(Music Playing) You may be seated.

Good evening, everyone.

I'm Glenn Chambers, the interi dean of the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities.

And it is our pleasure to join with one another today to celebrate the graduation of the 16th.

Entering class of the residential college in the Arts and Humanities.

I think that deserves an applause.

Let me begin by acknowledgin that Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabeg Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodéwadmi peoples.

In particular the university resides on land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw on behalf of the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, we recognize, support, and advocate for the sovereignty of Michigan's 12 federally recognized Indian nations for historic indigenous communities in Michigan, for indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who are forcibly removed from their homelands by offering this land Acknowledgment.

As had become increasingly common, we affirm indigenous sovereignty and the complicated history of the land grant university.

Now, let me ask the class of 2026 if they are able to please rise and turn towards caregivers, parents, family members, eithe given our chosen and important loved ones, it is throug the support of these individuals that enable your success.

Next, let me ask the class to continue standing again if they are able, and turn back towards the main stag to the arc of faculty and staff who have guided you on this journey.

As you look on at this group of RCAH the leaders, I hope that many memorable thoughts about your time in RCAH come to mind.

Each of these individuals have committed themselves to excellence in undergraduate education and making, RCAH the place it is today.

Please join me i thanking them for their support in your respective and collective journey.

Please reserve your names.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Please reserve your applause until all the names have been read.

John Ani Flexner, Toby Altman, Eric Aronoff, Steve Buy-back, Guillermo Delgado, Vincent Delgado, Austin Harper, Tamar Hamilton, Ray Laura McDonald, Kelly.

Richman, Christiane Sanchez, Estrella Torres, Scott Yoder, and those who are unable to attend who I also think should be acknowledged.

Dave Sheridan, Sitara Thabani, David McCarthy.

And last but not least, Theresa Malmberg.

Thank you.

You can have a seat.

For now.

All right.

I would like to recognize our community partners, RCAH graduate fellows, mentors, friends and supporters in the audience.

And I would also lik to recognize our staff members.

Maurice Roy, Alissa Briones, Katie Crombie, Marcus Fields, Alison Fox, Laurie Hollinger, Andrew Midgley, Rogelio Ramirez and Karen Williams.

I'd also like to than Sandra Smith and her colleagues for providing the captioning for our ceremony.

And I would also like to thank the Wharton Center staff for hosting us on this important day.

And also, I failed to acknowledge and recognize the alumn representative, Benjamin Thorpe, as well as Trustee Brianna Scott.

My apologies.

If able and willing, all please rise for the singing of the Star-Spangled banner with soloist Eleerna Coreyava, accompanied by the MSU Jazz Orchestra, too, under the direction of Anthony Stanko.

(Singing and performance of Star-Spangled Banner) Thank you.

Please be seated.

It is my honor to introduce our Board of Trustees chair, Brianna Scott, a distinguished attorney, entrepreneur, and Michigan State University graduate.

From breaking barriers early in her career to leading with excellence in her community, she exemplifies service, leadership and impact.

Welcome Trustee Scott.

Thank you.

Dean Chambers, on behalf of the Michigan State University Board of Trustees, I welcome all of the graduates, families and friend who are all with us this evening to celebrat the undergraduate commencement.

Under the Michigan Constitution, the Board of Trustees is the governing body of the university by whose authority degrees are awarded.

Today's ceremony represent the culmination of discipline, intellectual work, and creative imagination.

Certainly no small accomplishment for many of you and your families here today.

The sacrifices have been long and great.

The degree that you have earned acknowledges your success and honors those who have encouraged it.

Our wish i that you will always be leaders who generously use your intelligence and your knowledg to improve the quality of life in your communities, to advance the common good, and to renew the hope in the new spirit.

Our faculty and administration and the MSU Board of Trustees are all very proud of you.

Please accept our warmes congratulations and best wishes.

And thank you for letting me spend this evening with you.

Go green.

Go white.

Thank you, Trustee Scott.

Now, I would like to take a few minutes to recognize the following students.

Student who participate in and fulfill the requirements of the Honors College by completing enriched programs of study or identify as graduated.

Graduating with honors College.

Distinction.

These graduates wea a white collar stole with the HC designation, and all students who are graduating as members of the Honors College.

Please stan and accept our congratulations.

Thank you.

Please be seated.

And I also say, in my other life, I'm also the dean of the Honors College as well.

So, students who attain a grade point average of 3.88 to 3.97 are awarded University Honor.

