 Thank you so much Provost Siegel. Thank you all for being here. Today we celebrate this your first day of classes in college. For getting up, finding your classes, and maybe getting your first assignment, let's have a round of applause for all of you class of 2023. Give it up for yourself. The lead up to this day involved much effort and many people and many departures from home. Perhaps Gloria Anzaldoa's words, I am a turtle wherever I go, I carry home on my back, echoed in your minds as you and your families loaded up backpacks, put boxes into vehicles, and came to Fairfield University from your homes to build another home here. Our commuter students will do this each day when they come to campus from home. Our international students traveled from afar leaving their home countries. You are turtles who carry your homes on your backs. We welcome you all and look forward to being welcomed by you. How do we enact this seemingly simple and commonplace gesture of welcoming? Fairfield University's Jesuit tradition offers us a particular way of engaging this question. Radical hospitality. Radical hospitality is the fourth pillar of our diversity and inclusive excellence mission statement, this piece of paper that you just received. Radical hospitality emerges from Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit tradition. Ignatius advanced the idea of global citizenship long before there was a name for it. He charged his fellow Jesuits to venture out and live in the far reaches of the world. They encountered unknown cultures, languages, and religions from China to India and across Central and South America. Mobility then characterizes Jesuit life. Geronimo Nadal, one of Loyola's lieutenants, embraced the spirit. Instead of hiding behind walls, Nadal believed that we find God in the world through the journey and by this the whole world becomes our house. Nadal may have found a kindred spirit and Gloria Anzaldowa. She wrote that staying home and not venturing out from our own group comes from woundedness and stagnates our growth. This venturing out Anzaldowa tells us is a form of activism that is the courage to risk leaving home. Packing your bags and like a turtle carrying home on your back here to Fairfield was an act of courage. This move sets you on the path to making the world your home. Hospitality, if one is always on the move, then shifts from the more common practice of welcoming others to your home of receiving to sending. This dynamic relationship involves welcoming others to know you as you are welcomed by them. This moment of knowing and being known is one of shared vulnerability created by the fluid motion of sending and receiving. Hospitality from this view is radical in both ways it is meant in both of its meanings. The first meaning of radical is extreme, even revolutionary. Radical hospitality refers to a fluid dynamic between sender and receiver that equalizes relationships between people. Consider for a moment how many times you welcome someone and were welcomed by others today alone. Now extend that to any given day in your life. This reflects changing power relations that generate the equality that leads to equity as sender and receiver ebb and flow for us all every day. This equalizing factor arising from the dynamic nature of radical hospitality is revolutionary. It challenges the inequity, inequality and exclusivity characterizing our world today. This practice also reflects the second meaning of radical from its Latin meaning the root as it shows how rooted hospitality is in the human experience. One aspect of this rootedness is the vulnerability that emerges from engaging the unknown through the practice of radical hospitality. Each of you experience this moment many times over the past few days. Whether it was when you entered your first college class, started living with a new roommate or walked into the tully for a meal. Perhaps it was your first encounter with one of those turkeys roaming our campus who quite frankly can be a bit confrontational. Shared vulnerability when encountering new people's places and non human beings marks the human experience. Hospitality greeting others sharing a meal enables us to navigate these moments of vulnerability when we may feel alone or fear rejection. When we extend our hand and greeting, we reach beyond what is safe across a divide of difference and into the unknown. We reach for the modus in that moment. Hospitality as a fundamental feature of human life animates the Jesuit impulse to reach for the modus the more. Reaching one's fullest potential entails reaching as far as possible beyond your given context. We reach beyond our current selves with an openness to embracing the unknown. Jesuits enact this through education, literally establishing schools across the globe committed to academic excellence. Pursuing knowledge as essential to membership in a global community grounds radical hospitality in our Jesuit tradition. Education was certainly radical or extreme, even revolutionary over 400 years ago when the Jesuits were founded. At that time, generally only the elite could read and write. Jesuits then and now invite people's globally to learn within their own communities where the Jesuits in turn are invited to learn from that community's cultural practices. This act bridges the boundaries between cultures. This act brings diverse peoples into an educational endeavor marked by shared vulnerability as we reach together into the unknown for the modus. Education as radical hospitality is revolutionary by embracing diversity through the inclusive practice of knowing and being known. In October of 2012, I was invited to go to the East African country of Tanzania to help build Fairfields partnership with Loyola High School, a Jesuit school in Tanzania's largest city, Dara Salam. I had never been to an African nation state. As a political scientist, I studied the United States and I did not have substantive training in African politics. My initial response was like a turtle to pull into my shell and stay home. Yet I am also a political theorist. Theory from the ancient Greek theory means to see. To see is to engage in the modus, to reach for the more through the pursuit of knowledge. One way we do this is to visit other places and engage with diverse cultures to better understand our own as one among many in the global community. I accepted the invitation and began a journey that has led me to think of Tanzania as a home and to know the world quite differently. This pursuit of knowledge drove each of you to have the courage to venture beyond your home out into the world to join this community. Reaching for the modus, the more drives this pursuit at our Jesuit institution. But what does that actually mean? How do we do it? And most importantly, perhaps, why approach your university experience from the perspective of radical hospitality? Radical hospitality involves three steps. Remembering, welcoming, belonging. Let's think about these three steps in terms of building our shared community driven by the pursuit of excellence. Thinking about radical hospitality in this way on this day, the very first day of classes that begins your college career seems an opportune moment in which to do so. Remembering, Bell Hooks invites us to remember our