Provost and Dean of the Faculty Rebecca Walkowitz, Remarks As Delivered

Good afternoon, I’m Rebecca Walkowitz, Provost and Dean of the Faculty.

Congratulations to the Class of 2025 on behalf of the faculty of Barnard College.

Graduates, I am honored to greet you on behalf of our distinguished faculty, many of whom are seated behind me. They are here with me to wish you well and to honor all that you have accomplished.

For their commitment to you, and for their generous collaboration with me over the past year, I want to pause to thank them today. Thank you!

I’d like to reflect for a moment on what I hope you’ve learned from us. Let’s remember where things started. 
There’s a ceremony that launches your college experience. We call it “Convocation.” At that event, we remind first-years that they come to Barnard not simply to achieve their goals but to discover goals that they didn’t know they had. That discovery can take many forms.

You might be surprised to love an academic subject you had never heard about before.

You might hear from a new friend about an internship opportunity or a job you didn’t think was possible for you, because no one you knew had ever pursued it, and now you find yourself launched on that career.

You might take up an intramural sport, an artistic practice, a community project, or a leadership role that you had never imagined for yourself.

Maybe you’ve traveled to a new country to meet your roommate’s family, or they’ve come to your home in a part of the U.S. they had never visited.

Four years later, if we’ve succeeded, some of that has happened for you.

Today, you know more, and you also have a much broader sense of what there is to know, what more you want to know, and how to generate and share new knowledge. You leave us not only with new thoughts but with new modes of thinking and rethinking — a suitcase of strategies for problem-solving, communication, analysis, and creativity.

I first learned about how to sustain thinking from a novel I read in college, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which was published 100 years ago this month. Written in the wake of World War I, Mrs. Dalloway asked the question of how do we sustain thinking in anxious times.

What I learned from that novel was this:

Thinking needs community. There is nothing more valuable than the lifelong friendships you make in your teens and twenties and which support you throughout your life.

Thinking needs uncertainty. A creative person asks questions and seeks new words rather than familiar phrases.

Above all, thinking needs curiosity. That means being open to wonder and strangeness, welcoming surprises that take us somewhere we didn’t expect to go.

Graduates, I hope you will embrace the friendships, the uncertainty, and the curiosity you have developed here. 

You are now part of Barnard forever. We, all of us, look forward to seeing all that you will do.