THE CLASS of 2021 Commencement Ceremony Thursday, May 27, 2021 2
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THE CLASS OF 2021 Commencement Ceremony Thursday, May 27, 2021 2 Message from President Daniel Lemons Greetings and congratulations to the graduates of the Class of 2021. I wish we were gathering in person today on that wonderful space with the Old Gym in the background and beautiful trees around us. I have heard the same wish from many of you. When we celebrate this huge milestone, we want to be together, thousands of us. You graduates and your families deserve to celebrate, not just today, but in the weeks and months to come. So, we are doing what we have done over the past year and a half, making the best of our situation, and doing it with grit, determination, sometimes humor, and with a desire to be a community that cares. As president at Lehman for the past two years, I feel deprived, as you do, in never being able to participate in an in-person graduation in that role. But I am still joyful today on this occasion because circumstances cannot diminish its significance or the fact that you have reached a major milestone in your lives and are moving forward toward the next one. I’ve chosen to talk you to today with this amazing new installation behind me. It is the result of the work of a group of faculty and staff members who were asked to re-envision this space so would reflect Lehman College as it is now. In the center is this great quote from the college’s namesake, Herbert H. Lehman, and these photos are you, the people that make up Lehman College. I hope you’ll get to be here soon to see it in person. Now I want to turn to disruption, surprise and change. Those are descriptions of your final time at Lehman College. We can react to those realities with shock, fear and withdrawal, or we can find ways to use them for our own good. As I have prepared to address you on this momentous day, I have been giving a lot of thought to how we struggle to understand why things happen the way they do. We were warned by experts for years that a major devastating pandemic was coming, and I never doubted that. Yet, when it did come, I was as taken by surprise as was almost everyone else. Since I’ve been president at Lehman, I’ve often thought about how unpredictable life is and how we cannot know how the things we do at each stage of our lives prepares us for the next. Even when you know you’re taking a detour, and you are pretty sure that part of your life will not relate to your future, there’s really no way to know. What I have learned is that all my experiences have, in some way, been important later on. Let me relate some of my experiences prior to coming to Lehman College. When I arrived at Lehman College, I had been working within CUNY for a long time – I am a professor emeritus of biology at the City College of New York and I collaborated for years with colleagues on bioheat transfer and vascular mechanics research, and also on new ways of teaching college science. I’ve worked as a dean of several quite different CUNY programs, been an associate provost and a provost, among other leadership roles. I was also an elected official when I came to Lehman. I co-founded an institute outside CUNY– related to alleviating poverty through international energy development projects -- during a year of leave from CUNY between 2012 and 2013. I mention these things not because I want to share my resume or CV with you and its highlights. What has struck me as I recount these experiences, is that, first of all, many of them were not part of a plan I had created, and in fact most of them were entirely unplanned. Maybe because of that, they didn’t always seem connected or likely to be particularly useful in the years or decades ahead. But as it turned out, they all were. I haven’t followed a straight or predictable path during my career, not that there is anything wrong with doing that, and while being Lehman’s president these two years, it has seemed like all those experiences prepared me for what was needed, particularly during the last 15 months. 3 Of course, my experience as a professor and a CUNY I want to return to the theme of unexpected and unwanted administrator were important background for being president. change, and unanticipated results with one more example. Being But, having been in electoral politics in New York also became in a pandemic it has been natural to think about health and very important; to have those connections and to be able to use disease, and I have been thinking about how the war on cancer them effectively in the Bronx and the City. Certainly, having a began, and how it ended up. When it began, the major focus was background in biology came in handy during a global pandemic, on viruses. After twenty years, and billions of dollars for research, particularly in its early phases. Having gained an understanding understanding viruses turned out not to be the key to curing of how insufficient infrastructure impacts health, education and cancer. But when AIDS came along shortly thereafter, all that prior the economy of local areas has also been important for me while research on viruses was critically important in understanding and helping shape our institutional response to the pandemic and its learning how to treat HIV. All that research didn’t help much with aftermath. Actually, I can’t think of any aspect of my varied career cancer so it seemed like a failure, a wrong turn, but it was critical path that hasn’t been useful to me as Lehman’s president. for responding to HIV, which didn’t even exist in the US when the war on cancer was launched. We’ve experienced that same kind of I predict that for each of you graduates of 2021 the same thing result with the coronavirus pandemic. will be true – and let me include in that prediction not only graduating students, but also family and friends, and staff and Research on mRNAs was a fringe area for years. In fact, the most faculty of the college. You go through life and you pick things up, important person in developing an understanding of how mRNAs and you think, “Well, I’ve taken a new direction, and what I’ve done could be used therapeutically, Dr. Katalin Kariko, hasn’t even had in the past is no longer so useful to me.” But you actually don’t a secure faculty position through most of her career. Yet without know that. You should never discount any of those things you’ve her work, the two most successful vaccines we have, Pfizer and learned; they will most likely come into play in ways you can’t Moderna, would not exist. She didn’t know about coronavirus imagine now. Some of those things may turn out to be the most through all her years of work. In fact, for a number of years she important ones you could have in your life’s toolkit. was trying to use mRNA to improve blood vessels for heart bypass surgery. But that eventually led to the idea of treating infectious One of the important consequences of that is that you can make diseases, and I along with hundreds of millions wo have had one a wrong turn and have to back up and change direction, but even of those vaccines, are the beneficiaries of both her persistence that wrong turn will very likely teach you things that will help you and her ability to see how a solution that didn’t work for one later on. I can promise you that. Another consequence of this, problem, could work for another. what shall we call it, “unintended learning,” is that we should embrace change and do things that are not on the prescribed Disruption, surprise and change—they have been our constant path. We all have a choice at this moment in time, entering the companions the past 15 months. Let’s all of us commit to using post-Covid era, which can be an inflection point in a good way, or what we’ve learned at Lehman College and to expect that we an occasion to return as much as possible to the familiar. That is will be applying it in ways we can’t imagine now. Remember that what we are hearing – “return to normal.” The unwanted, and in everything you’ve experienced has lessons for your unknown most ways, terrible disruption we have all experienced the past future; value all that you’ve learned, good and otherwise, and 15 months has forced us to learn at a pace we could not have remember to enjoy every moment as much as you can. imagined possible two years ago. We were forced to, but none- Congratulations, again, Class of 2021. And thank you for the the-less, we have all become much more adept in the digital lessons you’ve shared with me that now are part of the memories world we have been inhabiting. Our days and weeks have followed I will cherish in the years ahead. different patterns. Much of this we will be happy to leave behind, but we have also changed in ways that we should retain and build upon.