December Commencement 2024

by Michael I. Kotlikoff, Interim President

As prepared for presentation
Sunday, Dec. 22, 2024

Thank you, Professor McLeod.

Welcome to our families, welcome to our friends, and congratulations, graduates!

I am so very pleased to be here with all of you, celebrating your successes and accomplishments, and your transition from Cornell students, to Cornell alumni.

And as we celebrate our graduates, I also want to recognize everyone who traveled from across the state, across the country, and around the world to be part of this milestone. Along with today’s 470 graduates, we welcome close to 2,000 of the people who love them most: people who chose to travel on the shortest and darkest day of the year to sunny Ithaca, New York, to be part of this moment, and this celebration.

Let’s give them all a round of applause.

I also want to recognize the faculty who have contributed so much to where you are today. The advisors, teachers, and mentors who made sure that your college education was a Cornell education.

I’ve always felt that there’s something particularly Cornellian about a December commencement. And by that I don’t just mean that we have it when it is dark, gray, and freezing cold outside.

It’s that a December commencement, recognizing graduates who completed their degrees in August or December, celebrates Cornellians whose journeys didn’t necessarily follow a standard path. They sped on ahead or took some detours, encountered obstacles and found a way around them, or chose a new direction to explore. Our graduates today are students who, in one way or another, did things differently—who charted a course with their own compass, instead of following someone else’s map.

And every one of our December graduates—whether graduate or undergraduate, whatever degree they receive today—exemplifies, each in their own way, the particular spirit of Cornell.

To paraphrase Cornell historian Carl Becker, universities don’t have souls, but they do have personalities. And from its founding, the personality of Cornell has always leaned more toward the curious and the adventurous, and, I think it’s safe to say, generally away from a willingness to do what everyone else thinks they should.

(I’m seeing some knowing nods from our families.)

Cornell’s very first graduating class, the class of 1869, consisted of just eight members—all of them transfers, like many of you. But instead of transferring to an Ivy League university their parents and friends had probably heard of, our first students had a very different experience.

If their parents and friends had heard of Cornell at all, it was most likely in attack ads, newspaper editorials, or Sunday-morning sermons warning against that godless and dangerous new place up at Ithaca.

Why? Because Andrew Dickson White and Ezra Cornell, the two New York state senators who founded the university, had very publicly declared their intention to found an institution that would be, not just a little bit, but radically different, from any university that had been established before.

With a plan that embraced the democratic ideals of our nation, in ways that the founding fathers definitely did not have in mind.

Challenging existing views of class and privilege, race and gender—along with existing ideas of what should and should not be taught in a university.

Theirs would be a university independent of any religious affiliation; open equally to men and women, whatever their color, background, social status, or ability to pay; a place of low walls, and high ambitions.

And as if all that weren’t bad enough: it would provide all of its students with whatever education its independent faculty chose to provide—including not just the classical curriculum, but also practical studies, like agriculture and engineering, not seen as university-worthy at the time.

That plan for a university doesn’t seem too outrageous today, now that it has become the gold standard for research universities around the world.

But at the time, these departures from the accepted pattern of American education—departures in not just one or two particulars, but really in their entirety—were seen as not just inadvisable, but frankly dangerous; a threat to the students, and to society.

My favorite attack op-ed from Cornell’s early days called it “a school where hayseeds and greasy mechanics are taught to hoe potatoes, pitch manure, and be dry nurses to steam engines.”

One public hearing in the New York state senate lambasted it as “a wild project” and “a selfish scheme” and denounced Ezra Cornell as “seeking to erect a monument to himself.” Cornell, who was trying to start the university largely with his own money, was in the room at the time, sitting next to Andrew White, both of them probably taking a lot of deep, calming breaths. As White recalled it later, Cornell turned to him at one point in the tirade and said, “If I could think of any other way in which half a million dollars would do as much good to the State, I would give the legislators no more trouble.”

(This scene is a particularly comforting one for the modern university president. This is not the first time that the value and values of higher education have been criticized, nor will it be the last.)

Almost 160 years later, there’s a lot of reason to be glad that Ezra Cornell and Andrew White didn’t yield to criticism, and adjust their plans along better-trodden paths—and instead doggedly pursued the insanely ambitious goal of an institution where any person could find instruction in any study.

Thanks to our radical thinkers and wild schemers, our greasy hayseeds and engine nursemaids, the world today has air conditioning and oral contraceptives, the implantable pacemaker and the digital computer, Charlotte’s Web and The Elements of Style—not to mention commercially grown blueberries, the biofortified sweet potato, the turkey you probably enjoyed at Thanksgiving, and, for better or for worse, chicken nuggets.

But also, Workday and Salesforce, Moderna and Wayfair, innovations in nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, the exploration of our world and the universes beyond—all have grown from Cornell roots, along with the countless and uncountable achievements and impact of our hundreds of thousands of alumni—the ranks of whom you join today.

But perhaps Cornell’s greatest contribution, as Edmund Ezra Day, Cornell’s fifth president, put it, was a “spirit of educational adventure, which at its founding was the first revolt from the accustomed ways of higher education in America and whose innovations have swept the field and become traditional.”

It was the idea that students would learn best, and ultimately achieve more, when taught in an environment of both freedom and responsibility—the freedom to explore wherever their curiosity led them, coupled with the responsibility of an academic mission.

The personality of Cornell today is a personality passed down to us by Ezra Cornell, a “tough-minded idealist” who found his greatest joy in helping others, who wanted his students to find and pursue that joy, and who expected them to give the greatest return on his investment.

It’s probably why we’ve developed, over the years, a reputation for rigor—the tendency to demand more of our students than might be demanded elsewhere. At Cornell, our students tell me, the courses are more difficult, the material more challenging, and the expectations higher.

(Not that you were complaining.)

And at Cornell, our faculty tell me, our students rise spectacularly to meet those expectations: with open minds, an endless curiosity, and the work ethic recognized by Cornellians everywhere as the right way to get things done.

You didn’t come to Cornell because it would be easy. You came because you wanted a Cornell education: one that would push you and strengthen you; that would equip you for any challenge; that would enable you to contribute, and prepare you to lead.

Today, we celebrate your achievement.

Many of you, over your years at Cornell, have walked through the Andrew Dickson White Memorial Gate—the gate down on Eddy Street that once marked the transition between town and campus.

On the side of it is an inscription, borrowed from a Latin inscription on the gate of the University of Padua. It reads:

So enter that daily thou mayest become more learned and thoughtful;

So depart that daily thou mayest become more useful to thy country and mankind.

Whatever path brought you to Cornell, and to today, all of you entered to become more learned and thoughtful.

And today, as you depart, it is my hope that all of you will seek and find your own way, a way that will be entirely your own, to be more useful to your countries and to humanity—to do, in the words of Ezra Cornell, “the greatest good.”

May you continue to carry your Cornell ethos, and that spirit of educational adventure, wherever your curiosity guides you.

Congratulations.