University High Honor is awarded to students who have earned a grade point average of 3.98 and higher.

These honors are designated by the gold cord.

Add it to the academic robes with all students who are graduating with honors and with high honor.

Please stan and accept our congratulations.

Thank you.

Please be seated.

All first generation students, please stan and accept our congratulations.

We're so grateful you selecte Michigan State University and so proud of your achievements.

Thank you.

Thank you.

In recognition of Michigan State's ongoing commitment to study abroad, I ask all graduates who participated in a study abroad program while at MSU to to stand so that we may recognize you.

And that's why we continue to be number one and study abroad.

Thank you.

Please be seated.

I would like to recognize those students who, in addition to their degree in the arts and humanities, are also earning an additional major or second degree.

With those students, please stand.

Thank you.

Please be seated.

Community engagement is also an important aspect of our student undergraduate career, and RCAH all students who have participated in a community engagemen activity during their education and RCAH.

Please stand.

I would have been reall shocked if that wasn't everyone.

Thank you.

Please be seated.

I would now like to introduce soloist Elena Corriveau performing two marvelous for words, composed by Johnny Merce and arranged by Nelson Riddle.

For your enjoyment.

(Singing and musical performance) Now I would like to introduce our class speaker Rebecca Saulmanson.

Thank you.

Like, I just got my exercise for the day.

I am so truly honored to be here.

Speaking on behalf of the RCAH graduating class of 2026.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn't acknowledge the reason and the people who got me here.

Thank you to all my friends who showed me what true friendship is, and for being my constant daily inspiration and life, and for my devoted boyfriend, and forever showing me what tru kindness, patience and love is and helping me through numerous 18 credit semesters.

Thank you to my professors for inspiring me to want to learn again without your guidance and encouragement.

I'm sure I wouldn't believe in myself nearly as much.

And finally, thank you to my family.

Thank you for sacrificing so that I might have the life that I do now.

But more importantly, thank you for your unconditional love, support and wisdom and for believing in me more than I could imagine, and also for showing me tha a disability doesn't define me.

So growing up deaf, I received a lot of questions about the things on my ears, especially by whomever I sat next to on the bus in elementary school.

I could see them kind of side in me throughout the whole ride.

And then finally, in their childlike frankness, it' simply brought out the question, what are those on your ears?

In the early days of this, I started off by trying to explain what deafness was and why they shouldn't equate me to their grandma with a hearing aid.

But eventually I came up with the perfect, concise answer.

I was leaning kind of conspiratorially and say, I'm the Bionic woman works every time and made me look incredibly cool to boot.

However non-serious my answer might seem, I actually do believe tha my deafness can be a superpower.

For one thing, it's one of the best study tools out there.

Immediate silenc in a quiet corner of a library.

But there are other things I've gained from being deaf.

Empathy.

Resilience.

Optimism.

Perhaps this is unique to you on being disabled, but I'm so grateful to my parents for never making me feel as though I was disabled.

In fact, I'd almost say that I get to be deaf as I live life a bit more.

I realized that this message carried in to every corner of how I lived.

Challenges became simply something to overcome.

Something I got to do.

In other words, I began to realize how lucky I was to simply get to do life.

How many things in life do we accidentally make into a curse, instead of seeing it a the blessing that it truly is?

I know I'm guilty of it.

I have to go to class today.

I have to go to my late night club.

I have to get out of bed.

And college has this luxury that we don't have to do that we really don't.

But we get to.

We get to learn and grow and change the world.

If we want.

RCAH has instilled so many wonderful things throughout my four years of being here.

But I'd say one of the bigges things that has reinforced to me was the idea that I get to do life.

RCAH really is about going to create experiences out of what the world sees as nothing.

Getting to design our ow projects, lesson plans, rubrics.

There is even a rubric to begin with.

They really show me the magic of learning and provide us with as many experiences as they could, so that we were able to make the best plan for us.

We got to choose.

We got to do life.

We got to make art project that have petri dishes and apply our classroom knowledge to places in the community and write zines and make poetry.

Professor Toby Altman taught us that we can even pla like children if we wanted to.

He gifted us the game Miniature Tanks, in which a person would get down on their hands and knees and crawl aroun while chanting miniature tanks.

Apparently this helps with writer's block on getting somewhere.

He looks in the parents right now, I promise we learn to.

I can't say for certai that inspiration always struck while doing this, but the class and the hapless person walking by the classroo that afternoon had a good laugh.

