‘A Magnet for the Brilliant and the Curious’

In his first Commencement address as president, Mike Kotlikoff celebrates Cornell’s culture—one of connection across difference

“In the President’s Words” brings the president’s major messages to the broader Cornell community, so alumni can hear from the University’s leader first-hand. The following has been adapted from his Commencement address to the Class of ’25. The full text can be found here.

By Mike Kotlikoff

For all of you in caps and gowns, the past few weeks have been full of lasts. Last classes, last papers, last exams; last hike up a hill that’s much too big, much too early in the morning. Right now is a very specific last: the last time you’ll sit in chairs, in rows, with your fellow students, listening to a Cornell professor tell you something they hope you’ll hear and remember.

You don’t need to take any notes. There’s not going to be a test; all of that is behind you now.

But before we confer your degrees, and complete your transformation from Cornell students to Cornell alumni, there are a few last things I’d like to add to your Cornell educations—some lessons from the past that might help you on your way in the future.

Most of our graduates know the story of Andrew White and Ezra Cornell—the two statues on the Arts Quad, and the founders of Cornell.

Andrew White was a planner and an intellectual, a serious thinker always in the middle of an enormous book. Ezra Cornell was a tinkerer, a builder, and a fixer; the oldest of 11 children who had barely been to school and never really learned how to spell.

Half the country had just spent four years fighting the other half. And though the South had surrendered, the nation was not at peace. It was, in many ways, even more bitterly divided than ever before.

The year before the Civil War began, Abraham Lincoln, who was then campaigning for the office of president, put the situation plainly: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Division has frequently been a part of our American society, where the right to think, believe, and speak as we will is among our most cherished freedoms. Democracies aren’t intended to be places where everyone always agrees.

But what they require to succeed is a shared understanding about how to disagree—how to discuss differences, honestly and in good faith, with knowledge and facts, and with respect for those with whom you differ.

Today, our nation is confronting old differences amplified in new ways. New technologies designed to bring people together are instead pulling us apart. Each of us is invited, every day and in a thousand ways, into private worlds built only for us: where we hear only the opinions we agree with, see only the stories we want to read, and watch only news that an algorithm predicts we’ll click on and like.

Democracies aren’t intended to be places where everyone always agrees.

Ezra and Andrew’s plan—for a university where any person could find instruction in any study—aimed to create the opposite experience. To invite young minds into a community—a community of shared experiences that didn’t insulate students from difference, but instead invited them, perhaps for the first time, to experience it.

Cornell welcomed students from every background, every religion, and every race—enrolling international students from the very first class.

It welcomed all those people, who didn’t have a lot in common, to an often freezing cold campus, on top of a very large hill, centrally located in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do but learn together, talk to each other, and figure out some way to make a community together.

It’s not actually all that different today—although we do now heat the buildings.

Most of you have now spent four years on this beautiful, if occasionally cold, dark, wet, windy, and isolated campus with people unlike any you’d previously encountered. And I sincerely hope that experience has been an antidote, for all of you, to the isolation that beckons from inside your phones and your feeds.

Cornell welcomed students from every background, every religion, and every race—enrolling international students from the very first class.

That those you have encountered here and the experiences you’ve shared have expanded and deepened your understanding of others, and yourselves.

That you have been stretched and strengthened, not only intellectually, but in the fullness of your humanity; in your ability to connect with, and comprehend, and learn from, different people, with different perspectives. What we call … diversity.

And here’s something I’ve noticed, having now spent 25 years at Cornell, and having seen generations of students arrive in Ithaca, earn their degrees, and then come back as alumni.

Sometimes, you only really understand the strength of the bonds you’ve built here after you leave. When you realize that you now share, with the people you met here, a common identity—one that will stay with you, and remain a part of you, for the rest of your life. That they are bonds that were built despite, and will endure throughout, your disagreements and differences.

To me, what is so precious and wonderful about Cornell, the thing that struck me so vividly the first moment I arrived here and that I have cherished more deeply every year since, is the sense of shared community—a community that is truly different from any other I have known.

Sometimes, you only really understand the strength of the bonds you’ve built here after you leave.

Cornell is not, and never has been, a place for one specific kind of person. It’s a place that welcomes as its own any person with the ambition and the courage, the creativity and the openness, the practicality and the idealism, to throw the gates of their minds open wide to a community where the walls between us are low, and the goals we reach for are high.

And that has been our greatest strength.

