 And now it is my great pleasure to introduce our commencement speaker, our own distinguished alumnus, Hardy View. Since graduating in 1997 from what was then simply known as the School of Public Policy and with a dual degree from Michigan Law, Hardy has forged an incredible career in human rights law and policy. He is currently the legal director for the Human Rights First, an influential nonpartisan non-profit that Susan Rice has called a clarion voice in defense of human dignity and the rights and freedom of people everywhere. Hardy recently concluded a policy fellowship with Save the Children International in Amman, Jordan, and there he handled child protection policy issues impacting Syrian refugee children living in Jordan. After earning his dual degrees from Michigan, Harvey enlisted in the Navy's JAG Corps and eventually went to work for a private law practice. In 2010, the DC bar recognized him as its pro bono lawyer of the year for his litigation stemming from the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to juvenile detention impact litigation and asylum representation. Hardy is on the board of visitors of Duke Sanford School of Public Policy where he earned his bachelor's degree and it is truly an honor to welcome him to the podium. My mother would have loved that. My father would have submitted it to a fraud investigation but good afternoon graduates, family members of graduates and throngs of adoring fans of graduates, Dean Collins, faculty, administrators, alumni, and staff. It is comforting to return to the place where my graduate and law school days were spent and occasionally misspent. I remember finally the start of each semester when flushed with financial aid cash, I called places like Amir's, Zingerman's, and Ray's Red Hots home. By semester's end, these places seemed overhyped. Who needed fancy sandwiches and loaded hot dogs when one has found peace in the simple elegance of ramen noodles, saltines, and craft macaroni and cheese? As a first-generation graduate student, where my next meal was coming from was not my only struggle. I often felt like I had more than I could handle as I shuttled between our old public policy home in Lorch Hall and the law school quad just across at Tappan. I looked harried and hurried. I felt beset and besieged. But I was never without support. This school and the friends I made here had my back. They along with my family helped me successfully navigate through my four years here. As I'm sure each of you graduates can attest, whether it is parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, partners, or children who take on the role of support in our lives without them this day would not be this day. And so, to the families of today's graduates, one more time, we applaud you. It is encouraging to see that this room has far more color on stage and in the audience than when I was here in May 1997. I'm a child of Brooklyn and Port-au-Prince. I've been a resident of Mexico and Jordan. And I have soca, compa, hip hop, salsa, and jazz coursing through my veins. Simply put, I love me some diversity. So, I would be remiss if I failed to tip my hat to the dean, the faculty, and the administration for making this school of ours as a welcoming to those from Kinshasa as it is to those from Kalamazoo. In this audience today, I see brown, black, white, and every color in between. And I'm proud to say that one color unifies all of us today. Go blue. So, it should now be readily apparent to you that I am a proud Michigan man. I'm also a lawyer, a former naval officer, an uncle, a human rights champion, and an advocate. I advocate for children. It is exciting and perhaps a little nerve-wracking to deliver the charge to this class of graduates because, you see, my charge is really an ask. I'm asking all of you graduates to do more. I'm asking you to do more. To make more a part of your daily professional nomenclature. To live and breathe and strive to do more. Why this ask? As Mayor Bloomberg alluded to earlier this morning, the world faces serious problems and we need serious people to solve those problems. I work at Human Rights First, a nonprofit that seeks to protect refugees. For us, the plight of children takes center stage on a regular basis. In summer 2014, our country saw a surge of unaccompanied minors and families from Central America enter the United States. These children and families embarked on a treacherous journey north fleeing persecution and violence to the south. They did so reluctantly, but knowing full well that its decision to stay was a decision to tempt death. When those families reached our country's borders with Mexico, our government's response was to detain these migrant families in jail-like settings where children manifest symptoms of depression, behavioral regression, and anxiety. And when we cast our eyes overseas, there too the plight of children is precarious. The crisis in Syria makes that point all too well. In more than five years of war, the fighting in Syria has left an estimated 470,000 dead, more than one million injured, and driven 11.3 million from their homes. But the most vulnerable are the children. According to UNICEF, 8.4 million children, more than 80% of serious child population, has been affected by the conflict. In the face of these world problems, I am