And it also reminded m that if I wanted to do something a little outside the box, no one would stop me.

I got to do it an we got to make everything ours.

We received so much to this college and I'm so grateful for all the applicable lessons it taught us.

So if I may, I'd like t just take 10s to close our eyes and remember all the things that we got to do in our.

And as a parting gift, they set us up for life after graduation.

We all have so many experiences in this next chapter of our life that we will need to make our own.

And you better believe RCAH has set us up for that.

So as we embark on this next big adventure, let me just give you this one last piece of encouragement.

You have so much life left in you and so much love to give whatever it is you are stepping into.

Never let it b something that you have to do.

Yes, there must be pain and jobs may grow old, but let life itself be something that you are excited to do.

Find the random poems that bring you joy.

Make art that moves others as well as yourself.

Immerse yourself in culture and the beauty around you.

Make a stand for what you believe in.

Dream big.

You get to choose a career that you're stepping into, a blessing that is.

And always remember, you get to do life.

And so for the very last time, before our college merges with another congratulations RCAH class of 2026.

We did it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Rebecca.

I would now like to introduce our alumni speaker, Ben Thorpe.

Ben graduated from RCAH in 2014 and earned a master's in creative writing from Central Michigan University.

Here he is currently a reporter for WFYI Public Media, a broadcast media production and distribution company in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Welcome back, Ben.

So when Scott Yoder first got in touch and asked m to be the commencement speaker, I went immediately to a group chat with some friends I still have from my time here in RCAH and asked them, d we all think this was a mistake?

First, how many speakers did he have to go through before getting to me?

And second, would Scott be asking me to do this if he knew I was a depressed 35 year old living in a studio apartment in Indianapolis, Indiana with Scott, who I really adored taking classes from, by the way, and hold zero ill will.

And I'm so sorry for singling him out like this right now.

Allow me to get up here and talk to you all.

If you knew that I, like many people in my line of work right now, had deep doubts about the future and stability of the work that I do.

So, hi, I'm Ben Thorpe, and I work as a government reporter for a public radio station in Indiana covering the statehouse, one of the many local national public Radio stations across the country.

Last year, as you may have heard, federal money going to public radio stations was cut off by lawmakers a the request of President Trump.

At the same time, lawmakers i Indiana also voted to end state funding for our local station, a big one two punch.

Our statewide news team, some of whom had been working and their jobs for over a decade, were all very suddenly unemployed.

Some of this, I think, is worth saying is not new.

Journalism has never felt like a particularly secure career.

And if I'm being honest, I go through a spiral maybe once every year, maybe once every few months, where I ask myself, is this all worth it?

Join m now as I take you on a journey through that existential crisis, because it's something that I've been doing since literally my sophomore year, sophomore year here at RCAH.

And because I think it leads to some basic questions that I hope maybe will be useful to all of you.

And if not, I'm sorry in advance.

So many years ago, I started at MSU as a dual enrollee in RCAH, and if you can believe it's the theater department.

But after my first year I came back and realized, wait, I don't think I know that this is the right fit for me, and I'm not sur this is going to lead to a job.

So I don't theater.

And I kept RCAH.

Over the next two semesters.

I took all kinds of classes outside of RCAH English teaching.

Weirdly forming.

I was convinced I would be a great organic farmer for some reason.

I cannot explain this to you if you're struggling to imagine me on a tractor.

Well, you're probably right.

All of these different paths started to feel like the wrong direction for me to head.

But worse than that, I started to really panic that school was the right choice for me at all.

Student loans were adding up, and I started to fear that I was wasting my time in school trying to figure out what I wanted instead of getting ready for a job at that moment of profound crisis.

In what Joanna Bossie who during my time taught music courses here in RCAH and Bossie said to me, look, if you want to leave school, you can do that.

If you're worried about how this is all going to set you up for a job, or where a degree in the Residential College of Art and Humanities is going to lead.

That's fair.

But I think you're going to be better off getting the degree than not.

And if you apply yourself, learn literary analysis in classes with Eric Aronoff.

How to make an argument agains transhumanism with Scott Yoder.

Build community with Austria Torres.

Those things will make your life better, even if the things you learn don't translate exactly 1 to 1, to the jo you end up doing down the road.

Basically, your life will be better if you stay here, even if it doesn't line up perfectly with a job.

So I stayed and I look at my job now, a job I really love.

And so many of it touches o the things that I learned here.

