Welcome to everyone.

I started today as I often have over the last three decades, by running around the Dish – clockwise, because it’s a little easier on the knees. And as I was climbing toward the top, I was hoping we would have a beautiful California afternoon, just like this one.

I want to express my appreciation to our Board Chair Jerry Yang; members of the Stanford Board of Trustees; Presidents Emeriti Gerhard Casper, John Hennessy, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, and Richard Saller; Provost Jenny Martinez; past Provosts Condoleezza Rice, John Etchemendy, and Persis Drell; the executive cabinet and senior staff of the university. 

I want to thank the members of my family who are here, especially my wife Amy, and our children Madeline, Ben, and Noah. 

And I want to welcome all of you here today: faculty colleagues, students, postdocs, staff members, alumni, and friends. 

The first time I was in Frost Amphitheater was 34 years ago. It was the fall of 1990. I was a Stanford freshman attending Convocation. 

As I told this year’s entering class – despite having high hopes that my own first Convocation address would have a deeply enduring impact – I am unable to remember a single word the president said that day in Frost.

What I do remember is the feeling of arriving in California. 

I had grown up on the East Coast with a deep love of the outdoors, reading about the pioneering climbs in Yosemite and the whitewater of the High Sierra. When I arrived at Stanford, I was excited to be a student, and I couldn’t wait to get to the mountains.

My memories of Stanford from that time blend the exploration of the classroom – reading literature, studying mathematics, taking classes in computer science and philosophy and economics, writing a thesis on Norman Maclean – with trips to the rivers and peaks of California.

For me, like so many others, the intellectual expansiveness of the Stanford campus has always been intertwined with the physical expansiveness of the American West. 

We are reminded of that today, when we can look up at the natural beauty of our surroundings, and look around at this array of scholars, students, and friends who have contributed so much to our academic excellence. 

Stanford is the university of the American frontier.

Stanford has all of the complexity of the frontier. And like the frontier, it is infused with a sense of openness, possibility, and hope that is fundamental to who we are. 

Those characteristics are an essential part of what makes this place so distinctive, and will help us define our future. 

Since that September day 34 years ago, I have been fortunate to spend most of my adult life at Stanford. I have gotten to see the university as a student, a teacher, a scholar, and an academic leader. 

Each of those experiences and perspectives makes the responsibility of becoming Stanford’s 13th president more meaningful and more humbling. 

I am conscious that I begin my term as president at a time when American universities are under intense scrutiny. The difficulties we have faced in recent years are evident. Many of them stem from outside influences – global events, politics, skepticism about elite institutions ­– some from within. 

We are criticized for not doing enough to address societal challenges, and for doing too much. We are criticized for suppressing speech, and for permitting it. Our admissions policies, faculty composition, research funding, campus climate, and endowments are the subject of heated debate. 

There is no doubt that in the coming years, we will have to navigate challenges. 

Our North Star is our fundamental purpose of discovery and learning. We exist as a university to create and share knowledge, and to prepare students to be curious, to think critically, to flourish, and to contribute to the world. This purpose, both simple and profound, gives us a distinctive role in society. 

Discovery and learning require fresh ideas, open discussion, sometimes sharp disagreement. It is no accident that Stanford’s first president chose as our motto: “The wind of freedom blows.”

When our former President Gerhard Casper arrived at Stanford, he was so struck by our motto that he dedicated his inaugural address to explaining its origin, and relating it to the freedoms of the university.

These include the freedom of faculty and students to pursue knowledge without constraints; the freedom to challenge orthodoxy, whether old or new; and the freedom to think and speak openly. 

These freedoms nurture the conditions for discovery and learning.

These freedoms also provide a guide when it comes to navigating many of the contentious issues we face today. 

To be clear, we want Stanford’s students and faculty to engage with the world. We expect them to wrestle with social and political issues. We hope that they will have an influence on the direction of society, pursue public service, and tackle the pressing challenges of our time. 

