Following is the prepared text of remarks by Stanford President Jonathan Levin at the 135th Convocation Ceremony on Sept. 16, 2025:

First-years, transfer students, and families: Welcome to Stanford!

We are so happy you’re here. I hope you’ve settled into your new residences, met a few people, made all of your last-minute trips to Target, and even if you are understandably a little anxious, are excited to have arrived.

Parents, my heart is with you. A few weeks ago, we dropped one of our own children off at college, and it is hard to capture in words the pride tinged with sadness that comes from that moment.

At dinner the night before move-in, my son asked me what I remembered from my freshman year of college, which was here, at Stanford, 35 years ago.

I have many memories from that year: making friends, taking classes that sparked a passion for mathematics and literature, a brief, unsuccessful stint rowing for the Stanford crew team, writing letters (actual paper letters!) to my long-distance girlfriend (that worked out better than the crew team – she’s sitting right here in the front row), and falling in love with Stanford.

However, for some reason, we didn’t talk about any of those memories. Instead, the memory we discussed was a trip I took with some of my dorm mates to go bungee-jumping off a bridge in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

I’m going to share that story, but before I do let me say: Don’t do this. It was a different time, even if in retrospect there is something to learn from it.

At that time, bungee-jumping had just started in the United States. I’d never heard of it. However, someone in my dorm had, and they found an outfit to take us. So one Saturday morning, we drove up to the mountains to meet these folks on a bridge off Route 49. We arrived before dawn, which might have been related to the unclear regulatory status of the activity. They set up and demonstrated how it worked. Then, one by one, we put on harnesses, clipped into the cords, and dove off the bridge.

Jumping off the bridge was not all that fun – it was scary – although it was exhilarating afterward. There was one exception. One of my friends was a Stanford gymnast; she had competed in the world championships. She was not intimidated. She did a triple flip. The people running the operation were impressed and wanted to see more. So we kept hauling her up and she did back flips, twists, layouts.

Later, my mother found out about it. It remains one of her salient memories of my time at Stanford – not for good reasons.

However, what I remember about that day was not the jumping. It was the feeling of trying something new, and the camaraderie of doing it with a group of new friends. In that sense, it is very much a metaphor for starting college.

As you arrive at Stanford, you are not jumping off a bridge, but you are launching into unknown territory. You are entering a world of new ideas, new challenges, new opportunities. In short, you are an explorer.

You might be the first person in your family to attend college, or have grown up on a university campus. You might plan to study computer science or comparative literature, or like most of us, need time to figure that out.

Each of you is here to discover new things, to set ambitious goals, and to work hard to achieve them.

Exploration is about freedom. At Stanford, you have the freedom to choose from thousands of classes, from dozens of majors, from hundreds of student clubs. You also have a deeper set of freedoms: the academic freedom to ask questions, to speak openly and plainly, and to form your own views. You are encouraged to do those things.

Academic freedoms are essential to the university’s mission of research and education. New ideas often come from rejecting orthodoxy. So do the most productive debates. That is why universities today must strive to protect academic freedom. It is why Stanford’s first president, David Starr Jordan, chose as our motto: “The wind of freedom blows.”

Exploration at a university also means being part of a larger community. You are arriving with more than 1,800 fellow explorers. Your experiences living together, studying, volunteering, competing in athletics, and just hanging out will be the stories you tell your children. Some of the people around you – I cannot predict who they will be or how long it will take you to find them – will become lifelong friends.

Today, you also become part of Stanford: its students, faculty, and staff, and the many others who love the university and believe in its mission. So in addition to enjoying the freedom to explore, you are taking on a responsibility: to nurture Stanford as an environment for discovery and learning.

What will enable you to explore successfully and shoulder that responsibility? I will offer three suggestions.

First, I hope you will be curious and open-minded.

You are arriving at one of the world’s great research universities. Virtually every Stanford department is ranked in the top five. Our faculty love teaching and you will get to know many of them.

As you do, I think you will find they share a common trait. They are curious, and they are highly conscious of what they don’t know. That’s a model for lifelong exploration. Indeed, it is the definition of wisdom that Socrates gives in Plato’s Apology. And it’s an excellent model for college: College is much more about asking questions than about knowing all the answers.

Being open-minded is also essential on a pluralistic campus. Stanford brings together people from many backgrounds and with many different viewpoints. On social media, that’s a sure-fire recipe for loud voices and conflict. At Stanford, it sets the conditions for learning and dialogue.

You will help make that happen. Sociologists note that one way to understand conflict is to examine how people respond to offense – what follows when something goes wrong.^[1] In some environments, people respond by escalating; that’s a culture of honor. In other cases, people respond by appealing to authority or peers or social media in order to shame or sanction; that’s a culture of grievance. Finally, there are environments where people respond by asking questions and opening a discussion. That’s a culture of dignity.

In a culture of dignity, there is forgiveness for mistakes. Differences of opinion and even of values are an opportunity to learn more about others and perhaps yourself. We want to have a culture of dignity at Stanford.

Second, I encourage you to take some risks.

I don’t mean finding a bridge off Route 49. I mean trying things that might be hard or unfamiliar or uncomfortable.

All of us are keenly aware that to get here, you’ve had pressure to be near-perfect: getting straight A’s, acing standardized tests, securing leadership roles. Undoubtedly, you will feel some of that pressure here, whether it comes from looking ahead to jobs and graduate school, or from your own high standards. That can be okay. As the tennis champion Billie Jean King once said to a younger player (actually, to one of the mothers who’s here today): “Pressure is a privilege.” The pressure that young player was feeling meant she’d put herself in position to do something of value.

But we don’t want you to feel at Stanford that you need to avoid failure. We want you to take a hard class, introduce yourself to a professor, get into conversations that might be awkward at first but lead to friendship later.

You can start right now. As you get settled, it’s easy to gravitate to people who have a similar background or to look for environments that feel comfortable. That’s fine, but take some chances as well, and make an effort to get to know people even if at first it seems you have little in common.

Finally, I encourage you to be a problem-solver.

Even among the great universities, Stanford is unusual. A hundred and thirty-five years ago, when Jane and Leland Stanford founded the university, they had an audacious vision. They wanted to create a truly American university on the western frontier, far from the country’s intellectual centers.

They wanted Stanford to be different. They believed that students should become broad thinkers, but also gain practical knowledge, and put it to use in service to the world. They included women in Stanford’s very first class.

It took time to build Stanford into a university of excellence. Early on, Jane Stanford had to sell her jewelry to keep the university afloat. Coming out of World War II, Stanford was still a regional university of modest caliber. Our predecessors built up Stanford’s research capacity and figured out how to let ideas flow out into entrepreneurial firms: They created Silicon Valley.

In the late 1980s, actually the day I came to visit Stanford as a high school senior, a major earthquake badly damaged the campus. Our predecessors applied creativity, perseverance, and goodwill to rebuild.

Today, universities and the world face new challenges, and here at Stanford, we will apply that same creativity and problem-solving mindset to tackle them. That’s good advice for you as well. When you encounter challenges here, which will surely happen, think about how to be a problem-solver.

Now in closing, let me pause for a few moments. Take a minute. Look up at the broad blue California sky. That’s the freedom of Stanford. Look around you. Those are your fellow explorers. On your way out, introduce yourself to one of them you haven’t met.

Stanford students: I encourage you to be curious and open-minded, to take risks, and to be problem solvers.

I can’t wait to see what you do with your time here.

Welcome to Stanford!

^[1] The tripartite distinction here comes from the work of the sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, although I have slightly changed their terminology.