With bossy, I worked on a project editing a documentary with Therese Malmberg I had to listen to and transcribe interviews, a thing that I still literally do every day.

And for so many of the classe here, I had to write and write and write, and all of those skills have found a home in what I do now, in a way that I feel incredibly lucky for.

So when I'm trying to decide what to leave journalism for, I'm often stopped by the question, where else will I get to use some of these skills?

Where else will I get to put the parts of myself that I care about to use?

My coworkers and I all have contingency plans.

What's work that you could happily leave for?

How much money are you willing to jump ship for?

What's a communications job that you could leave for and feel okay about?

Working as a press person for a politician or a pharmaceutical company?

Or probably not in my future, but maybe I could run communications for a local community form nonprofit that pays 1 million American dollars every year.

That's a real job that definitely didn't just make up.

I think those are questions that are good for anyone graduating right now to ask, where do you want to go and what skills do you care about the most using?

How do you want to balance the things that you most love doing against your own financial stability?

If it comes to that?

And look, I understand that not all of us are going to get to choose.

One year after graduating from MSU and working a job teachin afterschool programing in Iowa.

I ended up unemployed and with my parents for about four months.

I applied to a local publi radio station and interviewed, but hadn't heard anything back.

I had also applied to be a welder on a ship that worked on Lake Michigan, because my dad told me being a welder would be good for me.

I got offered that job.

A job that I think we can all safely agree I was not remotely cut out for.

At the interview, which was in the garage of the family that ran the ship welding business in northern Michigan.

They asked me if I'd ever worked on a ship, and I said no.

And they said, how soon can you start?

I was set to start that job on a Monday, and the Frida before that happened, the public radio job called and gave me my first job as a reporter.

I tell you this because it's funny, but also because there is a universe where I am working on a ship somewhere with a whole ass, RCAH degree, and trying to talk with my coworkers about trans culture, Asian.

And I still think that universe where I'm discussing Moby Dick on a welding boat in Lake Michigan because of a class Erik Aronoff taught, is a better universe than the one where I left school my sophomore year.

I don't know what's next for me or for any of you.

Maybe I can keep sticking it out a few more years and take a new job.

Maybe I die doing public radio.

Who knows?

But what I do know is that so many of the things I learned here have come back into my life, have come up in expected and unexpected ways, and I'm bette for the time that I spent here.

It was worth it for me and I hope the same will be true for you.

Thank you.

I took his script Im so sorry.

Thank you.

Ben.

I want to invite associate Dea Theresa Malmberg to the podium to give the remarks on behalf of the archive, faculty and staff.

Thank you, Dean Chambers.

Can everybody hear me?

On behalf of the arc of faculty, let me say congratulations to the graduates, their families, their friends, and everyone who made it possible for you to reach this goal.

I'm honored to have the opportunity.

I'm honored to have the opportunity to offer you some faculty remarks as you sit at the threshold of your next chapter.

The last time I took the podium at an RCAH graduation ceremony was in 2011.

The class of 2011 included the inaugural first year students of RCAH, who began college in 2007, the year RCAH first opened its door to students.

And today, I stand at the podium during what many are calling RCAH's last graduation ceremony, at least in Wharton.

For as our college is integrated into the College of Arts and Letters, as the Schoo of Residential Community engaged Arts and Humanities, or the school of Art, students graduating from RCAH or with a degree from RCAH will walk in the larger Cal graduation ceremony.

But first and last are really relative terms, and I hesitate to use the because they make our histories and our legacies and speculative futures less visible.

When Ocean Vong, a Vietnamese American poet and writer, came to RCAH as an artist in residence in 2017.

He shared that he is often asked, how does it feel to be the first poet, meaning the first poet from Vietnam or the first Vietnamese American poet?

And he tells them, I'm not the first poet.

I come from a long line of poets.

They were not documented.

He says, my grandmother, she was a rice farmer.

In a sense, all Vietnamese farmers were poets because while they were working, they sang.

And the songs helped the rhythm of the harvestin and the seeding of the fields, but also the daily news of life.

And ultimately, when the war came, when the bombs were falling information started to come in the rhyming couplets in the poems and in the songs.

And Wong's reply to that question.

He reminds us tha poems are one of the many ways that knowledge is made and carried forward.

For similar reasons, wheneve I take the podium and whenever I publish something, I use my grandfather's name.

His family name, Ginza, surtout trees in the title Malmberg.