ancestral past that for her took shape at her grandmother's house. There, her family took refuge in a place to recover and renew, to remember slavery as shaping their everyday reality in the United States in order to recharge, to continue to resist and struggle for liberation, for freedom. Like Hooks, we all have family histories, which, like a turtle, we carry on our backs. Remembering that our histories shape who we are today can help us to understand people very different from us. We can recall Dino's story from the Fairfield Slavery Project that suggests that she and Rebecca Jennings formed some bond of friendship despite being slave and master. We remember that Jennings Beach here in Fairfield is named for the slave owning Jennings family. Remembering what came before us allows us to understand our now to move toward a better future. Remembering is also key to learning. It grounds our pursuit of knowledge. There are lots of things to remember, equations, historical figures, anatomical parts. You may ask when your biology professor requires you to memorize all the parts of the human body, why do it when I can Google it? Remembering starts the move from gathering information to co-producing knowledge. You begin to integrate new information into how you understand the world. In that process, you should challenge what you think you already know. You also develop the skills to discern fact from fiction. In a world where facts, data, and evidence are regularly called into question, remembering what you know and being open to challenging it creates a toehold amid the daily deluge of accurate and inaccurate information. Welcoming. Embrace the challenge of learning new ideas from a welcoming posture of understanding rather than judging. Sit next to those ideas that most challenge you, the way like Claudia Rankin who describes taking the seat next to the black man sitting alone on the crowded train. Get comfortable enough with those ideas that you can call them family. As Rankin came to call the man on the train, even though they never said a word to each other. The experience of sitting with those challenging ideas will transform how you know the world. This does not mean you have to believe all perspectives. The goal is to welcome them and to be welcomed by them by exercising intellectual curiosity. Be George Yamazawa, who has a little boy despite his mama telling him to get out of that dining room of their family's Japanese restaurant in Durham, North Carolina, keeps going out there where he encounters stairs from people who do not share the culture of his immigrant family. Notice when you start shutting down fear expressing your viewpoint or asking a question when you stay out of that dining room. Try your best to open up welcome the challenge and invite others into the spaces of shared vulnerability where we engage with difficult ideas. Be that turtle who carries your history on your back as you travel through places that transform who you are while giving you a sure footing in your identity. As George Yamazawa sums it up, I must stay true no matter what I do. Belonging, let's break that term down. Be longing to exist with a desire for the more. We come full circle now to the Modus. Belonging to a university community such as ours welcomes you to reach for the more, not to accept what is known as given to push the boundaries of current ideas and then push past them to speculate and to innovate. Here is where we co-produce knowledge. Here is where imagination is let out to play as we stretch past the known to the unknown. Imagination of function of the soul and Zaldua tells us has the capacity to extend us beyond the confines of our skin, situation and condition so that we can choose our responses. Doing so means that diverse views are not barriers to our way of knowing the world and who we are in it. Diversity is the way to do this through an inclusivity that takes into account the whole planet and embraces our humanist manifest in all its forms. Remembering, welcoming, belonging. These three steps of radical hospitality are critical to engaging in academic communities and the pursuit of knowledge that makes education so central to democracy. Democracy demands engagement grounded in diversity. This is often a chaotic process, one that throughout much of human history made democracy the most dangerous form of government and often the most fragile. Democracy requires natural bridges which are fragile and ever changing yet strong and resilient like those and Zaldua uses to illustrate how we navigate our differences by crossing cultural chasms. Democracy demands that we act as bridge builders and crossers who begin by sharing our stories and listening to those of others with empathy aimed at understanding. When I graduated from college I joined Teach for America. At the age of 20 I was placed as a fifth grade school teacher at St. Alphonse Elementary School in the small rural town of Greenwell Springs, Louisiana. In four days I landed my teaching job an apartment, a roommate and a car while I figured out how to set up a classroom for 30, 11 year olds. I like a turtle wanted to carry my back right home but I stayed. Frequently teachers, parents and even students called me a foreigner because I did not understand their culture. Befuddled, I explained that I was from the United States. They would reply, maybe but you're from the north specifically Detroit. Never before had I known so clearly what it meant to be a stranger in what I thought was my own land. I chose to engage to learn about Louisiana culture, my fellow teachers' talents, my students' lives and how they saw the world. My fifth grade students became their culture's ambassadors. They taught me how to eat crawfish about the baby and the king cake and how to survive weeks of Mardi Gras operates. Okay, that wasn't that hard. We learned from and taught each other each day. We built empathy bridges on shared understandings that empowered us to cross a vast cultural divide between peoples from the same country. This experience illustrates how radical hospitality can empower us to build communities upon difference as necessary to ensuring democracy's future. Radical hospitality is a revolutionary idea necessary for us to live in democratic communities amid an increasingly diversifying globalized world. This practice based on the fundamental human act of welcoming and being welcomed advances democracy by requiring that we reject retreating into our shells and behind walls. Radical hospitality empowers us to engage with the rich diversities that make up human life. Education is a cornerstone for democratic society. Education balances the stability of knowledge with the capacity to navigate difference. Education offers an experience shared among different peoples. Radical hospitality as a groundwork for education pushes us to the horizons of knowing as we experience the pull of tradition. Like the turtle then we move between land and water sending and receiving welcoming and being welcomed all the while carrying our homes on our backs. We in these moments reach for the modest. The more is our shared vulnerability transforms into empowerment for positive engagement advanced by remembering welcoming and belonging. The practice of radical hospitality. Thank you.