indeed asking you graduates to do more. Let's pause and keep it real for a moment. You don't know me, and I don't know you, or your stories, or what lies ahead for this class of graduates. And yet, I'm asking you to do more. Perhaps some of you will lean back when I make that request, thinking I have done more throughout this journey to this place, to this day. Some of you may lean in, eager to hear more defined with the pristine and explicit exactitude of a differential equation. I assure you that my great and Professor Carl Simon's class would certainly clearly establish that there was nothing pristine or exacting about my work and calculus or in any other subject where numbers were employed. Those of you leaning back, I need you to lean in. Because though ostensibly unfair, I'm going to ask you to do even more. And those of you leading in, temper the enthusiasm. Because what I have to say about doing more is as imprecise and amorphous as you'll know it when you see it. Some examples might help. Let me tell you the story of poor Joshua, who was the subject of an infamous case that reached the Supreme Court. When Joshua was three years old, the Wisconsin Department of Social Services suspected that he might be the victim of abuse by his father. When his father denied those allegations, the department pursued them no further. A year later, Joshua was admitted to a local hospital with bruises and abrasions. Joshua's treating physician suspected child abuse and notified the department. He was placed in the court's custody but was returned to his father after child protection team determined that there was insufficient evidence to retain him in the court's custody. In the following seven months, Joshua was twice more treated by hospital emergency room personnel for injuries suspected to have been caused by child abuse. The department's case worker observed and recorded numerous suspicious injuries during monthly visits and twice was told that Joshua was too sick to see her but determined that there was no basis for action. Four months later, Joshua's father beat four-year-old Joshua so severely that he fell into a life-threatening coma. Emergency brain surgery revealed evidence of traumatic injuries to the head inflicted over a long period of time resulting in brain damage so severe that he was expected to spend the rest of his life confined to an institution for the profoundly retarded. In its opinion in the case, the Supreme Court observed that the case worker dutifully recorded these incidents in her files along with her continuing suspicions that someone in the household was physically abusing Joshua. But she did nothing more. She did nothing more. Joshua was just 36 years old when he died last fall. Joshua deserved more years. Joshua deserved more compassion. Joshua simply deserved more. About 50 miles north of here, Flint's residents continue to wrestle with the aftermath of a water crisis not of their own making. An opaque swirl of allegations and figure-pointing abounds while Flint's residents fear of the lasting effects of lead on the city's youngest children. Wartigate-like questions proliferate. Who knew what? When do they know it? Where were the policymakers charged with protecting the children? These questions have not yet fully given birth to transparency-inducing answers, but this much is already clear. Those children also deserved more. While Joshua's case was about negligently failing to do more, and the Flint case may be a cautionary tale of what happens when public officials intentionally fail to do more. There is also the good ol' run-of-the-mill. I'm just too passionate to step, to stop and figure out what more really means kind of failure to do more. Let me illustrate that type of failure with a tale of my own experience when I served as a Navy Jaguar. If you've seen a few good men, which I have way too many times to admit in public, you know that a Jag is a military lawyer. One of my clients, a Navy sailor, was court-martialed for writing more than his fair share of bad checks, which he passed both on the base and throughout the city of Norfolk, Virginia. Eventually he was caught, bled guilty, and sentenced to the naval prison, the Brig. With just a few months left in the Brig, the sailor contacted me to tell me that he needed to be released early because the woman who single-handedly raised him, his grandmother, was on her deathbed. He wanted to be with her when she died. While there was no clear legal basis for the early release he wanted, I was sympathetic to a model prisoner's desire to be with his dying grandmother and decided that justice called for me to step into the fray. I canvassed my fellow Jags and diligently searched for a way to make a miracle happen. Lo and behold, I ended up finding a solution for his early release. Let the chest thumping begin. When the call came telling me that my client was just set free, the caller, after giving me the good news, paused and added, Lieutenant, there's something else you should know. Your client was re-arrested moments later. Say what now? He was picked up by the city police who had outstanding arrest warrants on him. It turns out that the city chose not to prosecute my client when the Navy opted to do so, but they changed their mind when they learned that the Navy chose to release