My grandfather came to the U.S.

when he was 19 years old, durin the territorial period of U.S.

colonization of the Philippines, as a migrant worke living precariously in the U.S.

as a colonial subject.

And the professor in me wants to unpack that phrase, but it would be a very long tangent, so I'm going to resist that urge.

He worked on the railroad in Montana, and I imagined other jobs as he made his way from Seattle to Chicago in pursuit of an education from a university in the U.S., in the U.S., because at that time, Chicago was a hub of educational opportunities for Filipinos of all genders, seeking them.

My grandfather was a self sponsored student, as opposed to a government sponsored student, which meant that he struggled to balance work and his studies while learning English, and he was ultimately unable to finish his college degree.

But he turned his sights on me and became an important sponsor of my education.

He encouraged my academic studies, but he also taught me that school is not the only source of knowledge.

He taught me what it means to build community, to enact reciprocity, and how to use my education to further and sustain the communities that have lon sustained me and brought me joy.

I wouldn't be standing here in front of you today if it weren't for my grandfather and so many others over the years, some of them on this very stage with me, many of whom I can name and many of whom I've never even met in the years early years of RCAH.

We began a project called the Building Stories Project.

The name stemmed from the renovation of Snyder Phillips, the building in which RCAH's house.

But the name also signaled the excitement of building a new residential college.

We developed an archive of recordings, photos, and interviews with construction workers, staff, faculty and administrators who had been building the college even for the even before.

The first cohort of faculty an students arrived in fall 2007.

By bringing students in contact with others who were literally building the college or rebuilding the building, we wanted students to see, their education was not just an individual endeavor, but a collective endeavor supported by a larger community of diverse people.

It was through the Buildin Stories project that I learned.

RCAH has its roots in MSU's Justin Morel College, which was founded in 1965, two years by the way, before James Madison and Lyman Briggs College were formed.

Justin Morel was closed in 1979, and on its official web unofficial website, it says that Justin Morel was, quote, Michigan State's first, most experimental and most innovative residential college, unquote.

But again, there's that word first, which again, is not my favorite word.

As a community engaged scholar and teacher and immersed in the work of building and sustaining community.

When my grandparent and countless aunties taught me.

And what I've learned through this work is that building community does not just happe once, but repeatedly over time.

You don't just build it and it's always going to be there for you.

It takes work to sustain it.

As I've listened to my elders, I hear in their stories a landscape of community connections that emerged, thrived or seemingly faded as larger political, racial, economic, and global contexts have shifted.

Challenging any given community organization, no matter how formally or loosely defined to regroup repeatedly over time.

These stories reveal legacies of community building and advocacy, and the deeper constellations of relationships that sustain community.

So one common thread if you're still with me, are you still with me?

Is that RCAH as another community that I've worked with others like you to build was not the first and will not be the last innovative experimental educational spac in the arts and humanities RCAH like other communities, ha multiple beginnings, revisions and sustaining threads as a college, as a program, and now as or soon to be a school.

We are not founded by one single narrative.

Rather, we as a collective body have a number of legacies we have drawn upon, and we have a number of alums like them who are some of our sustaining threads building out our legacies, communities, and visions of the future.

In our strategic plan, which we collectively wrote during the 20 2122 academic year, we say in our vision statement, RCAH is an educational space built on the ongoing transformative work of radically reciprocal teaching and learning.

A residential college in the fullest sense, we build community among our students, faculty, staff, and the people around us wherever we are living.

We are grounded in and push the boundaries of the arts and humanities to create space for and deepen multiple ways of knowing that can be mobilize for equity and social justice.

We strive to be accessibl and accountable to communities as expert and co-producers of knowledge.

Our transdisciplinary efforts address inequities that undermine the potential of a socially engaged and community based university, and more just society, unquote.

As we move into Cal, thi vision will not change the word.

College in that vision statement may change but the vision remains the same.

We may have to be creative an how we navigate new constraints, but that is the challeng of sustaining not just a college or a community, but a vision.

RCAH is not jus a college, a place or a school.

It's a concept.

It's an idea.

It's a spirit.

It's a way of moving through the world.

Our roots are deep, and we will continue to plant seeds and reach for that vision.

We see our vision as revolutionary.

If I might borrow that word from Grace Lee Boggs, revolutionary with the R in parentheses to signal a vision that is both revolutionar and evolutionary, meaning that with our commitment to create change, is also a commitment to both reimagine and retool as needed.

Our vision is not just a statement, but also an active proces requiring us to, quote, engage in sustained, reflective, thoughtful and historical critique, making art in many forms and innovating new ideas, knowledge and practices and quote.

