 This year, when I say I'm happy to be here, I'm not just making small talk. If you're like me, you're happy to be anywhere after the year we've all been through. I wish we were over in Elliott Hall, celebrating your achievements individually as only Purdue does among schools our size. But this beats the virtual version we were forced to in 2020 and marks a long step back on the path to fully normal life. As we've never done an outdoor commencement before, we may have gotten a few things wrong. For one thing, way out here on the 50 yard line, it feels like we carried that social distance thing a little far. Well, however well it goes, like everything about your senior year, it'll be one for the history books. For all the trouble and downsides, there can be some real value in living through a time like this. For decades to come, scholars and ordinary citizens alike will look back on your senior year, trying to identify its consequences and imagine what lives so disrupted were like. As they do so, they'll know more than we can now about the results of the choices today's leaders made. They will reach judgments with the benefit of hindsight about the wisdom and maturity with which our nation handled this challenge in this particular pandemic. Odds are, not all those judgments will be favorable. Time will tell. An ability to comprehend and work with complex facts and data has always been part of a Purdue education. At least since the industrial age, that's been an essential for a useful life of the kind at which Boilermakers excel. But that's never been nearly so true as today. Massive amounts of information are being collected intentionally by us and silently by the machines we invent and use in daily life. Interpreting its meaning and discovering patterns within it is perhaps the most important skill in the economy of 2021. Our faculty has determined that data analysis, as we now call it, should be as universal a part of a Boilermaker education as English composition. You will leave this stadium able to evaluate statistics and whether they are significant or meaningless. You'll know better than to confuse correlation with causation. You'll look at decisions critically and holistically, understanding that any objective pursued too far eventually yields diminishing returns and is not worth their cost. That just as all medicines have side effects, almost all actions produce collateral consequences, often collateral damage. It doesn't stretch a point to say that we wouldn't be meeting here today without those skills. Keeping Purdue open last fall so that you could stay on schedule and graduate today required the daily examination of, it required the daily examination of COVID-19 infection rates and patterns of its spread on and around the campus. Prior to that, the decision to reopen at all involved a reading of the available data which showed even then that people your age were at far less risk from the virus than from a host of other dangers. Starting soon, these decisions will be yours to make. In businesses you start or join, in causes and what you feel called to enlist, or in that most important of all organizations, the families, I hope you will form. Wherever they are, the very essence of your coming leadership roles will lie in making hard choices. After weighing all the options, the competing priorities and the uncertainties that even the biggest databases cannot totally eliminate. Others will look to you to choose. The risk of failure, of a hit to one's reputation, or just that the gains don't outweigh the costs. All these can deter or paralyze a person out of fulfilling the responsibility someone has entrusted to them. Should I make this investment or husband my cash? Take that job offer or stay where I'm comfortable. Engage in this debate or sit silently. Choose this life partner or play it safe. This last year, many of your elders failed this fundamental test of leadership. They let their understandable human fear of uncertainty overcome their duty to balance all the interests for which they were responsible. They hid behind the advice of experts in one field, but ignored the warnings of experts in other realms that they might do harm beyond the good they hope to accomplish. Sometimes they let what might be termed the mad pursuit of zero, in this case, zero risk of anyone contracting the virus to block out other competing concerns like the protection of mental health, the educational needs of small children, or the survival of small businesses. Pursuing one goal to the utter exclusion of all others is not to make a choice, but to run from it. It's not leadership, it's abdication. I feel confident your Purdue preparation won't let you fall prey to it. But there's a companion quality you'll need to be the leaders you can be. That's the willingness to take risks, not reckless ones, but the risks that still remain after all the evidence has been considered. Great societies before us tended to look backward for their inspiration to locate their golden ages in the past. Here, our eyes have always been forward, but now signs abound of Americans losing that eagerness to move ahead boldly. Before the virus visited us, there were already troubling signs that fearfulness was beginning to erode the spirit of adventure, the willingness to take considered risks on which this nation's greatness was built and from which all progress originates. Rates of business startups moving in pursuit of a better job or the strongest of all bets on the future, having children, all have fallen sharply in recent years. And now there are warnings that the year 2020 may have weakened that spirit further. As early as April of last year, researchers at the Federal Reserve of St. Louis documented the quote, belief-scarring effects of COVID-19. Psychologists proved a long time ago that we humans tend to overestimate how common, terrible events are because they are terrible. We're more sure to hear about them and we trick ourselves into believing they are far more likely than they really are. Now we learn that such misconceptions can be long-lasting, the scarring effect that the Fed's economists tell us, quote, a persistent change of beliefs about the probability of an extreme negative shock, producing long-lived responses to transitory events, especially extreme unlikely ones. Fortunately, Boilermakers don't scar easily. If Amelia Earhart had been intimidated by uncertainty, we wouldn't know her name. If our recent board chair, Keith Crock, had stayed within the safe confines of a giant corporation's career ladder, the world would not enjoy the huge efficiency breakthroughs of Ariba and DocuSign. If Neil Armstrong, Gus Grissom, and more than a score more Purdue astronauts had run from risk, humanity's knowledge of its universe would be far short of our current boundaries. In the most jarring book of recent years, the Israeli philosopher Yuval Harari predicts that humans, your age, will live to see, quote, the last days of death when the species we call Homo sapiens becomes, he calls them, godlings and immortal. He sees this happening through one of the same technologies at which this university excels, either biological engineering or cyborg engineering of our organic beings, or simply the complete replacement of humans by super-intelligent machines. Immortality sounds good until Harari points out the implications. One of them would be a total aversion to risk. If you believe you can live forever, why would you ever take a chance of any kind? I hope that the experiences of 2020 left you with an attitude, not of fearfulness, but of confidence. Confidence that we can tackle hard problems and that hiding from them is rarely the best course, but given a careful examination of the available facts and a thoughtful calculation of relative risks, we can overcome even the biggest obstacles and be the masters of our fates and our futures. As school started again at her campus, the provost of Kansas University sent a message to her students and colleagues that's relevant far beyond the present day or the recent pandemic. She wrote, in times of high anxiety, it is human nature to crave certainty for the safety it provides. The problem with craving certainty is that it's a false hope. It's a craving that can never fully be met. She quoted the astronomer Carl Sagan. The history of science teaches us that the most we can hope for is a successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. Maybe the greatest story in Jacques Barzoon summed it up best. The last degree of caution is cowardice. Certainty is an illusion. Perfect safety is a mirage. Zero is always unattainable except in the case of absolute zero where, as you remember, all motion and life stops. You are leaving here ready for leadership. Your academic records say so. The history of Purdue graduates says so. The character you demonstrated this last year when your embrace of the Purdue pledge enabled this place to stay open at all clearly says so. We expect, no, we know that you will tackle leadership's challenges as they present themselves to you. You're taking with you all the tools to weigh alternatives, balance priorities, assess relative risks. All you'll need is the courage to act on the conclusions you reach. Now take that readiness into a fearful, timid world crying for leadership and direction and boldness where the biggest risk of all is that we stop taking risks at all. Hail Purdue and each of you.