The years you’ve spent here as students have been challenging, for our institution and our nation. Today great universities are accused of political bias and intolerance. Our ability to foster discourse and dialogue is doubted. And the value of a university education—and particularly a so-called “elite” education—is questioned.

At the same time, political divisions related to war and suffering have placed our own community under great stress. Some have seen the University as a platform for promoting causes, or protesting them. Some criticize us for allowing too much expression, or too little, or the wrong kinds.

Some are vocal about their expectation that the University should be a place where never is heard an offensive word.

And some would prefer universities that say: not those people, and not those studies.

Cornell is not, and never has been, a place for one specific kind of person.

At Cornell, we’ve tried very hard to maintain a house united. Stress can either pull a community apart, or make it stronger. The ability to overcome difference, and to avoid division, lies in our ability to listen to each other and stay true to our values and our principles.

“Any person, any study” is our expression, at Cornell, of those values: our commitment to a community of diverse individuals who can work together on anything they decide to pursue.

That commitment is what’s transformed us from a tiny, struggling university to a powerhouse of academic excellence that became the model of the modern research university. A place committed to excellence across an extraordinary range of disciplines—a magnet for the brilliant and the curious, who, generation after generation, have enriched this community, and made it their own, and welcomed new generations to make it theirs.

When I first arrived here, back in 1999, one of those people was Hans Bethe.

In his decades at Cornell, Bethe was known not only for being a theoretical physicist who had won the Nobel Prize, but for picking up students in his car on his way up Buffalo Street, for hair that looked perpetually electrified, and for riding his bicycle around the Synchrotron, which runs 30 feet below the football field our graduates are sitting on right now.

Bethe never expected to end up at Cornell. He began his career in physics in Germany, but within a year of his hiring, the Nazis rose to power, Hitler became chancellor, and Bethe, like all faculty of Jewish descent, was out of a job, out of the university, and, in Germany, out of options.

The ability to overcome difference, and to avoid division, lies in our ability to listen to each other and stay true to our values and our principles.

He left for England, and that’s where he was in 1934 when the job offer came from Cornell. A place that, although certainly not devoid of antisemitism, was committed to welcoming anyone. Where you could talk about or teach anything you wanted, be it physics or politics, without fear.

Bethe talked in later years about the sense of relief, comfort, and belonging he felt when he finally arrived.

An ocean away from where he was born, in a community of people he’d never met, Bethe found the place where he belonged—where, for the rest of his life, he felt at home.

And in making Cornell his home, he also created an intellectual home for others, a community others wanted to join.

Over the years, some of his colleagues from Los Alamos came and spent time at Cornell—like Richard Feynman, who came back, in later years, again and again. At Cornell, Feynman said, “you could just go and talk to the chemists, or the engineers … Cornell was where I felt I could start thinking freely again.”

And another was Freeman Dyson, a fellow alumnus of Los Alamos, who was at Cornell for only a year before spending the rest of his career in Princeton, with Oppenheimer and Einstein—but said, years later, “Cornell has always been my vision of America.”

‘Any person, any study’ is the ethos, and the greatness, of Cornell. But it is also, in deep and fundamental ways, the greatness of this nation.

‘Any person, any study’ is the ethos, and the greatness, of Cornell. But it is also, in deep and fundamental ways, the greatness of this nation.

Your time as a Cornell student is now over. Your lives as Cornell alumni are about to begin.

At Cornell, I hope you’ve learned to value discussion and debate, to evaluate arguments on their merits, to consider evidence and make decisions based on facts. You’ve learned, as well, why civil discourse matters: what we ourselves lose when we shut other voices down.

And what I ask of all of you, in the years and decades ahead, is to use what you have learned here wisely and well.

Build and cherish new communities in the new places in your lives; and hold fast as well to this community, and the values you found here.

For wherever you go, Ithaca will always be your home.

Congratulations, Cornellians.

Top: A view from the dais in Schoellkopf. (All photos in this story by Cornell University photographers Alex Bayer, Sreang Hok, and Jason Koski.)

Published May 28, 2025

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Comments

1. 

   COAN MARK

   1 Jun, 2025

   Your words bring tears to my eyes and bring hope and warmth to my heart. I “graduated” more than 50 years ago; the experience of education on the Hill, expressed in your words and thoughts of what can be after leaving the “place,” still fuels and energizes my life. The Cornell experience is “The Gift that Keeps on Giving!”

   Thank you for stoking the fire that keeps me warm….

   Reply

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