Yet the university’s purpose is not political action or social justice. It is to create an environment in which learning thrives. As Harry Kalven memorably put it, the university’s obligation in challenging times is “to provide a forum for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues.” 

This is what we should strive for today: to foster searching discussion, to listen with curiosity, and to ensure the freedom of members of the university to study and learn. 

These are goals I will work toward as president, and to which we all can contribute. 

It is in this way that we will generate ideas that percolate out and shape the future, and that our students will graduate with the inquisitiveness and knowledge to make a difference. And it is ultimately through those means that we will fulfill our role in society and renew public faith in universities. 

It is also essential, when there is so much skepticism, to remind ourselves just how extraordinary an institution we are part of at Stanford. 

In the time since I arrived, I am inspired by how our faculty and students have advanced human welfare. 

Our faculty have pioneered fields such as optogenetics, bioorthogonal chemistry, market design, and large-scale online education. They have written poetry and history, and expanded our knowledge of the human condition. Our clinicians have built our academic medical center into a national jewel.

Our students have served on the Supreme Court and as prime minister of the United Kingdom. They have won 81 gold medals, 12 just this summer, and founded and built thousands of companies – sometimes here on campus, occasionally in a friend’s garage, or even a Denny’s restaurant. They have won Oscars, Emmys, and Nobel Prizes. More than a hundred thousand have graduated and gone on to lives of meaning and purpose. 

Stanford embodies the essential characteristics that, even now, make American universities the envy of the world. 

We pursue parallel excellence in research and education. We seek to attract and bring together the great scholars of today and the brightest minds of tomorrow. Nowadays, we take that vision for granted. But when Leland and Jane Stanford set out to create this university, it was a new concept to integrate the research focus of German universities with the British model of college education – a distinctively American combination. 

It remains an exceptional one. When it works best, as it often does at Stanford, faculty share their knowledge with students, and students inspire questions and new thinking. The learning goes in both directions. 

And of course, what is remarkable at Stanford is the breadth of fields in which that occurs. If you walked around today, the classrooms you passed might have been full of discussion about Victorian poetry, or fluid dynamics, or constitutional law, or the politics of immigration. It is impossible for a curious mind to be bored at Stanford. 

We are an engine of innovation. One of the most consequential, and sometimes underappreciated, steps in American history was the decision after World War II to locate scientific research in universities, and to invest at a scale that would ensure U.S. leadership. If our political leaders today have sense, that investment and leadership will continue far into the future. 

Stanford took up the challenge – expanding the faculty and student body, becoming the home of a national laboratory, and moving the hospital to campus. We brought a pioneering spirit – the idea that discoveries could move from labs and classrooms to the world. By the end of the 1950s, Stanford had launched the semiconductor industry that became the foundation for Silicon Valley. A few weeks ago, I tried to count the value of Stanford-founded companies and quickly got to over $7 trillion.

Most importantly, we have a culture of openness and exploration.

We are open to people from around the world, from an array of backgrounds, with the widest range of interests, aspirations, values, and beliefs. 

We are open to new ways of thinking, to pursuing research that can reshape our understanding of humanity and the world. 

We are open in giving our ideas away – to publishing our research so that scholars everywhere can build on our ideas. That commitment distinguishes us from the private sector, and even universities in other parts of the world. 

This foundational value of openness is at the heart of American universities. 

Our former President Wallace Sterling referred to Stanford’s history as the story of “strong growth from good soil.” I love that description because it captures the place in which we are rooted, and the sense of progress. 

There is another quote that I think captures even more of Stanford’s potential. Every morning for the last eight years, as I walked onto the GSB campus, toward the Coupa Cafe, I looked to my left at the engraving by the artist Peter Wegner. It says that Stanford is “dedicated to the things that haven’t happened yet, and the people who are about to dream them up.”

