 Carolina, good to be here. Good morning, everybody. It's a pleasure to be with you. And my charge this morning is pretty simple. You all know how important your work is. I'm just going to tell you again about how important it is and why the work you're engaged in today, thinking about institutionalizing what you've been building in universities, is of profound significance to democracy, to human experience, to human flourishing everywhere. Let me just back up for a minute, though, and introduce myself so you know a little bit more about me and where I come from in bringing you this message this morning about the importance of your work. I am, as you heard, a Harvard professor. I'm also a democracy advocate inside and outside the university. I focus on work that I call democracy renovation. When folks ask me what I work on, I always give the same answer. It's just democracy, past, present, and future thereof with no question mark at the end of that. I come by that focus super honestly. It's a matter of basic family inheritance. So on my dad's side, my granddad helped found one of the first NAACP chapters in northern Florida in the 40s. And I don't know how much you know about northern Florida. But it was basically the same thing as southern Georgia. So in the 40s, lynchings were on the rise. He was taking his life into his hands. It was super dangerous work. And on my mom's side, my great-grandparents helped fight for women's right to vote. So my great-granddad marched with suffragettes on Boston Common in 1917. And my great-grandmother ended up as president of the League of Women Voters in Michigan in the 30s. What this means is that they were all people who were told that things were impossible. That social equality for African-Americans in the South was impossible. That women having the right to vote was impossible. Their answer to this was, of course, not only possible, but these things are necessary. So the only question is not, is it possible? The only question is, how to achieve it? So I was really fortunate to grow up in a sort of network of super civically engaged people who had that attitude towards the world around them. Also, people who understood that empowerment is the bedrock for human thriving and well-being. And with empowerment as the bedrock, therefore also democracy. So I'll admit, as a kid, I took the value of democracy for granted. It wasn't really until I was watching my own generation came up in the world that the question of democracy's value got to be a lot more complicated for me. So my parents' generation, everybody pretty much moved up. That same granddad was a fisherman. His kids were small business owners and professors. On the other side, it's from factory workers to accountants and so on. But my generation, and I think I'm older than most of you in the room at this point, but my generation has lived through something quite different. It's what I call the great pulling apart. So here I stand in this incredible, beautiful space, this amazing view of the gorgeous city of Boston. Tenured faculty member at a great university. That is a role of incredible privilege. It's like, forget Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or whatever people think is the sort of pinnacle. Tenured faculty member, yeah. Have to admit that is the most privileged role there is. I feel that every day. And I have a brother who's a corporate executive. At the same time, I have cousins who aren't with us any longer. So for all the reasons that are among the hardest things we struggle with in our society, substance use disorder, incarceration, homicide. I lost my youngest cousin Michael in 2009 and that was a moment when I just realized what my family was living through, where some of us were here and others were trapped in really dark and difficult circumstances. Over the course of my lifetime, that's exactly what our entire country has lived through. So my 50 plus years on this planet perfectly coincide with the graphs that show you the rise of income inequality, the rise of wealth inequality, the rise of incarceration, the rise of polarization. And I began to ask myself, hang on, this democracy concept, it's not supposed to be abstractly valuable. I mean, yes, we love the ideals of freedom and equality. Yes, we can name empowerment as something important in human life. But we embrace those ideals, those goals, because in doing so, the idea is it gives us a society that makes it possible for each generation to move forward one after the next, each generation to do a bit better than the previous and as a whole cohort. So I began to ask myself the question of how is it that we can change the dynamics in our society so that this democracy is delivering on that promise? And as I started to do that work and that for me became work of democracy renovation, I realized that when I was a student, when I was an undergraduate, I was graduating into the world where this great pulling apart was just starting to happen. 1992 was the first point when economists and politicians and policymakers really named the challenge of rising income inequality. They were having a debate, like, is it or isn't it? Like, does it matter or doesn't matter? I mean, it should, I don't think the debate should have been as complicated as it was in all honesty, but that was what was happening in 1992. So here we are, 2023. Our students are graduating into a world that we all know is the age of AI, the age of incredible impact from technology. And the most important question really is whether or not that age will make those problems of the great pulling apart worse or better. And technology is truly the most influential force right now for impacting that question. Is technology going to make the great pulling apart worse, more inequality, more polarization, more disenfranchisement, more alienation? Or is it gonna be a part of the solution? Help us come out of those dynamics. I take that question to be the work of public interest technology. And therefore the work that you're all doing on campuses with courses, with research centers, with community engagement programs are fundamental to governing innovation, governing technology, so that we can change those basic dynamics that are delivering so much injustice in our society. Reverse that dynamic and deliver justice instead. There's a moment of great opportunity right now when I talk about that need for the public interest technology perspective to govern technology. That is about the students that you are developing and sending out into the world. There are roles for them in the public sector. There is huge opportunity right now with the CHIPS Act with other aspects of governmental funding for meaningful partnerships, programs that can be sustained on campus through access to federal and state funding, and it's really worth pursuing those. It is also about making sure that every kid who goes into the private sector is ready to say inside technology companies that technology is for human flourishing, not profit, all right? I mean, yes, you need sustainable revenues to support any enterprise, any human enterprise, but at the end of the day, technology, like journalism, like law, even like business is best understood as being for human flourishing and nothing else. We're watching a transition from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism. It is about that insight that the project is human flourishing, and we need our public interest technology networks on university campuses to ensure that that lesson, that technology is for human flourishing, is embedded in the private sector fully and that the sector is well-equipped and also that that lesson is embedded in the private sector. So I've taken too long, I was just supposed to be the warmup act for your next speaker, so let me go ahead and invite Ruman to the podium.