TEXT FOR A MATRICULATION ADDRESS—
TO BE REPEATED AT COMMENCEMENT

When you graduate from a four-year program of liberal education, you will possess a wider range of significant knowledge gathered from many fields of academic inquiry, and clearer understanding of how those various disciplines comprehend their subject matter and their methodologies—most especially in your major field(s).
 
You will be more confident and disposed to continue pursuits of inquiry auto-didactically, employing those skills of study and research you have practiced as a collegian, and with an appetite for learning whetted by the challenges you have previously met.

Having now learned better how to learn, you will have developed an appetite for life-long learning that you’re prepared and eager to pursue, whether in conjunction with your work career or as fruitful leisure activity.

Your wider interest in and comprehension of the world should sharpen your concern for its well-being, for the thriving of its species and the viability of its ecosystems.  Your liberal education should have liberated you from self-centeredness and disposed you toward developing a wisdom that seeks to realize what is of greatest value for yourself and others—to discover it and to make it so in an ever more flourishing world.
 
In sum, a true liberal education leads to the flowering of self-actualization and to fruitful words and deeds that follow from one’s blossomed powers, along the way toward wisdom.

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