President Garry W. Jenkins offered this welcome at Commencement on May 25, 2025.

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Good morning, all. I’m Garry Jenkins, and I’m the ninth president of Bates College. It is my honor to welcome you to the 159th Commencement of Bates College. 

I want to welcome parents, families, and friends. I also want to welcome esteemed special guests: today’s recipients of Bates honorary degrees, who are seated here on the platform.

I also want to welcome members of the Bates Board of Trustees, including our board leaders, themselves all Bates alumni and parents: chair Greg Ehret, Class of ’91, vice chair Jean Wilson, Class of ’81, and secretary Katie Frekko, Class of ’95.

And welcome Bates faculty and staff. And of course, welcome, our graduates of the Bates Class of 2025!

Whether you are joining us in person on our Historic Quad or by livestream from across the country and around the world, we are delighted to have you with us on this joyous occasion. 

Before beginning our program, I’d like to invite you to join me in thanking the Events and the Facilities staff and everyone else who worked so hard to prepare this event so beautifully. Let’s thank them. 

While we have celebrating to do, and that we will do, we also mark the Memorial Day holiday. We remember what it means to believe in and fight for our country, our democracy, our Constitution, and the rule of law. 

Seniors, let us also take a moment to express the gratitude I know you feel for all the family, friends, and loved ones who are here or spread across the globe, and for the faculty and staff, who have been behind you, supporting you, and encouraging you, at every point along your path to this momentous milestone. I invite you all to stand and show them your thanks and appreciation. Thank you.

Members of the Class of 2025, you are a remarkably accomplished group. Five-hundred and four of you will march across this stage this morning, representing 38 states, the District of Columbia, and 31 countries. Sixty-four of you are the first in your family to graduate from college. 

You all have knit this campus and community together over the past four years through your engagement and leadership in residence life, as club presidents, as members of student government, as debaters, as team captains in athletics. You have inspired us with your gifts of music, performance, art making, research, thesis writing, and endless intellectual curiosity. You have served as Multifaith and Admission fellows, as Purposeful Work peer advisors, as EcoReps and Bonner Leaders, and so much more. 

A whopping 126 of you are double majors, and four are triple majors. Thirty-four of you received departmental honors for a year-long honors thesis. Sixty percent of you studied abroad. Forty-one percent of you have participated in a varsity sport while at Bates, many winning All-NESCAC honors and even some being named All-Americans.

Four of you were recently selected to perform at the internationally renowned Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival this summer. Five of you have won highly prestigious Fulbright fellowships — and one of you won a Goldwater Scholarship.

All of this you have achieved while also giving back, especially here in Lewiston, supporting the work of over 100 off-campus schools and organizations through research, volunteering, community work-study, and course-based projects.

You are off to continue your education in fields like law, applied math and statistics, counseling, international relations, and nuclear engineering. You will study at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and more. You are launching exciting careers: in banking and finance in New York; in medical research in Boston; in wilderness adventure leadership in Wyoming; in government in Washington, D.C.; and so on and so on.

And some of you are still deciding what’s next or taking more time to open up the doors you wish to walk through. We are excited for all of you. We know that your liberal arts education will leave you well-poised to flourish and make meaningful contributions in whatever you pursue. 

The world needs Bates graduates — always. But perhaps especially now, more than ever.

You probably heard more than once that these are uncertain times. Perhaps so much so that you may be a bit tired of hearing it. And if you’re like I was, as a soon-to-be college graduate, you may feel like you’ve got uncertainty enough about your own next steps, your own life journey, let alone with regard to national and world events and issues to pile on top of that. 

But friends, I’ve got good news and bad news.

I’ll give you the bad news first. There will always be uncertainty. Life is defined by change, by the unexpected, by the yet unknown and the always unknowable. The degree of uncertainty, and the effects it has on you personally, will fluctuate. But uncertainty is a fact of life.

Of course, you don’t need me to tell you this. You know it already. You all finished high school and started college in the midst of a global pandemic. You know about uncertainty. 

And that’s the good news. You’ve already faced uncertainty. You understand it. And you have the tools you need to manage it for yourselves — and to confront and lessen it for others. 

The world needs Bates graduates. The world needs you. We need you to bring the tools, the talents you have acquired during your time on this campus for lives of leadership and purpose, ameliorating uncertainty, fueling prosperity and innovation, standing up for what’s, caring for those around you.

The world needs your power of deep critical thinking and sparkling creativity to find solutions to problems and better ways of operating. The world needs your sense of justice and ethics, your dedication to something beyond yourself, your willingness to ask difficult questions and assess the substance of the answers you are given.

The world also needs something else, and dare I say it in front of the world’s foremost expert on the topic, but we need your grit — your fortitude, your perseverance, your sustained commitment, even in the face of challenges, setbacks, plateaus, disappointment, or failure. The world needs your voice, your heart, your mind. 

Let me be perfectly clear, should there be any doubt. This is the promise, and the value, of a liberal arts education. It’s at places like Bates that we prepare students to think critically, to problem solve, to engage across difference, to connect, both the dots and with each other. And then those students become graduates who contribute to their communities around the world in all their vibrancy, diversity, and complexity. We believe these are the elements of a meaningful life for our graduates. We believe they are also the elements that drive change — for the better, for the greater good.

This is why higher education is essential to a healthy democracy. This is why Bates is essential. 

Higher education has long fueled American progress: driving innovation, preparing leadership, enhancing civic life. Of all this, I am certain.

And, all of you — our amazing graduates, as well as friends and visitors — I call on you all to be ambassadors for Bates and for higher education. Tell the story of how and why Bates matters.  Tell the stories of other colleges and universities that are important in your life. Talk about the doors that have been opened by this kind of higher education. Share with others the excellence that lives in these places. Stand up for the positive difference we — small liberal arts colleges and higher education more broadly — make in communities, in professions, in human advances through research and progress in a wide range of fields. And defend the distinctive mission of our colleges and universities and their unique and vital contributions to our nation and world.

Yet, even while I hold fast to the enduring power of education to shape lives and propel the world forward, I still feel plenty of uncertainty, too, born of this particular moment, this fraught and fragile time. I’m right there with you. But I am certain about you. I am certain about our Bates Class of 2025. I am certain you are ready for the future. 

I have loved getting to know you. I take joy in seeing your close and warm relationships with one another. I have loved watching you grow and achieve, face setbacks and come back stronger. You have all you need to succeed in whatever you choose. And whatever you choose, wherever life takes you, your college community will be here, cheering you on. 

The world needs you. And I am so proud of all the ways I know you will meet those needs. All of us — your Bates family — we are so very proud of you. Thank you!