 Hello, my name is Robert Sellers and I'm Chief Diversity Officer and Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion here at the University of Michigan. It is my great honor to have this opportunity to congratulate you on receiving your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion certificates and I want to congratulate you on the hard work that you've put in to obtain this certification. It is an extremely important certification. I'm fortunate in my position. I have an opportunity to participate in a number of celebrations, a number of graduation celebrations in particular, but I must tell you that this is one of my very favorite. It comes very close to my heart. It reminds me back of my days as a graduate student back then. We didn't have a certificate program, but we were equally committed to not only trying to make the University of Michigan a better institution, but also to instill principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion into our larger society. You have the great fortune of having gone through a rigorous curricula, an opportunity to talk with fellow students and to run your ideals by those fellow students, to give you a skill set, a toolkit, a tool belt to make the kinds of changes within the future that we all need to see. Hopefully, many of those changes will happen here at the University of Michigan, but I know that many others will happen in the other places that you go, that you will take that toolkit and build a better society for us all. When I think back to my time here at the University of Michigan as a graduate student, I often wondered and often wish that I was in a position where I too could make the kinds of changes that I impassionately wanted to see happen here. I actually had a relative naive view of the University. I thought that much of that change was a function of power that sat somewhere within the Fleming Building. When I became Vice Provost, one of the first things that I did was I snuck back in the building late at night and I snuck into the President's office and I was looking for that lever of power because I thought simply through will, we could make the change that we need to see here at this University. I thought that there was somewhere a magic wand that if it was waved correctly, it could make the kinds of changes that we all want to see. Obviously, I was wrong. The reality is that change can only happen if each and every one of us works to make this University a different and most importantly better place. And you as change agents are really the spark that an institution like the University of Michigan needs to make that change. I'm so proud of the work that you've done. I'm so excited about the work that you will do. And I just want to say congratulations. Go Blue and continue the work.