2025 SSD Diploma and Hooding Ceremony

To the graduating class of 2025, it is an honor to stand before you, representing the distinguished faculty of the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago at this very joyful occasion. I, along with my colleagues, congratulate all of you on what you have accomplished.  Those of us on this stage can attest to the fact that being awarded a graduate degree, necessitates a level of focus, drive, curiosity, discipline, and interrogation, often unmatched in other fields and careers. You have met those demands and today you will be credentialed representing all you have worked for and learned in your field of study. 

Those of us on this stage can also assert with confidence and knowledge that no one reaches this point without the support of family and friends. So, I especially want to ask the class 2025 to applaud for all those family and friends here today and maybe far away who helped to get you to this moment. Congratulations to your families and friends! 

When Dean Woodward invited me to give brief remarks today, I was humbled, honored, and I must admit a bit reticent. The graduation ceremony, beyond a site of celebration, and no doubt relief for some, is often a time to reflect on what you will face as graduates entering a new stage of your life, either at the university of beyond. At this particular moment, such a reflection feels a daunting task.

Class of 2025 you face a changing and challenging political and economic landscape possibly unlike anything we have experienced in our lifetime. We have entered a period when fundamental issues such as the work and reach of the state, who is a citizen and welcomed in this country, the rise of antisemitism and the weaponization of antisemitism, and how we stop the genocides and humanitarian crises happening in other parts of the world such as the Sudan, Haiti, and Gaza, now confront you. 

You face political challenges that threaten to continue to undermine the very fabric of our democracy, whether those issues center on immigration policies, reproductive rights, voting rights, mass incarceration, the rights of trans individuals and how to address the historic dilemma of race and equality.  You also face a changing economic landscape increasingly defined by what some call the emerging AI gig economy. And, of course, yours is a generation or generations that are true social media natives, where expanding parts of your life will exist online in a manner we have never previously experienced and may prove damaging.  

And even more closer to home, at least for some of us, there are the sustained attacks on higher education, whether it is the dismembering and banning of inclusive policies and programs located under the framework of diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI, the detention, deportation, and in some cases disappearance of international students and colleagues, the defunding, and privatization of scientific research, or the attack on rigor, facts, the production of knowledge, and academic freedom. 

I want to be clear that are any number of crises that define our/your future, but I do not recount these challenges and threats from a position of defeat, but instead one, actually, of promise. As a scholar of social movements, I know that even during desperate times, and possibly especially during desperate times, there are countless examples of people coming together collectively to demand something new, to build something better, and to produce something transformative.

In the study of social movements, much attention is given to the mechanisms, conditions and resources that produce such movements or what scholars call the political opportunity structure.  However, central to every movement has been the ability for collectives of people, even facing the most desperate forms of oppression and authoritarianism, to imagine that together they can change what appears to be the inevitable, bending the moral arc of the universe toward freedom, as Dr. King would reminds us. And while I know that in your classes we talked a great deal about theory, and methods, and systems; today I want to add to the list of critical concepts needed for this moment, that of imagination. 

Professor Anthony Bogues, in his article, “What about the Human” writes that, “imagination operates as critical thought. It imagines and breaks the boundaries/horizons of the status quo of the everyday.  In this way, the imagination…produces new thought and desires.”  He further reminds us that Frantz Fanon in the concluding pages of his canonical book, Black Skin, White Masks, asserts that “I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into life,” invention into existence.

So today I am asking all of us, but especially the graduates sitting in front of me, to use the knowledge you have learned and produced during your time at UChicago, but also use the histories, legacies, and experiences that nourished you long before you arrived on this campus, to bring new inventions, new imaginings, into life, into existence during what must be acknowledged as challenging and, for some of us, troubling times.  As the direct beneficiary of the radical imagination and organizing that put into existence the Brown decision, the Civil Rights Movement, and, yes, Affirmative Action, all occurring during difficult times, I know both intellectually and personally that collective mobilization and radical imagination can change lives and transform societies. 

That means of course that it will be your generation who will decide what policies we will pursue, what communities we embrace, and what commitments will anchor our journey forward. Fittingly, it will be your standards, your definitions, your beliefs of what constitutes progress, of what is right and moral, and what is a just society which will determine the political path on which we embark.  And it will be your generation that is entrusted with guaranteeing not only the existence of a democratic system, but the larger pursuit of justice built on the recognition of everyone’s humanity, no matter what language they speak, what country they come from, or what race, gender or sexual identity they embrace. It will be your generation that is charged with reimagining what is possible, even during times of crisis. 

Let me say that I have great faith in your ability to chart a new and hopeful path. For I am reminded of the potential of young people to help transform the world every time I walk into a classroom and hear the ideas of a group of intellectually curious students; every time I interact with graduate students who detail new ways of seeing, exploring, and theorizing the world; and every time I watch students involve themselves in movements that will not only shape this university, but the surrounding community and the world. 

Graduates of 2025, you have been privy to one of the most intense and energetic intellectual communities in the world. What we at the University of Chicago fondly call the life of the mind.  But I hope during your time here you have also learned that intellect is most powerful when it is mindful of the lives it can change, the people it can empower, and the societies it can transform. 

So, to the class of 2025 I wish you a life of happiness, of success, of imagination and, yes, collective struggle! 

Thank you Dean Woodward, honored colleagues, guests and most importantly the graduating class of 2025. Congratulations and good luck!