This afternoon, I would like to share three aspirations for Stanford’s future, each of them rooted in the values of openness and exploration. 

First, I aspire that this university be open-minded – that as we pursue excellence across the broadest range of disciplines, we foster a culture that embraces inquiry and curiosity. 

Last week when I welcomed our new students, I talked about the philosopher Jonathan Lear’s account of Socrates. Lear observes that when people came to talk to Socrates and were confronted with his probing questions, they invariably rushed off in confusion. But Socrates stood still, because he alone was comfortable asking questions and not knowing the answers. 

The point was that college is about asking questions, about recognizing that however much one knows, there is always more to discover. Of course that cuts against today’s world, where it often seems that everyone on the internet believes they have the answers, and feels compelled to share them. 

Our campus must be a place where we can ask each other questions, experiment with ideas, and share our own thinking. 

These skills are important not just for our own community. In a time of deep division, they are foundational to effect positive change in the world, which is precisely what we envision and hope for in our graduates. 

Second, I aspire that our university be open to new ideas – that we are ambitious in exploring the frontiers of knowledge. 

Over the next decade, I believe we will be astonished by the breakthroughs made in many fields. We are living at a time when the ability to assimilate vast amounts of information, make predictions, and formulate new hypotheses has the potential to transform discovery. 

And we can only begin to imagine the ways in which these technologies will affect so many parts of our lives – including the whole of education. 

The frontier is open: new treatments for cancer, radically improved energy storage, and a deeper understanding of human intelligence and behavior. 

What we do know is that if you could pick one place on Earth to be during a dramatic acceleration in discovery, it would be here. 

Stanford will be the leading university to advance research and teaching, and deepen our understanding of the impact and potential of these technologies. 

We are one of the few places where faculty and students from across every field can interact and work together. And crucially, we have the academic strength of the humanities and the arts to keep us from losing sight of the fundamental questions of what it means to be human, what it means to be a citizen, and what it means to live a good life.

Third, I aspire for us to open the reach of a Stanford education – to seek to educate more students from around the world. 

The opportunity to learn at Stanford, and from Stanford faculty, is extraordinary. It widens students’ apertures and shows them possibilities that they did not know existed. 

That is true for our recently arrived frosh, our newly minted one-Ls at the Law School, our graduate students in biology and literature, the professionals taking summer programs in the Business School, or online courses in engineering. In each case, our students walk away changed by what they have learned, inspired, and prepared to contribute to humanity. 

Today, relative to when I was a student, there are an order of magnitude more people with the talent and preparation to benefit from a Stanford education. 

I believe that in the coming years, we should find new and creative ways to open a Stanford education to more students. The potential is exceptional, and it spans the world. 

Some might argue that this is the wrong time for that aspiration, because the world is moving toward nationalism and parochialism. In fact, it is precisely when there are political divisions that the openness of universities allows us to make our greatest contribution, because at our best, we are among the few institutions that can transcend political differences, enable the exchange of people and ideas, and foster mutual understanding.

This morning on my run around the Dish, when I reached the top, I looked out at the red roofs of the campus, and the San Francisco Bay, and the hills beyond, and of course I was thinking about Stanford and our future.

Let us navigate the challenges ahead by staying true to our distinctive purpose of discovery and learning, and our commitment to the university’s freedoms. 

Let us appreciate what an extraordinary institution this is, and its potential to contribute.

And as we look forward, let us aspire to be open – to each other, to new ideas, to the world. 

In closing, we can take inspiration from one of our great faculty colleagues, Wallace Stegner, the founder of Stanford’s creative writing program. 

I love Stegner’s writing, which captures the beauty and spirit of Stanford and the American West. 

He wrote: “One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope.” 

Considering our future, I too cannot help but be optimistic. 

I suspect the same is true of you, because you chose to be here at Stanford – the university of the American frontier, a place of openness, of exploration, of possibility. 

Stanford is our home, and let us pursue our aspirations with hope.