be easy. Quote, “An education is, and is of right, a costly thing. And it ought to be so, not chiefly in funds, but in time, in toil, in determined, persevering, long-continued effort.”  

Then jumping forward to the dawn of the information age, President J. Wayne Reitz implored us to embrace the complexity of education. He asked, “Do we need to sacrifice liberal education in the interests of professional or the technical alone? I believe not. Our ever-expanding technology and the increasing complexity of our society bring forth for us demands, not just for greater numbers of timely information on our daily problems, but we also need to learn to emphasize the aesthetic and the humanistic next to the practical and the technical.” 

Then speaking on the eve of the digital revolution, President Criser asked us to think of our mission. And in particular, what do students need in a disrupted age. And he said in his inaugural, “Our charge should be this : We should not be preparing our graduates for their first employment, but for their last. For their many callings.”  

Bernie, who has given me good wisdom, he spoke consistently about the path of discovery being something that is not abstract, but real-world. Neighbor-loving. He said, “If you remember nothing else from me today, I want you to know this. When the University of Florida talks about discovery, what we’re talking about is solving problems, the troubling problems. When the University of Florida talks about discovery, we’re talking about people. We’re talking about making a difference for the people of this state.”  

And Kent, who has been incredibly kind to me. It was a surprise when I was courted for this. And so there were a number of moments over the course of 60 days or so when it seemed like a pretty random conversation to be having. And Kent was someone in whom I could confide and from whom I received perennial wisdom in our short relationship. He is a guy who spoke so compellingly about the land grant mission that he said, “We need to learn to embrace a comprehensive land grant mission. This is not just about agriculture. It is about all 67 counties in the state of Florida where the University of Florida wants to serve. That’s what it means to be a modern land-grant institution.”  

As I was biking from Dasburg over to Tigert this morning, it was cold, but I was reflecting on this day. And I got into the office, and no one was there yet. And of course, my text went off and it was my boss. And I looked down at my phone and Mori, besides calling it game day, gave me these three great insights. He said, “The abundance of opportunities at this place and in this state are breathtaking. The headaches are going to be plentiful. And the opportunity to be a part of a team that pursues life-change on behalf of the students already here and the students yet to come, that is priceless. And even though it was only a text, I could hear that Iranian immigrant accent lingering the word: priceless. The headaches will be plentiful, the opportunities are abundant, and the opportunity to do this together is indeed priceless. Archimedes, the ancient mathematician, famously said that with the right lever, with the right fulcrum, he could move the world. Well, the 22 million citizens of this gorgeous state have in this institution the right leover, the right tool, so that we together, the University of Florida, can move the world. 

We believe that our north of half a million alums of Gator Nation are already changing the world. And going forward, this place can promote even more human flourishing, even more innovation to the benefit of our neighbors. And to you all, I would just like to say a sincere thank you for the opportunity to be teamed with you. It is my honor and privilege. 

Go Gators.