8/12/2019 Onorable President

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/onorable-president 1/9

ONORABLE PRESIDENT, Matron, Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Board of FPCGI, Board of PCG Itarsi, Dear Pastors,Guests, Colleagues, Delegates and all Friends. 

I count it a privilege once again this year to stand and welcome you to another Commencement Service of Central

India Theological Seminary. The goal of education is the acquisition and discovery of truth. Jesus declared to Pilate

His mission as being a witness to the truth. Of course, Pilate was not in a position to accept such a position as

worthwhile; for brute force and wisdom are two different worlds. History is witness to the fact that brute force has

often tried to silence the voice of wisdom; while the purpose of wisdom has always been to introduce order into a

world full of chaos. The word is supposed to calm the storms. Man lost that power when he fell from truth and

disobeyed God’s word. But, the Word of God Himself incarnated as man and men marveled that even the winds and

the storms obeyed His word. They obeyed, not just because He is God, but because the Wisdom and Truth of God

has its finality in Him in bodily form.

Truth is a difficult word in the modern context of things. The world is a dark habitation of skepticism, doubt, suspicion,

mistrust, and fear. We aren’t even often able to trust each other within the very Body of Christ. Falsehood is a deeply

rooted problem. But, God has not willed it so. Jesus said that we must have salt among ourselves. We are called the

children of light and called to walk in the light. We are called to stand out and hold out God’s word among a crooked

and perverse generation. God expects us to drop our masks and behold Him with an open face, in the liberty of the

Spirit. He wants us to look into the Law of Liberty and be transformed thereby.

Towards this end, we strive in our Seminary to guide and lead our learners to the discovery of truth. We have also

extended our borders to embrace learners beyond the four walls of seminary, and we have done that by means of our

distance education department and theological publications…. A clear understanding of God’s truth liberates God to

move in greater proportions in our life. We can only walk in the light. And, so we are grateful to you all this morning

for joining us in this cause of the Kingdom. We thank you for being a part and parcel of this vision of excellency in

Christian education. And, we appreciate that you have come here to share in the joy of our fruits. This graduation

marks the completion of a term in education for the graduating class. But, certainly they know it that the learning goes

on.

Most Welcome and May God Bless You ALL!

16 November 2012, Central India.

My hearfelt congratulations to you, Class of 2011. I share in your joy and well-earned pride as you celebrate this

achievement and milestone in your life, made all the more sweet by the years of hard work, study and sacrifice you

have made in order to reach this point. Congratulations to your parents and families as well for their support and

encouragement and, perhaps at times, forbearance. This achievement is as much theirs as it is yours.

8/12/2019 Onorable President

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/onorable-president 2/9

As you prepare yourselves for the greater world beyond the halls of your college and this University, remember

always that you bear the mark of UP with you. You have joined the ranks of the UP alumni - a singular honor that

distinguishes you from thousands of others. However, this honor comes with a heavy responsibility. As graduates of

the National University, you have been given the best education this country can offer. In turn, you must use this

education to serve the country and its people. Your knowledge, skills and superior training; your ability to analyze,

to criticize and formulate solutions; and your sense of ethics and nationalism must be harnessed to serve a greater

ideal. No matter what career you find yourselves in, I exhort you to embody the greatness and spirit of UP through

your own personal integrity, your commitment to excellence, and your willingness to continue learning. All the

ideals that UP has taught you, all the good you have learned here, you must now demonstrate to the rest of the

world.

Again, I congratulate you all and wish you success in your life beyond UP.

(Sgd) ALFREDO E. PASCUAL

President

OFFICE OF THE CHANCELLOR

MESSAGE

My warmest greetings to the graduating class of 2011! Today marks a milestone in your lives. Not so many years

ago, you set foot on this beautiful campus, happy beyond description because you were accepted in UP. Despite the

difficulties, you mustered the courage to begin your life as iskolar ng bayan. For some, poverty was not an obstacle

in earning a college degree. To this end, we are grateful UP Mindanao is here.

Small as our campus is, limited in resources, underdeveloped in its landscape, and with less than a hand's count of

 buildings, we boast of a powerhouse of academicians, having a University Scientist, a University Artist, several

national awardees, and a pool of faculty experts with a genuine desire to teach excellently and to give to you that UP brand of quality education. Recently, one of our BS Architecture graduates placed 5th in the Architecture Licensure

Examination.

Your life in UP has developed you into an individual, a cut above the rest. You have become more mature,

 purposeful, analytical, sensible, and caring. As you pursue your respective careers, value the principle of timeliness

as everything significant happens at the right time and place. What you deliver comes with better value when you

are time-bound. Accept too, that change is constant and recognize that obstacles are numerous, but have the

8/12/2019 Onorable President

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/onorable-president 3/9

determination to rise above these challenges confident with the training you derived from the University. Continue

to instill the values of honesty and diligence in your work, as these shall define your character. Remain focused on

your goals and aspirations. Work unceasingly and love it. Render true service and actuate unparalleled love for

 people and our nation. And at all times have that fortitude to stand your ground. These are the marks of excellence -

the "tatak" UP.

