 Welcome, everybody. Thanks for braving the rain with us today. Please, everybody, have a seat. It is great to see you all out here. It's great to be in person again. How about that amazing community high school jazz band? We're so happy to have them here. I'm Michael Barr. I'm the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. It was a pleasure to see many of you this morning at the Big House. And it is my honor to welcome you all here this afternoon on behalf of the entire Ford School community for our 2022 in-person commencement ceremony. It just feels so great to be with you here today. In fact, I'm thinking, if you guys don't mind, I might grab a selfie. Here we go, right? You got to do it. I hope you take the moments, too. We built this temporary structure we're enjoying today in partnership with the School of Public Health and with the School for Environment and Sustainability. And I'm grateful to all of our colleagues there for partnering with us on this effort. I'm going to start by just briefly introducing the folks up here with me on stage. First, our keynote speaker, Mr. Julian Brave Noise Cap. Julian, we're really honored to have you here, and we look forward to your remarks. Next, please welcome Regent of the University of Michigan, Paul Brown. Paul Brown, thank you so much for being here today. Long time University of Michigan leader and my predecessor dean of the Ford School, Provost Susan Collins. Welcome, and thank you. A number of our faculty colleagues are here at stage left is John Chichari. John directs our Wiser Diplomacy Center and our International Policy Center. And he'll be reading the names of our amazing graduates as they cross the stage. Next to John is Ford School Professor David Thatcher, here to do the honors of hooding one of our wonderful PhD students. Professor Catherine Dominguez, who directs our PhD program. Professor Betsy Stevenson, who has been elected by our graduating students to deliver the faculty address. Our atrophic associate dean, Luke Schaefer. And our other terrific associate dean, Celeste Watkins Hayes. Moving over to this side, we have Assistant Professor Charlotte Cavallier representing our undergraduate program and Associate Professor Kevin Sting on behalf of the Graduate Program Committee. And finally, your colleagues elected by their classmates to provide the student commencement address are soon to be Ford School MPP graduate, Crystal Olalde Garcia, and BA graduate, Gerald Sill. We're gathered here in this beautiful venue to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of 181 outstanding students. Smart, resilient, public-minded people who will be leading our communities for the next half century. Graduates, congratulations, you did it. I get the honor of telling your family and friends a little bit about you. The Ford School at the University of Michigan is a community dedicated to the public good. That's the core of our mission statement. We inspire and prepare diverse leaders grounded in service, conduct transformational research, and collaborate on evidence-based policymaking to take on our communities and our world's most pressing challenges. You know that's what we do. Our school is named for one of the University of Michigan's most distinguished graduates, the 38th President of the United States, Gerald Ford. We're proud of his legacy of principled leadership and courage. Our curriculum starts with a shared understanding and belief in the facts. Today's graduates have learned to analyze complicated data sets, to think analytically, to evaluate costs and benefits. They know their stuff. We stress communication skills, and so they've learned to speak and write clearly and persuasively. We've helped our students to learn about leadership, and our graduates have learned to listen and to talk and to think critically, ethically, and compassionately. These amazing students have persevered through so many challenges these last hard years. We're celebrating today two students who have earned PhDs, one in public policy and sociology, and the other in public policy and political science. Each is doing groundbreaking work on how to improve policing, integrating the theory and knowledge from their disciplines, and the tools and lens of public policy. We celebrate 102 students who have earned master's degrees in public affairs and public policy. They hail from 12 different countries and speak 19 different languages. It's a strong supportive group. Through two years of the pandemic, campus discord, strife, they lifted each other up. They've supported and cared for each other. For most, their first year at the Ford School was fully remote. And yet with grit and creativity, they found ways to connect over zoom in parks and study groups. As professional students preparing for careers of impact, they've been motivated and intentional. They focused on caring for communities who need it the most. And they've been agile. This class has learned how to navigate classes, workshops, job interviews, all using technologies I, at least, had never heard of before the pandemic. So I'm just amazingly impressed with what they've been able to do. And now they've completed internships or capstones with organizations across all sectors and levels of government, the nonprofit sector, and the for-profit sector. And looking ahead, they're landing jobs that will help them change the world. We're celebrating today 77 students who have earned a bachelor's of art in public policy. Give yourself a hand. They had not made it to the end of their sophomore year when the pandemic hit. They spent junior year taking courses over Zoom and he scattered around the country. But we felt the character already that fall in the form of a hand turkey campaign in Betsy Stevenson's class. And that spring in the form of great Wild Hall rubber ducky campaign. So some of you know what I mean. And the others will learn later in the reception. Back in person this year, they were thrilled to be with us, but they also had to weather adjustments. Learning, for example, that they really couldn't go to class anymore in their pajamas. But with tremendous hard and resilience, they jumped back right in, finishing strong and improving our community. They celebrated together this month with a well-publicized bar crawl, which was absolutely not named after me. Our grads are now headed to work at top jobs in the public and private sectors. Several would go on to graduate programs in law, education and policy. And a large number of them are moving to DC where I'll know they'll have a lot of fun together. Taken together, the classes of 2022 are resilient. They care about each other and about the world. Graduates, let me send you off with five words of advice. And by words I mean, longish paragraphs. Number one, work hard, really, really hard. Anything worth doing requires hard work. Number two, don't be a jerk. That might seem like one of the norms we've lost in our society, but it's not. Be kind to your colleagues. Number three, empower yourself. You can do anything. Don't talk yourself down, talk yourself up. We're facing enormous challenges and I believe and you know that you can make the difference. Number four, find your passion. That passion will help drive you to do great things. And number five, let me talk about more at length. Number five, this one's about love. Let me start with this. You need to love your team. You can't get anything being done alone, but you don't have to. You need to find or build a good team, then support each other. If you give deeply, they'll give back to you in ways that you could not have imagined. I've loved my faculty and staff team at the Ford School and I hope and trust you have as well. Graduates, will you join me in thanking our faculty and staff? And let me make a broader point about love too. Now, I know our school is known for our quantitative chops, but for this I'm gonna turn to the humanities, to poetry. I checked it out with the university lawyers and they said it was okay. After all, we do have a great writing center at the Ford School. A poet whose work I return to often is the great Seamus Haney. In his poem, The Aerodrome, he recalls being a young child in Northern Ireland during World War II, standing with his mother outside a busy airfield where American airmen were preparing for the liberation of Europe. And it's a bit of a complicated story, but let me just say he feels a child's uncertainty and then he feels the warm, tight grasp of his mother's hand. And this is what Haney writes. If self is a location, so is love. Bearing's taken, markings, cardinal points, options, obstinacies, dug heels and distance, here and there and now and then a stance. Graduates, I know when you look back on your years at the Ford School, you'll remember how brutally hard the pandemic has been. You'll also remember we hope, statistics, microeconomics, values and ethics, how to write a policy memo. But I hope that you'll also, more than anything, when you look back on these years at the Ford School, you'll remember the love. The love of your families of origin and your families of choice who got you here, the love you found and made among your classmates, the problems and solutions that you've come to care about with your whole heart. Over these past couple of hard years, it's been love, I think, that's gotten us through. And so wherever your career and your life will take you, never be afraid to bring that love with you, to center yourself in that love. We all know love is the key to a happy life, but it's also the secret ingredient to leadership, to having an impact in the world. As Haney wrote, if self is a location, so is love. Take your bearings, orient yourself around the people and the work and the causes that you love. Take a stance. Classes of 2022, we're so proud of you, we love you and go blue.