 Good morning. Proud parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, children, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends of our graduates, welcome to the University of California at Berkeley. Welcome too to the many dedicated faculty, staff, alumni, community members and other honored guests who are here with us today. And welcome especially to those individuals whom we have gathered here to recognize the members of the exceptional Berkeley graduating class of 2018. Berkeley's 11th Chancellor, it's my distinct honor and pleasure to preside over today's ceremony. This is a day of joy and celebration, of happy endings and new beginnings, of friends and family, of achievements and high hopes. Members of the class of 2018, you've long anticipated this day with eagerness, with anxiety, perhaps with a mixture of both. But however you're feeling today, I hope you hold a keen sense of accomplishment. Through your passion, hard work and diligence, you've reached a great milestone. You've completed a demanding course of study at the nation's best public university. Today you join and renew the long line of alumni reaching back 150 years whose lives are forever intertwined with this great institution. Today you become one of the nearly 500,000 living alumni worldwide who can proudly call themselves UC Berkeley graduates. Congratulations. While today is a celebration of you, your success is certainly not yours alone. While the entire Cal community is proud of your achievements, known as Prouder than those who have stood by you with their understanding, love and support. Graduates, please join me in thanking your families, partners, children, friends and mentors, everyone who helped pave the way for your arrival at one of life's great crossroads. Let's have a round of applause for them. For those in this room who, like me, have been immersed in the seasonal rhythms of higher education for a long time, there's a pleasing familiarity in the customs and traditions of today's ceremony. Seeing you all today in your caps and gowns links you with generations of Berkeley graduates who have come before you, just as the many rituals that you've taken up over here in the last several years. From morning coffee dates at the Free Speech Cafe to afternoon study sessions in Morrison Reading Room to sunset walks in Tilden Park, all are points of connection you share with Cal's students of years past. But for all the similarity that these shared activities give your college experience to that of previous generations, your Berkeley is distinct. Colored as it is by the particular set of events that took place here and in the world during your time on campus. Events that guided your class discussions, that you and your friends debated late into the night, that shaped the decisions that you made in regard to coursework, internships, your major, perhaps even the career ahead of you and the kind of life that you will lead. Your Berkeley, the years that you have been on campus, has been marked by hugely consequential changes in the world. You saw the rise of the strongest woman candidate for president in the United States history ultimately delivered a stunning defeat in an election that upended American politics. You saw important strides toward justice and equality in society as the Supreme Court declared same sex marriage a fundamental right. As the Black Lives Matter movement challenged institutional racism in law enforcement and as the Me Too movement toppled abusive men in positions of power. Yet you also saw major setbacks as disdain for immigrants and refugees to hold here and around the world and as fear and hatred of the other became a central theme in many countries political discourse. In your time catastrophic natural disasters from monsoons in South Asia to a hurricane in Puerto Rico to raging wildfires across the state of California have stirred up debates about wealth privilege and our responsibility to aid victims and help rebuild their communities. Not to mention I'm dismayed to say arguments challenging the reality of climate change. Other kinds of disasters to including acts of terror and bias motivated mass shootings have renewed disputes about gun rights and seen thousands take to the streets in protest of standing laws. While you've been at Berkeley concerns about cybersecurity changes in the media we consume and questions about privacy rights have asked us to reconsider our relationships to now ubiquitous new technology and moans of communication. Many of these historic events and the attendant discussions about rights responsibilities and privileges that come with them have had analogues here on our campus. It is a defining quality of those at Berkeley that you do not sit idly by when you see injustice whether in the larger world or locally. You reflect on the issue at hand consider solutions and confront problems and all their complexity and with all their deep and enduring difficulty. As surely as this institution has left its mark on you you have left your mark on Berkeley. When you saw the need for change at our institution you seized it and our university is richer and better for your efforts. It was your classmates in the Black Student Union who were behind the creation of the Fannie Lou Hamer Resource Center and the ones who helped craft the African American Initiative which is now working to improve our campus climate for black students at Berkeley. It was the work of survivors and student advocates among you who in 2016 and 2017 helped this university critically examine its policies and procedures for handling cases of sexual assault and harassment and take up the process of improving them. You modeled strength and resolve in support of our undocumented student population even as those students were villainized by the leaders of our country and threatened by anonymous chalkings and posters on campus. You celebrated the 50th anniversary of the free speech movement and then saw Berkeley cast into the national spotlight as we endeavored to navigate a new free speech debate about how best to reconcile maintaining a sense of community alongside a sense of the university's role as a public forum open even to speakers whose views we find abhorrent. In February of 2016 you helped to clean up the mess literally left by rioters in the wake of Milo Yiannopoulos's appearance as well as joined us this past year to use dialogue not violence to bridge the partisan divide. You have in short embraced opportunities to speak out, to organize, to advocate, to lean into controversial issues, to participate in public life, to leave this place a microcosm of the larger society better than you found it. To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., you have not been silent about things that matter. This is so critical for the world you are entering is rife with intractable problems that are pervasive, that have many dimensions, that span national borders, that don't care about partisan lines. Your training here has prepared you to become teachers, social workers, scientists, and software engineers certainly. But as the examples I mentioned show, it has also helped you hone the skills you need to fix a broken democracy and address the truly monumental challenges of your day. I hope you will not retreat from these challenges. Even when things seem hopeless or pointless, you must not abandon civic life and a commitment to the public good. It will be all too easy, privileged as you are now with a Berkeley degree, to retreat into your own lives into getting a decent job, making enough money, maybe playing tennis after work and calling your parents on weekends. Those things are important, but as one of our business school's core principal states, you must think beyond yourself as well. Just as each one of us has both a professional life and a personal one, we also have a civic life, and it should be just as central to our identity as the other two. Our civic life does not mean simply voting in elections. In fact, even those who cannot vote can live immensely important civic lives. Instead, it is the sum of all the good that you do in your community, and that is not confined to the town hall or the town square, the ballot box, or the soapbox. You build your civic life when you volunteer to tutor students two towns over, when you develop a thoughtful proposal to address a community need, and bring it to your city council. When you knock on doors in support of a state proposition you think is best for California, when you turn out in protest to oppose something that won't. An active civic life asks you to be aware, to be engaged with the world and its goings on, to take action, to organize, to volunteer, to advocate, to campaign, or take up public service yourselves, to dissent, to protest when it is needed. It will take a firm commitment to building up your civic life, to bring grace, justice, and beauty to the world. You all know that Berkeley's motto is fiat looks, let there be light. You are that light, shine it where you go. Thank you.