2025 Commencement Address

Undergraduate Ceremonies
May 21 and 22, 2025
Rumsey Playfield, Central Park, New York City

Class of 2025, congratulations. Today is your very own glorious day. 

I welcome your families and friends; the members of our faculty, staff, and administration; our FIT Trustees and Foundation directors, and all of our distinguished guests. Your presence here today adds to the joy of the special celebration of our graduates and their achievements. 

I share that joy, class of 2025. You have persevered through a tenuous time in our society. It has been fraught with international conflicts, national upheavals, political unrest, and local protests.  

Indeed, five years ago, some of you were on the cusp of planning your arrival at FIT—just as the whole world shut down. In recent years, you lived through ongoing conflicts that are biblical in their historic divide, seriousness, and scope. 

A number of these have been epic, historic, unprecedented, and some might say cataclysmic events that have swirled around you and yet you persevered, you studied, you matured, and you emerged successfully to be here on this day.

Clearly, you had a plan. Part of that plan was to succeed by creating innovative and beautiful things either as products or business plans or novel new imaginative solutions to problems not yet defined. 

Today you have expanded your reach, you have further developed your intellect, your receptivity to new ideas, your acceptance of new people and new cultures. You have broadened your perspective. That should give you a great sense of self satisfaction, but it also makes you valuable in the marketplace, in business and in life. 

The advantage of creative and critical thinkers—individuals who understand and find merit in how societies and democracy work, who demonstrate intellectual and global sophistication—is invaluable, perhaps even the best and brightest hope for our society to flourish and survive.

I do not need to tell you that we are living through difficult times and as we prepare to hand you—our graduates—the keys to society’s fragile future, I have thought a lot about what possible pearls of wisdom I can impart as I send you off into a world that is fragmented and vulnerable and engaged in questioning its core values.

Many years ago, there was a woman by the name of Emily Post. You can be forgiven if you never heard of her. She was born in 1872 and died in 1960, long before you graduates were born. She was known as the expert on etiquette and famously said: “Etiquette is the science of living, and manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that, you have good manners.”

A sensitive awareness of the feelings of others … If that is the measure by which we answer the question of manners today, I fear the practice of manners—of etiquette, of “civility”—is certainly going, if it has not gone out of style.

Among many life lessons, I want you to remember that “words matter.” As one observer noted they can clarify or cloud, inflame or inspire. They can exacerbate intolerance and perhaps “impel violence” … or they can heal as Abraham Lincoln did when he spoke of “malice toward none” and “charity towards all.” 

Democracy is difficult and civility is a true challenge. It requires self-restraint, respectful engagement and a willingness to listen, and to consider the point of view of others. It requires us to become citizens of the world, people who can, as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum put it so well, “transcend the divisions created by difference, distance, and mistrust.” 

Indeed, in order to build and maintain a culture that nurtures the democracy that we say we cherish—a culture in which civil discourse takes place—we need to be able to think critically. We need knowledge, we need facts both about ourselves and about people from other cultures, but most essentially, Dr. Nussbaum said, we need “compassionate imaginations” and the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself: “a compassionate imagination … a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others.”

And so I wonder what message is most important to leave with you at this significant moment? Which life lessons to impart? 

I will start by asking you to choose to see and appreciate the humanity in one another. Stay focused on your moral compass. Hold true to your ethical core. Stand up for what you believe in. Let there be no circumstances that make you compromise your integrity. 

Live your life with purpose, intention, clarity, transparency, and respect. Use your voice to speak your truth and then live it.

These days so much obeisance is paid to those we admire as disruptors. We seem to save our respectful attention for the rebels, the outspoken critics or even the deliberate nonconformists in the orderly society we thought we revered. Questioning the status quo or pushing and testing the limits of habits and orders that may not work for us anymore is fine—it may even be progress—but to respond before analyzing and understanding the consequences of that response is to give away your power to actually shape the landscape of the future.

Whatever personal beliefs you hold about politics, race, religion, freedom of speech, gender equality or identification, behavioral norms … Hold on to those beliefs, but don’t get confused about what the real challenges are. It is not about political parties or positions or any religious belief system versus another. It is about morality and ethics and behavior; it is about legacy and values, about character and leading by example, and above all, being honest.

Right up until today you have made choices; you chose to demonstrate moral strength by persevering. If you choose to preserve intellectual freedom, and observe the rule of law and embrace pluralism and have compassion for others, regardless of their station in life, you will remember and be guided by the value of compassionate imagination and a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others.

You are poised to be the next generation of leaders. I hope you will lead with care and compassion and create a pathway for those less privileged than you. At the end of the day we won’t remember the words that led us astray or even who spoke them, but we will never forget the silence of those whose voices could have kept us moving forward on the path to a better world and a civil society.

For me, commencement has always been the highlight of every academic year for the past 27 years. This one will be my last. As I pass the baton, please know that we are launching you to be voices for change as well as voices of reason.

I hope that joy and fulfillment lie ahead for you, that wisdom and humility will guide you, and that grace and the quest for truth are the forces that will propel you.

I will be watching your journey with great interest and pride, and I wish you Godspeed.