Wow, thank you all for being here. What a moment.
Thank you, Donna, for your love and friendship, your commitment and leadership, your generosity and your family. I miss Tom so much, never more than now. He is beaming down on us for all he inspired and guided here today.
Honestly, I feel like a little boy in this building. Yes, the sheer sense of wonder that I learned from my mom. The wonder this phenomenal art and architecture stimulates. But I feel more than that.
When I was very young, I used to make up pretend games for my friends. Some of these were so convincing that at a certain point, my friends started to act as if these games were real. I’d interrupt the game to say: guys, or in New Jersey dialect, the second person plural, “Hey, yous, stop, I was only pretending."
My shock in seeing the real thing is so great, I have the same feeling. As if I was pretending and you went ahead and thought I was serious. So, I want to begin by saying, we weren’t pretending … but we did make this whole thing up.
Doug Peterson gave a great talk about vision in leadership last evening. Pursuing our North Star.
As our own Pitzer Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Gould Center, Amy Kind, demonstrates in her scholarship: it is only through a powerful act of our imagination that we can chart our way North.
Today, we celebrate the power of our imagination and the realization of vision at its finest.
Thank you Bjarke. You are architecture at its best. You have expressed our revolutionary vision in this physical space. You have unlocked our imagination for who we can become and broken through the ceilings of our highest aspirations. You have provided the key to our expanded master plan, with the Roberts Campus Sports Bowl taking shape before our eyes.
Thank you, Ran. Along with Emily Wiley, founding faculty, and our outstanding external advisory board. Ran, you have led this strategy with brilliance and grace, with laser-focus, open ears, and tireless commitment.
Thank you, Heather. Building on the groundwork set by Peter Uvin, you demonstrate what Atul Gawande called more important than breakthrough innovation: follow-through innovation. You have recruited our world-class faculty, implemented the program, and executed with barrier-busting courage and intensity.
I echo the many thanks to so many special individuals who made this all happen.
As we did earlier today, we pay tribute to Robert Day and his family, George Roberts, Henry Kravis, and all of our visionary, generous donors, many whose names you see throughout the building.
We thank Ken Valach and David Mgrublian and our dedicated board and their unwavering contributions of time, talent, and treasure.
We celebrate Damián Ortega and all of the phenomenal artists Chris Walker and others have brought to us, artists that inspire our greater humanism at the center of our campus and this iconic facility.
We thank our College leadership, faculty, staff, and students, as well as each of our building and construction partners.
You made every detail matter. Every angle, every finish, every touch is beautiful.
Thanks to all of you for making this moment possible.
Beyond the immense gratitude, I have three points today.
This is our moment for quantum leadership
This is our magnet
This is dedicated to you and everyone in line
One, this is our moment for quantum leadership
During Convocation, I called this year a quantum moment.
Quantum, in the sense of quantum mechanics, where the smallest indivisible jump in energy matters. Here, every gesture of kindness, each engaging interaction is our commercio. Here, the smallest acts of goodness create our civitas. Here, our response to the banality of evil in the world is the banality of good.
Quantum, in the sense of quantum computing, where both zero and one may be true. Here in CMC’s history, we celebrate the triumph of and over the mutually exclusive either-or. The fusion of economics and political science. The fusion of the humanities and social sciences. The fusion of liberal arts and leadership. And now the fusion of integrated sciences in our entire program.
Quantum in the popular sense of a big leap. Here we take a long, unparalleled jump into the future. We reinforce the power of human intelligence in an uncertain era of accelerating AI. We take on the grand challenges of health, brain, and planet. We unravel the collisions of intersecting codes, from genetics to computer science, from ethics to law and policy, from economics to history and literature.
With each step, we snatch new opportunities from clenched jaws that are resistant to change.
We fulfill these commitments at a centrifugal moment for our country and greater world. The torque of our politics is trying to pull us apart.