Congratulations and Best Wishes!

Welcome, everyone, welcome to the One Hundred Thirty-First Commencement

in the proud history of Carleton College. Welcome Carleton faculty, staff,

students, Trustees, family members, and – this most of all – welcome to the

Class of 2005.

We will pause again in the course of the hours ahead to congratulate all in the

Class of 2005, a class which personifies those Carleton qualities of intellectual

curiosity and an engagement with life and learning which are this College’s most

distinctive and defining traits, and a class whose diversity, from this county and

from across the globe, is, I am proud to say, without parallel in Carleton history.

Even so, I wish still to begin with a hearty congratulation to all of you and to your

families: Congratulations to all assembled here this morning.

If you, members of the Class of 2005, owe more than can readily be said to the

Carleton faculty and staff, you owe as well a debt beyond repaying to yourfamilies. Hence, let me ask everyone in the Class of 2005 please to rise, face

your families, and give to them the ovation they deserve.

With all of you, I dearly wish we were gathered beneath the oaks and maples on

the east side of the Bald Spot, but that was not to be. Not long ago, we heard

again and again that Minnesota needed rain, and needed lots of rain. That we

received. For that rain, we give thanks even as we acknowledge as acknowledge

we must that all that rain has moved us to the Recreation Center today. TheClass of 2005 accomplished much never dared before. Among your

accomplishments is that today of inaugurating the Recreation Center for one of

its intended uses, the rain site for Commencement. Other graduating classes, in

years ahead, will hold Commencement exercises here when it is wise; but no

other class will the first so to do.

8/12/2019 Onorable President

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/onorable-president 4/9

For sixteen years now, and ever since I ceased to be a full-time professor and

assumed a position like that I am privileged to hold today, as I have greeted

graduating Seniors in opening Commencement exercises, I have routinely asked

graduates to recall their initial days at their college – at once to remind all of how

impossibly swiftly four years can pass, and also to recall how much graduating

seniors have changed and grown because of the faculty and staff with whom

they have learned. I ask you, too, to recall your first days at Carleton for just

these reasons, but today I ask you to remember those days for another reason

as well.

For many of you, your first full week at Carleton was the week of Monday,

September 10, 2001, and you began Carleton classes the following day. And this

means that if none of us can or will forget Tuesday, September 11, 2001, your

memories of that day’s tragic events are forever mingled with your initial sense of

college and of Carleton. I learned first of what was that day transpiring when our

son called from New York and said something like the following: “Dad, I know

you don’t like television, but you’d best turn it on now.” And at the college I was 

then leading we gathered first around television sets around campus and then

together in the chapel. We concentrated first, and for long days, on shared

sadness and sympathy, and only later on attempts to understand more fully what

had happened and why.

I know that you engaged in similar rituals here at Carleton. I also know that one’s

initial days at college are uniquely challenging, as one embarks upon one of

those rare moments of beginning anew and of defining one’s best self in a new

setting. Whatever the routine challenges of beginning one’s college career, those

challenges were multiplied and sharpened for you because of September 11.

You met and surpassed those challenges, challenges which for none of you can

have been easy, and it is right, I think, that we recognize that you, members ofthe Carleton Class of 2005, faced uncertainty and challenge as have few before

you because of September 11.

And I want to remind you that others went through rather different dramas and

challenges that same week. During this past spring break, in March of this year, I

8/12/2019 Onorable President

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/onorable-president 5/9

was in Cairo, exploring how we might begin to offer Arabic at Carleton, and I met

in Cairo with a Carleton graduate living in Cairo. The week of September 10,

2001, she, a Muslim and an Egyptian-American, was in this country, and she had

a very tough time of it. It was not she who had cost the lives of thousands in New

York and Washington and Pennsylvania, but she often felt that those around her

were convinced that her religion and her background were centrally responsible.

They were not; this she knew and knows, and we would that all the world knew

the same.

For all who suffered, directly or indirectly, for the irretrievable change that

September 11 made for your Carleton careers and for lives across the globe, we

know that our task is at once to remember and to move on. We know that either

moving on absent memory or remembering absent moving on would be wrong.

And so, we move on, on to Commencement Exercises for the Class of 2005.

When I was where you, members of the Class of 2005, have just been, when I

was an undergraduate, I met once with a treasured teacher and advisor, and I

met with him to complain. The complaint went something like this: I’ve been

doing pretty much the same thing for a number of years now, researching and

writing lots and lots of papers, and I’m wondering if I should rather be doing

something different, because this stuff I’ve been working at has becomesomething of a habit.

