President Hiram E. Chodosh delivered the following commencement remarks to the Class of 2025:
Out of Many, One
Thank you, Ellen, for your beautiful voice.
Thank you, Shaila, for your inspiring invocation.
Thank you, Zach, for rocking the Anthem.
Thank you all for being here to celebrate this extraordinary class of 2025.
We celebrate today through song, invocation, oratory.
We hug out what separates us.
We smile through tears.
We mourn the absence of loved ones we’ve lost.
We honor them for inspiring us here and now.
We curse the distance of imminent separation.
We bless our impending departure for bringing us closer together.
We soak in Henry’s humility and Tori’s river and Dr. Heinzl’s heroism.
We toss mortarboards high, square frisbees, sailing, cutting through marine-layered sky.
We absorb the final charge, a resounding echo of what we already know.
In shared purpose, we roar.
We congratulate and thank all those who created this moment.
Our brilliant faculty, their:
discipline-altering scholarship,
unwavering commitment to the liberal arts in action,
selfless dedication to intellectual and responsible leadership of our students
Our selfless staff and coaches, their:
unconditional love and support for every student
the stronger core of their character
cracking the ceilings of cramped aspirations
Our dedicated, generous, loyal alumni, parents, donors, and trustees, their:
selfless contributions of time, talent, ties, and treasure
unmatched in higher education,
the most powerful intergenerational cycle of impact found anywhere on our planet.
Our families and friends, who have:
nourished and nurtured,
raised and pushed,
mentored and coached our graduates
this beautiful collective of brilliant, curious, charismatic, caring, independent, responsive, emerging leaders.
Exemplars of their generation.
a tight community of competitive teams and dedicated clubs and special individuals who
stand out (in the crowd)
stand up (for principle)
and
stand in (to serve others).
In response to the wicked challenges confounding our civilization,
the polarizing controversies dividing our republic,
the plummeting confidence in higher education itself,
the desperate search for promising hope in an uncertain world,
Our Class of 2025 answers the call,
answers the question:
why are we here, today, to celebrate them.
To our graduates, I want to tell your stories to the world:
You give us the promise, the hope we all desperately need.
Hope is like a road on the earth, the Chinese author, Lu Xun explained, at first there are no roads, but when many people travel in a single direction, a road is made.
You are the many people. You travel in a single direction.
Your traverse of the stage today is the road the world needs to follow.
You prove the possible.
The 64% of Americans who have lost confidence in higher education have not met you.
You face and surmount the toughest issues. Just look at the thesis titles in the program today, from commerce to carbon, housing to health. Many of you are already published authors.
You have the confidence to speak up with mutual respect for the free expression of others.
You open up to divergent opinions and experiences through penetrating, neutral questions.
You reach critical, deeper levels of common understanding and solve problems creatively across lines of controversy through constructive dialogue.
You rank first in the country in expressing yourselves freely, 3rd in the country in tolerance of opposing viewpoints, and 1st in the country in political awareness and engagement.
You are graduating at nearly 6 times the national graduation rate for Pell students and three-and-a-half times the national graduation rate for students who are first in their families to attend college.
You will start your post-graduate lives with one of the lowest average levels of debt in liberal arts education.
You will likely earn back the average cost of attendance in less than one and a half years and make many leading contributions to business, government, and the professions. You will improve human conditions in our local communities and broader world.
You demonstrate every day what it means to grow community, purpose, and play, through your enduring kindness, your self-leadership, your pure sense of fun.
You exemplify the scholar-leader-athlete model, showing that here you can learn, lead, and compete at the highest national level of D3 athletics. You excel in our most competitive sport, innertube water polo too. You love every minute of it.
You are now part of a generation of young CMC alumni graduating within the last decade who are first in the country in their rate of philanthropic contribution.
You are the closest-knit class I’ve ever seen in over three decades in higher education. Your group-me chat has over 300 students on it communicating every day.
And even more importantly than that, you are the antidote to the challenge in Shaila’s beautiful invocation: conflict in our troubled world,
a grave threat to all we cherish.
This is nothing new.
After all, conflict is endemic to the human condition.
Even when we transcend our differences through the principles that bind us together:
truth, justice, freedom, equality, peace.
and unify societies out of many different communities,
and create great civilizations out of multiple societies,
we also fight about whose truth, whose justice, whose freedom.
We clash over what these big ideas mean, how they apply, who gets to decide.
This conflict is good.
Conflict is a creative social process. It sparks change. It produces:
art through the negative harmony of pure and uncompromised contradictions (Adorno),
deeper truth that emerges from arguments between friends (Hume),
the ignition, invention, innovation that competes with the most powerful force in the universe, inertia.
Conflict is also bad.
Destructive.
Debilitating.
Devastating.
Tragic, when it spirals into irreversible, vicious cycles of retaliation and endless war.
Our keynote speaker Dr. Heinzl knows something about the impact of war and how to treat those devastated by it.
He has dedicated his life to providing medical care in inaccessible areas, between the toughest rocks and hard places.
Here at CMC, you answer a critical question: how do we get the best from conflict and avoid the worst?
You live the answers we hold dear.
Nearly 250 years ago, du Simitiere, the philosopher and American patriot, and lesser-known framer of the U.S. constitution,
projected our national motto,
E pluribus unum: out of many, one.
He didn’t say out of many, two. He didn’t say red and blue.
He didn’t say out of many, many, or except for a few.
He said unum, one.
Our constitutional covenant with the future is to create a more perfect union.
A union supported by commitments to co-equal branches, freedom of speech, equality, due process.
Here we have a social covenant, too
with a future world that is not segregated by ideology or religion or race or money.