Like all strategic plans that reach for vision, it is meant to be both live and living to change over time.

You may already know that your life and your life's wor will not follow a straight line.

Mine certainly didn't.

I heard references to non-linear path in both Rebecca's talk about being in RCA and Ben's address to you tonight as well.

Embrace the non-linear paths that you might be on at different points in your life.

You may find yourself questioning what you're doing and where you're going.

And that is not a bad thing.

I would worry about you if you didn't have these moments.

It means that you are engaging in sustained, reflective, thoughtful, and historical critique, innovating and forging new paths.

And by the way, it's a myth that only arts and humanities majors have these existential moments.

My own non-linear path included several years as a computer programmer, and you better believe that coders are having some thoughts right now about what lays ahead for them in the wake of your AI.

Many people will tell you that we're living in unprecedented times.

But like the word first unprecedented mass, the legacies and deep knowledge that we have available to us to navigate these times.

You have the skills to navigate these times, to talk to others who've been through similar times, to think about what it means to adjust and regroup for the current context.

Never lose sight of what's possible.

Know the constraints under which you can navigate and advocate for your vision.

For our vision for change.

As gracefully Bogg reminds us, we are the leaders we've been looking for.

So stay grounded.

Celia Rutz, plant some seeds.

Graduates and families, thank you for saying yes.

I'm all in.

Thank you for taking the leap of faith, for joining RCAH, and for working alongside us as we continue to reach for that vision.

We have grown with you these last four years, and it has truly been an honor and a pleasure.

Congratulations RCAH class of 2026.

Go live your learnin and keep that RCAH spirit alive.

Thank you to Reese.

At this time, I invite Maurice Roe to the podium to announce the names of the graduate as they receive their diplomas.

I ask that the new graduates be escorted to the platform.

Audience.

Please remain seated.

We ask the audience to be considerate and applaudin your graduate as names are read.

We want each graduate's name to be heard and faculty, please stand.

Rebecca, Luella Sammons and.

Elena.

Foreman.

Sophie.

Motley.

Kierra.

Polizzi.

Thank.

Angelina.

Frenzies.

Thanks.

Madison.

Stark.

Thanks, Katya.

Marianne.

Bishop.

Sharp.

Elizabeth.

Goosen.

Delaney.

Jane.

Kelly.

Cami.

Huff.

Nagle.

Georgia.

Hill.

Shifa.

Abdullah.

Hassan.

Olivia.

Rose.

Gustin.

Vesper.

One.

Yow!

O'Brien.

Reese.

Wester.

Dale.

Thanks.

Mo.

On behalf of the president, who has delegated the authority of the State of Michigan vested in the Board of Trustees, I confer upon all of you the degrees for which you have been recommended, with all the rights and distinct according to custom.

You may now move your tassels from the right side of your caps to the left.

Congratulations MSU, RCAH Alumni.

This act represents the conclusion of a great achievement and marks the beginning of a lifetime of dedicate service to your community is an.

It is an achievement worthy of celebration.

And we are here this evening to celebrate the fact that you are now joining over 500 scholars, artists and advocates who have completed the academic program and the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities.

Take that deserves another round of applause.

Faculty, please be seated.

Allow me to close this evening by reminding us that we are here to honor the accomplishments of our graduating students, as well as recognize all those who made their accomplishments possible.

And this moment.

I am drawn to the word and actions of doctor Grace Lee Boggs, the brilliant Detroit based activist who passed away at the age of 100, 2015.

Grace Lee Boggs reminds us that we are beginning to understand that the world is always being made fresh and never finished.

That activism can be the journey rather than the arrival.

That struggle doesn't always have to be conference final, but can take the form of reaching out to find common groun with the many others in society.

As you transition into the next phase of your journey, remember as Doctor Boggs reminds us, that you play an active role in building this new world.

And just as the world is never finished, so too will you always be learning.

Your journey may likewise change courses.

I hope that your time in RCAH was but a small moment on our collective and shared journey to make a better and more just world.

We are confident that as you walk out of the Wharton Cente this evening, you will transform the world.

I now invite all to rise and sing the alma mater, followed by the MSU fight song.

Audience.

Please remain at your seats until all graduates have recessed and joined us and join us for refreshments afterwards.

(Singing and performance of MSU Alma Mater) (MSU Fight Song performance) Pine.

(MSU Fight Song performance)