him early. Of course, I knew nothing about the warrants. I knew nothing about them because I never asked. I never did my homework. The city went on to prosecute my client and he was sentenced to serve a term longer than the few months remaining at his Navy sentence. In effect, I helped him extend his time in prison. He never did get to see his grandmother before she died. Hashtag epic failure. This failure came about because in my zeal and headlong, passionate sprint toward justice, I failed to ask the right question. I failed to do my homework and I failed to do more. But for every failure to do more, make no mistake. There are those moments when more is real. When it comes into full relief and reveals our best professional selves. Such was the time in 2014 when I was in Jordan working at a nonprofit in the throes of the Syria Syrian refugee crisis. Almost all of our time, energy and money were focused on doing what we could to address the needs of the Syrians who by force of circumstance now called Jordan home. To address those needs, we often conducted needs assessments that tried and true public policy tool used to determine what we should focus on, how to improve our work and how to allocate our limited resources. On one occasion, a program development coordinator felt that the result of a recent needs assessment based on some 240 family interviews seemed off. He thought too many Syrians were reporting, reporting vulnerabilities at high rates where he didn't expect it and low rates where he expected to find higher ones. The coordinator skepticism nodded at him for some time, but he could not fathom doing 240 interviews again. So instead he decided to send a group of us out to the same community in northern Jordan, where we would interview a small subset of families, and even that subset would require a substantial investment of time. A team of four would spend hours with 10 families over the course of three days, driving almost three hours each day just to suss out a hunch off we went. But this time the collaborator urged us to listen attentively and go off script if it made sense to do so. He directed us to get it right, even if that meant taking more time than usual. During the course of one of these interviews, our team gathered in the living room of a Syrian married couple and some 10 members of their extended family. We used the script, but took care to spend all the time necessary to establish a rapport with the family. We played with the children, introduced ourselves to all the family members and ingratiate the family as sincerely as we could, and this non-coffee drinker drank more coffee in one day than I had in my 40 some odd years on the planet. At one point during the interview, the mother hesitated when we asked her if her children were safe. Until that moment, she had spoken to us directly, usually making eye contact, but this time she broke off eye contact and seemed to fidget with her head covering. Remembering our directions to get it right, we decided to take a break from a formal conversation and take the mother aside into another room. It is there that she told us that her young son had been sexually assaulted by a stranger as he made his way home from school. The mother told us that we spent so much time with her and her family that we made her feel comfortable enough for her to share what happened to her son, having never done so outside of her immediate family. This revelation enabled us to address the son's psychosocial needs while also doing what we could to ensure the safety of the other children in the community. The coordinator in Jordan chose to do more. He compelled us to do more, and in the end, more is what this boy and the children in the community needed. Though the bulk of my work was done in the name, has been done in the name of protecting children, my message to you applies to all of you and the various careers that await you, whether protecting the homeless or the homeland, advocating for social safety nets or sound fiscal policy, or speaking on behalf of a tribe or a transgender teen, doing more possesses crossover versatility. And although more will be something different, according to the person and the context, a few things are consistently true. More is not just doing your job. Showing up is only a part of it. More means embracing not only your passion and your creativity, but also your sound judgment. If that judgment suggests a more difficult path, take it. But do not take it without good strategy and process. More is chess, not checkers. More is also risky. Risk often means failure, but failure often begets success. I should know, among other colossal failures, I almost didn't graduate on time and I once effectively extended a man's prison sentence. So as you prepare to embark on your professional journey, I guarantee that there will come a time when you will have an opportunity to do more. I ask you to do so, whether it be to craft or implement new policies or refine solutions to the world's most intractable problems, more is the order of the day. When we dutifully do less, when we fail to do more, there are consequences. The challenges of today's world call for more. They call for more intellect, more creativity, more integrity, more, more. For School Class of 2016, this is your charge. Do more. Go Blue.