I found myself quoting Kipling’s If earlier today, and another verse is sticking with me now, one we should all internalize in the wake of recent tragedies and the reactions to them.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating
I don’t need to spell this out.
CMC represents the countervailing, centripetal force that pulls us together.
A place where we can be the most outspoken and the friendliest. Where we can be the most reflectively thoughtful and the most socially productive. Where we can learn and work hard and have fun. Where we can be technically skilled and imaginatively creative. Where we be erudite, athletic, and lead in our community.
CMC is an exemplar for how to pull people together. To live and learn together. To dream big. To co-author the vision and strategy. To attract and steward the resources. To implement and execute. All hand in hand.
Just look up into this architecture, this atrium. The parallel rectangular monuments, stacked on top of, and rotating on, one another.
George Mitchell said that leadership is the reconciliation of divergent forces in society. He could have added “colliding forces.”
CMC is here in the center. We can see solutions through the intersections.
Two, this is our magnet
We are the force beneath Damián’s Masterpiece, Magnetic Field.
The magnet pulls us in. We become that magnet, too.
The Robert Day Sciences Center is a jaw-dislocating facility. A Claremont McKenna College jewel. A gem for the ages.
The home for our revolutionary Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences. The first of its kind in the world. Organized around grand challenges (health, brain, planet), not siloed departments; just in time, project-based learning (not just in case); literacy in coding and AI, in the context of science problems in society; independent research throughout; integrations of economics, policy, and ethics; collaborative problem-solving; externally facing leadership contributions to business, government, the professions. A program for every student.
This is a new CMC home for all of you.
A place to learn at the intersection of powerful thinking and purposeful action. A place to solve problems and put the solutions to the test. A place to read, study, or build friendships over an espresso or Acai bowl.
It may seem a bit on the far edge of campus for the moment, but in the near future, it will have connecting paths and sightlines through an extended North Mall to the Kravis Center, and down a diagonal Southwestern mall to Roberts Pavilion.
It will become the center of our expanded campus (equidistant from our eastern and western borders).
As Damián Ortega said, this is “not just a building.” It is a “magnetic field of knowledge, ideas, people coming together.”
Three, this is dedicated to you and everyone in line
We dedicate this center today, the Robert Day Sciences Center, a launching pad for the CMC rocket now piercing the sky in increasingly steep trajectory.
We dedicate this Center to each and every one of you here.
To the broader members of our outstanding Claremont Colleges and the wider community, the small businesses nourishing us here tonight and so many others, the civic leaders here in Claremont who are our partners in this global experiment, including the Mayor and Vice Mayor and two additional members of the City Council, we dedicate this to all those who now serve, learn, and work here.
To all those who came before us.
To those we’ve lost. Especially Robert and Tom.
To presidents Benson and Stark and Gann.
To every CMC faculty member of our championed past.
To every alum and their parents and families.
Especially to our founding students, almost all of them vets, who stood in a long line to sign up for our college, nearly 80 years ago,
to redeem dreams nurtured in the Quonset huts in the South Pacific ...
dreams of getting an education ...
of becoming someone, something, somebody ...
How stunned, how moved they would be today.
Most of all, we dedicate the Robert Day Sciences Center to our students: current and all future generations to come.
Your magnetic personalities of social warmth and joy. Your purposeful commitment to what is good in the world. Your courage to speak up and take on tough challenges. Your engaged curiosity and uncanny ability to ask good questions. Your empathy, trust, friendship, and mutual support and championship of one another. Your brilliance at the intersections of colliding codes and multi-disciplinary methods.
These are your stairs to ascend.
This is your laboratory.
This is your studio.
This is your Agora, your forum for exchange.
This is your atrium to keep your eye on the sky.
This is your mall to pursue the Northern star.
This is your magnetic spot.
Now it is up to you to make the most of this quantum moment. Cherish it. Honor the hope we place in you. Fulfill the belief we have in you. Become the future we all want to see in the world.
You are why we are here today.
We dedicate this building, this program to you.
Many congratulations. Thank you all.