This is where you lead by example.
--
In August of 2021, when you all arrived on this campus, I did not ask you to avoid conflict.
I asked you to join us all in learning how to engage it and rise above it.
I asked: why are we here?
You have answered every single element.
Why?
You have fought “the banality of evil with the banality of good, through small intentional gestures of kindness.”
You have pulled “people together in a world that often seems to want tear us apart.”
We?
You have “develop[ed] the closest friendships of your lifetimes across differences and barriers and borders.”
You have “[broken] bread and freely share[d] (divergent) viewpoints at the Athenaeum” and Open Academy salons.
Here?
You have “develop[ed] the qualities and capabilities that … the world needs from you.”
As I predicted, you have “step[ped] up, ask[ed] questions, support[ed] one another, learn[ed] from [y]our experience, . . .
“[N]o pandemic, no politic, no prejudice, no pretense could stop [you].”
That is the possible you have proven.
What makes this even more spectacular is the special challenge you each overcame.
Profound personal losses we can barely imagine.
The moms and dads, siblings, relatives, and friends, who are no longer here in person, yet through our voice are cheering you on.
The protracted pandemic
our own campus closed for 18 months
our community cast into temporary diaspora
Theo sniffing around for his lost friends
Waiting at the door of the Soll Center, closed for snack opportunities
I worried:
Would our social memory be lost forever?
Could we ever get the CMC magic back?
Would we even remember how to speak with one another?
When you arrived, the sophomores were of no help, as they had not yet lived on our campus.
The juniors could only offer a distant memory of their six months of experience.
And the seniors? They were more like sophomores coming back from a nearly two-year leave.
And you were, well, a little goofy,
brilliant and kind and ambitious,
but with a year or two less life experience and preparation after your sequestered high school experience and the lonely zoomification of life.
And now look at you, look at us. Look around at the new magic you’ve created. Look at the community you all have rebuilt.
Intellectually, socially, athletically, you create a greater one, by standing out, standing up, and standing in.
The sheer intellectual brilliance of your research prowess.
The teamwork of our top-ten NCAA Division 3 program.
From Rafi, the Messi of Division 3 men’s soccer,
to the mind-boggling volleyball digs of Dede.
The creativity:
From Cayman’s intricate, sustainable designs in vintage fabrics to Lucy’s poetry and harmonies in After School Specials.
The collaboration:
Ava’s wise, compassionate, unifying leadership guiding us to be a better version of ourselves.
the signature ethos of Josh and Kat and our national and world championship Model UN teams.
But here you also are much more than a collection of individual and team accomplishments.
You created a greater one by standing up and in, by turning your attention on your classmates and the broader community.
Jonny’s AI innovations to improve student learning.
Olivia’s leadership in CIVES to increase voter participation.
Julian’s impact on leadership development for Black men on our campus.
Ella’s empowerment of other women athletes.
Josh and David’s high impact tutoring program, Student Connect.
Madeline’s ROTC military service leadership.
Clare’s environmental impact, from a new constitutional precedent in Montana to the collaborative SEED project to bring 60 environmental Claremont-wide student groups together in shared purpose.
Yahya’s social warmth and humor and staff serenades at Karaoke night.
Melanie’s commitment to ensure that everyone has the clothing they need to take full advantage of the Ath.
Antonio’s transformation of his first-year challenges into a super-power, always taking note of who’s hurting and making sure they are okay.
The open ears and warm shoulders of Eva and Luis, and our incredible 2025 RA cohort.
NPR could do an unsung hero series, all on our campus alone.
Out of many, class of 2025, you created a community greater than the sum of your outstanding members.
So, to all of you here, all of you watching, to those of you who are searching for hope in our world:
When each of our students crosses the stage, you will find the answer to conflict,
you will find the answer to the leadership we need,
you will find the answer to the call of du Simitière,
you will find the answer to the confidence we need to restore in higher education,
you will find Lu Xun’s new road of hope.
Class of 2025, you, and you alone, are why we are here today.
Let’s give them their first standing ovation.
--
To the Class of ’25, please stand for your charge.
This is a call to your calling.
A surfacing of what you already know.
What we have all learned from you.
You are why we are here
Wherever you go
Wherever you lead
Build again,
out of many, one
Make conflict your friend
Embrace, understand it
Love those on the other side
Fight for their freedom too
Counter disrespect with respect
Celebrate the iconoclasts
Fight against the trap of retaliation
Never let harsh words define or paralyze you
Raise your hand
Perfect your question before the answer
Challenge assumptions
Reject binary choices
Create space to concur and dissent
Put down the forks and skewer bad arguments with sharper words
Put down the knives and break bread with your open hands
Love your neighbor in yourselves
Catch the eye of the saddest face
Open your heart to those that are broken
Extend grace to those mistaken
Don’t cop out by agreeing to disagree
Keep disagreeing until you agree better
Stand out in the crowd
Stand up for principle
Stand in to serve others
Learn from your mistakes and failures
Even if you can’t boil the ocean, put up the kettle for tea
Never give up on your success
Bring others along on Lu Xun’s new road
Bring us, too.
Carry CMC with you
Make every new space your Athenaeum
every acquaintance, your classmate
every boss, your professor
each boardroom, your classroom
each coffee shop, your Hub
each apartment building, your dorm
each park, your Green Beach
Be for others the DT in your lives
Class of 2025
Vie in Shaila’s good works
Ask Henry’s big question
Step into Tori’s river
Follow Dr. Heinzl’s truck
Answer the call
We will follow your lead
Create (as you have here)
out of many, one.
Many congratulations, Class of 2025!
Cheers and congratulations to you all.