Graduate School Commencement Speaker Speech

Graham Carr

President and Vice Chancellor | Professor of History at Concordia University

Good evening. It’s an honor to be with you.

I’m thrilled to be among the first to congratulate the graduate students of the Class of 2025 on your success. Bravo! Well done!

It’s especially meaningful for me to be part of today’s ceremony. It takes me back to when I first arrived on the Orono campus in fall 1979 to begin my PhD in history as an international student from Canada.

Forty-five years ago, the world was a very different place. A month after I got to Orono, militants loyal to the newly installed revolutionary regime in Iran stormed the US embassy in Tehran. 

They took dozens of Americans hostage. In January 1980, happier news broke when we learned that six of those hostages, who had been hidden by Canadian embassy officials, had escaped to Montreal thanks to clandestine US-Canada collaboration.

That moment brought an extraordinary outpouring of bilateral friendship. Maine has always had a close relationship with Canada — in fact, many of you probably have cross-border roots. Today, I think back on that moment somewhat wistfully, as relations between our countries have unexpectedly taken a harder turn.

Geopolitics is just one example of how the world has changed. It’s equally stunning to see how technology has transformed, augmented and disrupted our lives.

Personalized computing was in its infancy when I was a grad student. Microsoft and Apple were practically startups. I wrote my dissertation on a Smith Corona electric typewriter. I was pretty proud of that machine, because it had a 1K memory!

My dissertation research took me to Toronto, where I would send drafts of each chapter by post to my supervisor and mentor, the late Bob Babcock, who would then mail back his comments to me.

This worked fine until Canadian postal workers decided to go on strike in 1981. The strike lasted 42 days, messing up my thesis correspondence with Bob, and forcing me to find a part-time job because my scholarship checks were stuck in the mail!

I share this vignette because I can laugh about it now, but also because it highlights what a different world we live in today.

In 1979, the Human Genome project — one of the highest-impact scientific research projects of all time — was still more than a decade away. There was no Crispr, gene editing or synthetic biology. The phrase “personalized medicine” had not yet been coined. In 1981, a new disease linked with immunodeficiency was reported in the US. The following year that disease came to be known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS.

In the time since I was a grad student the world has experienced unprecedented human population growth, movement, and displacement, with a corresponding decline in plant and wildlife biodiversity. Global temperatures have risen relentlessly. Natural disasters occur more and more often, ravaging rich and poor countries alike.

Both the world’s bold discoveries and its gravest challenges have made humanity more interconnected. We see this through the evolution–and disruption–of economic supply chains, the proliferation of real-time communications and, as we learned during the pandemic, the spread of epidemic disease.

Graduate education and decades of university research have played a critical role in enabling the world to move forward on many fronts by generating new and improving existing technologies, building and optimizing different skills, pushing the frontiers of knowledge and challenging received wisdom, all while professionalizing our approach to solving grand challenges.

Of course, as a historian, I recognize that there have been convulsive moments in every phase of human development: periods of protracted and crippling wars; of revolutions agrarian, industrial and class; of civil rights activism, economic depression, famine and political authoritarianism; as well as radical avant-gardism in culture and the arts. The difference today is that epic, seismic events happen with unprecedented scope, scale, frequency and velocity. So much so that it can all seem completely overwhelming.

Which begs the question: how are we, the beneficiaries of a university education— a privilege that is frankly out of reach for most of humanity — poised to respond?

When I was a graduating student, the consensus was that universities functioned as vehicles of opportunity and social mobility. They were considered repositories and transmitters of knowledge for the benefit of all. Universities were revered as havens for thoughtful inquiry and dialogue, drivers of discovery, innovation and creativity, not to mention — as is certainly the case for the University of Maine — anchor institutions for their towns, cities and states.

Going to university offered every graduate a chance to get ahead. Today, that pathway is open to more people than ever before. Women and individuals from disadvantaged or marginalized communities are earning degrees in record numbers with the result that every profession and every field of inquiry can benefit from the influx of new and diverse ideas, talent and leadership.

In the past, it was pretty much an uncontested belief that graduates from research and professional programs like yours were uniquely positioned to make a difference, sometimes even a transformative difference, in their communities and beyond.

As a university president, I believe deeply in higher education’s positive impact on society. I’ve witnessed how universities can change students’ lives and equip them with the tools to better the world around them.

What’s more, I assume that all of you share this belief. Otherwise, why would you have devoted the past few years to developing professional skills as social workers, educators, or business administrators? Why would you have put in the long hours doing lab or field work in forestry, agriculture, engineering, or in the health, life or climate sciences? Why would you have toiled away, often in lonely circumstances, in the library or archives to better understand and demonstrate the relevance of art and history, or the impact of social science?

Those questions bring me to the point in this address when I’m supposed to give you advice.

One of the privileges of being a university president is that I’ve heard a lot of amazing convocation speeches over the years. With good reason, they tend to accentuate the same points: follow your passion; foster a network of support; expect failure on the road to success; show humility; be adaptable, flexible, and open-minded in the face of change and in the pursuit of new opportunities. All that advice makes sense, and I’m not going to try to better what others have previously said.

Instead, I have an ask for you: a simple ask for a complicated time.

I’m sure you realize that not everyone in the US — or Canada, for that matter — feels generously about universities today. Polling data indicate that trust in universities is declining. We aren’t quite as low in public esteem as politicians, lawyers, and journalists, but the trend line isn’t good. Some of the most venerable institutions in higher education are under attack. Some scientists fear being muzzled. And there seems to be a diminishing respect for expertise.

So here’s my ask: when you leave this ceremony today and begin the next important installment in your life, how will you honor that parchment in your hand? 

Begin by taking a moment to reflect on where our world would be without universities. Imagine where we would be without their commitment to unfettered inquiry, creativity, and tolerance of difference. Where would our world be without the thought and energy universities bring to improving technology, human health, and the environment? The list goes on.

Year over year, generation after generation, universities contribute vitally to improving the world in which we live, and to which we aspire. Universities are evergreen institutions. Every year, they welcome thousands of new students to their campuses while graduating thousands more into society at large. That evergreen promise is one of the distinguishing features of universities. 

Universities are places of hope. As graduates, you symbolize that hope and you do honor to your degree by championing what universities did for you and do for society.

Something that each of you embodies by virtue of your research and professional accomplishments is that at the core of the transformational power of learning, at the core of research and innovation, lies a commitment to evidence, to proof capable of surviving rigorous testing. There are lots of apostles of misinformation and disinformation in the world today. But as university graduates, you can be champions for the evidence-based thinking, for the hard questions, and the thrill of discovery that earned you your degree.

There’s no better measure of what a university delivers for society than what its graduates go on to do. So be bold, make change happen, and be the best possible ambassadors for UMaine, the university that equipped you, that equipped me, for professional success.

The world will change unrecognizably in the next 45 years. Universities must play their part as agents of that change. But their impact will be even more powerful with each of you as champions, ambassadors and vectors of hope for a better world ahead.

Thank you for listening. And best of success in whatever you do!