 Graduates, families, friends, and guests, welcome to the University of California Berkeley and to our spring commencement. As Berkeley's 10th Chancellor, it is my great honor and pleasure to preside over the celebration of the graduation of the class of 2017. Graduates, today is your day. Today we celebrate and honor you. Your family and friends will photograph you endlessly and you won't even have to be told to smile. And I'll take, I promise, as many selfies with you as I possibly can, all right? Okay, deal? Today we recognize you for your passion, your perseverance, and your accomplishment. All these enable you now to join and renew the long line of alumni reaching back to 1868, whose lives are forever entwined with our great university. Today, you become one of 485,000 living alumni who can call themselves UC Berkeley graduates and Cal Bears. The entire Cal community is proud of your achievement, but today no one, no one is prouder than those who have stood by you with their understanding, their love, and their support. Graduates, please join me in thanking your families, your partners, your children, your friends, and your mentors, everyone, who has helped pave the way for your arrival here today. Now, I have to confess, I hold a particular affinity for the class of 2017. It isn't away my class as well. Four years ago, I came to Berkeley alongside many of you to begin my tenure as chancellor. In this summer, I'll also move on, though in my case to join the ranks of the Berkeley faculty. Like many of you, that is, I'm not gonna move that far away. Who would if they could stick around, right? But while I'm sure none of us would trade our experience at Cal for the world, our years together here have no doubt been marked by challenge and change. The Berkeley campus is facing unprecedented financial difficulties after years of stagnant funding by the state of California, threats of reduced federal funding for research, and a loss of political support for our great research universities. We are under fire sometimes for refusing to back down from commitments that we see as inseparable aspects of our public mission, such as our strong support for undocumented students. And because though we are a public university, we stake our identity on remaining competitive with the very best of our private peers. That is, we're under fire for the fact that we hold to our twin goals of access and excellence always. We also continue to have other challenges that we are continuing to work to meet head on. We have had and continue to confront serious issues related to sexual violence and sexual harassment on campus, the pressures of a housing shortage in a red hot real estate market that poses serious challenges for students around basic needs, the need to educate large classes of students with the personalized attention, support and resources that you need, and the process of making the campus more genuinely welcoming and inclusive for all communities and all identities at a time when certain national trends make this even more difficult and yet more important than ever. Most recently, as you know, Berkeley has been singled out by some extreme groups from opposite ends of the political spectrum that have few reservations about turning our college campus into a political and sometimes literal battlefield, particularly when it comes to provocative speakers with whom they passionately disagree. But on this front, let us be clear, the university's commitment to free speech is non-negotiable. We honor our tradition as the home of the free speech movement, but we are also committed to maintaining the physical safety of our campus community. We know that these paired commitments can be upheld because throughout the years we have done so. We have welcomed and hosted speakers from across the political spectrum without problems or controversy, at least when those speakers come without the objective of senseless provocation, but rather real engagement with you, the faculty and our campus groups through impassioned debate about the great issues of our day. But that being said, we will continue to host any speaker invited by legitimate campus groups subject only to the need to make sure we can protect safety. And we will do whatever is necessary to ensure the continuation of full and robust free speech at Berkeley, okay? So while the road has sometimes been bumpy, and yes, there have been literal fires we've had to put out, I'm proud of the work we have accomplished together. And I mean we. Members of your class have been instrumental in some of the university's most important endeavors over the last four years. It was the efforts of survivors and student advocates who helped the university critically examine our policies and procedures for handling cases of sexual assault and harassment and begin the process of improving them. It was the work of the Black Student Union and other groups that in partnership with the administration helped us create the Fannie Lou Hammer Resource Center and Craft the African American Initiative. It was our student athlete's discipline and diligence in the classroom that enabled us to make a cultural shift regarding academic success in our intercollegiate athletics program. It was the interest of our students that drove us to create a new set of courses and programs in data science. It was our student groups who modeled strength and resolve in support of our undocumented student population. And it was you who helped to clean up the mess, literally, left by rioters in the wake of the Milo-Unopolis event, as well as you who attempted through student groups like BridgeUSA to use dialogue, not violence, to cross the partisan divide. Thank you. Now Berkeley is no ivory or ivied tower. It's a campus that not only lives in the world, but seeks to make a better world. We know that our university must engage with difference and often polarizing ideas and issues, not shelter students from them. We are committed to maintaining our public mission through our full engagement with the public sphere. It is a defining quality of you, of our students on this campus, that you do not sit idly by when you see the need for change. You reflect on the issues, you consider solutions, and you confront problems in all their complexity, and with all their deep and enduring difficulty. You live the words of James Baldwin, who said, not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. You've done that as Berkeley students, and I know you will continue to do that as Berkeley grads. Now, as you move off campus, away from the comforting embrace of a share-tea, ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba, at a Berkeley haunt on a hot afternoon, gotta keep trying. You must now be the leaders to whom the world turns as we seek to navigate a future that is being transformed so quickly by new technology, expanding globalization, resurgent nationalism, changing social and economic structures, new cultural and political threats, and dangerous political and environmental trends. The key, I believe, is not only to remember your education, but to activate it, by being unafraid to imagine new futures, by matching those actions to those dreams, and by anchoring yourself and your communities to an abiding moral compass. And I bring up these challenges that Berkeley has and continues to face to remind you that as life takes you beyond Sathergate, Berkeley itself still needs you. As our relationships with the university changed this summer, it is vital, absolutely vital, that we all keep Berkeley close, remain committed to it, support it, speak out about why it must be supported, and yes, cherished. For Berkeley is not only the best university in the world, it is also the most important university in the world. The University of California was founded here nearly 150 years ago as part of a monumental American experiment based on the belief that a nation benefits collectively from broad access to excellent higher education, that society is more just and morally sound when the possibility of social mobility is afforded to all based on merit, and not origins or family circumstances, and that democracy thrives when all of its citizens, not just the privilege, not just the elite, have the opportunity to garner, perfect, and produce the intellectual tools necessary to fully engage with the issues of our day, and this philosophy continues to guide us as our North Star. Graduates, you cannot know where the future will take you, but as you go, know that Berkeley will be there with you. We hope and expect you will be there for us as well. You are now part of the greater Cal family whose members help sustain each other and the university in order to ensure that for many generations to come, Berkeley will continue to open doors to a better tomorrow for all of us. Graduates, may you be the bearers of Berkeley's torch, carriers of its influence, promoters of its spirit. May the education you have received here serve not just your lives, but your society well in the years to come. May your lives be richly rewarding and fulfilling, and may you all enjoy much happiness. Congratulations. Good luck, class of 2017. Fiat Lux and Go Bears!