December Commencement 2025

President Michael I. Kotlikoff

As prepared for presentation
Sunday, Dec. 21, 2025

Thank you, Provost Bala.

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

I’m so pleased to be here with all of you, celebrating your achievements, and marking this milestone in your lives: your transition from Cornell students, to Cornell alumni.

And as we celebrate our graduates, I also want to recognize some of the many people who made this day possible.

Starting with the parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, families and friends who have supported you on this journey — some of whom are celebrating with us from afar, and over 2,000 of whom have made the trek up to Ithaca to celebrate with us here in Barton Hall.

Ithaca, as we all know, is famous for being warm and sunny, except on days that fall between September and June. So, when someone chooses Cornell as their travel destination on Dec. 21 — the winter solstice, and the shortest and darkest day of the year — there is usually a very, very good reason.

Today, we have 475 terrific reasons, and all of them are grateful.

Graduates, let’s have a round of applause for all of our intrepid visitors.
None of us would be here today if not for the amazing Cornell staff who keep our students fed, our roads and sidewalks shoveled, our labs and libraries running, and who, every year, perform the Herculean task of turning historic Barton Hall from a 900-seat exam hall where you could hear a pin drop on Thursday, into a Commencement hall ready for celebrations on Sunday.

And one last recognition: for our faculty. The advisors, teachers, and mentors who have pushed you and challenged you, taught you to think more deeply and see more clearly, and provided you with the foundational knowledge that you will need to make your mark on the world.

We have some pretty impressive faculty here at Cornell, across all kinds of fields. Some of them are here as regular faculty, some as visiting faculty, and some we drag up to Ithaca by any means possible.

One of the faculty members in the last category is the British writer and comedian John Cleese, who about 20 years ago ran out the number of years we could keep him as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large, forcing us to cook up a new title: Provost’s Visiting Professor.

Being the provost at the time, and therefore guilty by association, I got to spend some time with him and introduce him at his last major event at Bailey Hall, in 2017. And on that occasion, John mentioned the first observation he had made when he started coming to Cornell in the late 1990s. He said:

“I remember being very impressed by the students, everywhere. They had a real pride in being at Cornell. They felt really good about it. And when I said, ‘Well, give me some criticisms,’ they had to think for a bit, and they said, ‘They work us too hard, of course.’ I said, ‘Really?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ they said, ‘The work is very hard.’”

Cleese then shared this observation with some of our professors: “I told them, ‘The students think that you work them too hard.’ The professors said, ‘Well, we do.’ I thought this was very odd. I said, ‘Well, if they think you work them too hard, and you think so too, are we moving toward some sort of plan here?’”

The line got a laugh, of course. But Cleese clearly understood the plan already.
It’s been 160 years since Cornell was founded. And over that time, we’ve developed an earned reputation for a certain approach to education — one that starts with the assumption that an education isn’t something you receive, but something you work for.

As a start-up, things were pretty tough at Cornell in those early years. What is now the Arts Quad was then a cow pasture, and students were well advised to watch where they put their feet.

Two years of military sciences and military drill were mandatory parts of the curriculum — and that mandatory drill was conducted, you guessed it, on the Arts Quad.

The roads were not paved. The campus was very high up on a very large hill. And just getting to Ithaca, from anywhere, really did feel like an odyssey.

Yet the students came, from near and far — drawn to an institution where what mattered wasn’t where you came from, but what you did when you got here.

Where students were admitted, as they are today, based on merit. And not excluded, as they were elsewhere, on the basis of irrelevant characteristics like religion, sex, or skin color.

Where students came, as they do today, seeking a certain kind of education — the kind you work hard for, that prepares you to make a mark on the world.

And just as Cornell has a deserved reputation, for a certain kind of education — we also have a deserved reputation, for a certain kind of graduate.

People who have knowledge and expertise, but also a certain measure of humility. Who feel a sense of responsibility and commitment, to the people around them, and to their communities. Who feel, as Ezra Cornell wrote in 1848, that “the satisfaction of being right and doing right is ample reward for the little extra exertion required to accomplish so desirable an object.”

Acquiring a capable mind — one able to assess evidence and work with data, to understand and convey complex ideas and situations, to evaluate new information in context, and to listen to and learn from other points of view — requires training your mind. And that’s as true today, in an era of artificial intelligence, as it was in 1865, the era of the slate pencil.

There are no shortcuts to a capable intellect. A Cornell education is rigorous, and it is demanding, for exactly that reason. Because it is designed to prepare you, not only for your careers, but for your lives, whatever paths they may take — to equip you with the capacity, and the resilience, and the flexibility of mind, to take on anything that lies ahead.

Every generation of Cornell students, from our founding, has graduated into a world different, in real and fundamental ways, from the world it was a generation before. And each generation’s challenges have been, in their own ways, unprecedented — whether through wars or pandemics, financial or political crises, or tectonic shifts in technology, society, culture, or identity.

And in a world where the only constant is change — know that your Cornell education has equipped you with the tools and the capacity, the habits of life and the habits of mind, to meet the future with confidence. To innovate and create, to contribute and to thrive, to pursue the path you choose, and know the satisfactions of a life of purpose — a life of doing right, and doing it well.

Congratulations to all of you. And I look forward to seeing you all at Reunion, held in warm and sunny Ithaca — in June.