“Ah, Robert,” my advisor replied, “So working on all these research papers has

become something of a habit. There is such a thing as a good habit.” 

Well, he, my advisor, was right about this, as he was about so many other

issues. There is such a thing as a good habit, and I want here to define for you

another good habit, one those in Class of 2005 have mastered admirably. Let me

get to this good habit via several illustrations from the academic year past.

First, the Senior Art Show, this Spring Term. Again this year, as in years past, the

Senior Art Show opened to standing-room only crowds, and I thought again this

year that Carleton students support the arts and support their friends through

attending the Senior Art show opening in numbers which obtain at other colleges

8/12/2019 Onorable President

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/onorable-president 6/9

and universities across the country only when students are standing in line for

tickets to attend national championship athletic events. Enthusiastic support for

athletic competition I wholly endorse, but at Carleton, we demonstrate similar

enthusiasm and appreciation for the life of the mind and for art. As I have viewed

the art produced by Senior across campus this spring, something striking I noted

again this year, and this is how much the art many of you produced owes to your

off-campus experiences. Living and studying beyond the campus, living and

studying in settings across the globe and outside the routine comforts of

homeland, has changed how you think and what you think and the art you shape,

and that art, in turn, changes all of us. Your and our intellectual development are

incomparably the different because of your time across the globe.

Illustration number two, this from the Fall Term. On September 25 of last year,

 just a mile from where we are this morning, a mile to the East and on a small

prairie hill, many of us gathered together to dedicate the first college owned

utility-scale wind turbine in the country. We dedicated the wind turbine, some of

you may recall, on the first, last, and only completely windless morning in recent

Minnesota history. I entered the control room and read the gauge indicating wind

speed, and it read “zero.” I pushed a button so that the same gauge assessed

the average wind speed over the previous four hours, and it again read “zero.”

But it’s been turning out there ever since, and with every revolution Carleton’s 

wind turbine is at once providing something like the equivalent of half our

electrical needs and also offering tangible and symbolic testimony to a greater

goal, that of our leading the way toward clean and sustainable energy production,

that of reminding us that the earth is the only home we’ll ever have and that we’d

best take good care of our home. That beautiful piece of Scandinavian Sculpture

on the Plains, as I’ve come to call our wind turbine, moved from a distant dream

to a waking reality because of many here at Carleton, many on the staff and

faculty, and many on our Board of Trustees. But, but  the dream began and the

dream was sustained by you, by Carleton students.

Further illustrations of the habit I have in mind arrived every term this year. On

campus and across the globe, you Seniors have engaged this year and before in

academic research, you have engaged in defining and solving real problems, and

8/12/2019 Onorable President

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/onorable-president 7/9

with the larger aim of making our world a better place. Your research, often

supported by fellowships and internships, were in the interest of increased

cultural under-standing, and in the interest of public service, of applied and

theoretical research in the sciences and mathematics, of international community

development, of preparation for graduate work. Members of the Class of 2005

have:

  explored the meaning of “being Chinese” in mainland and overseas

Chinese communities;

  collected an endangered medicinal plant in China to discover which

chemicals are medicinally active and how compound concentrations vary

with respect to life stage in an effort to protect the species from over-

harvesting;

  explored the impact that new laws forbidding the wearing of religious

symbols in public schools have had on the situation of Muslims in France

and how secularism affects dynamic tensions between integration and

assimilation;

  participated in a “Research Experience for Undergraduates” program in

mathematics to conduct research in probability, topology, geometry,

dynamical systems, and mathematical programming;

  studied geothermal swimming pools and hot springs in Iceland to gain an

understanding of how hot water provides places for people to socialize,

stay healthy, and get warm during the cold of winter;

  interned at a non-profit NGO in Ecuador that was founded to fight poverty

by providing homeless and working children with access to education,

basic health services, and vocational skills;

  studied the concept of worker’s pride during the Luddite Rebellion in the

Midlands of England by visiting various museums, working mills, and the

towns of longstanding fiber arts tradition; and

  studied ecotourism in Australia for the purposes of understanding and

developing ecotourism in Vietnam.

And this is but a beginning.

8/12/2019 Onorable President

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/onorable-president 8/9

Further examples of the good habit you have practiced I have also in mind. Our

Winter Term we opened just as newspapers around the world told of the untold

devastation and death from an earthquake-produced tsunami, death and

devastation throughout much of Southeast Asia and far beyond. Almost

immediately, people here at Carleton began to organize both information

sessions and relief efforts. Given the scale of the tragedy, our efforts were

perhaps small; but your efforts were at once tangible and symbolic, and the

symbolism was heard from afar. This Spring, national newspapers, and

especially and to its credit, the New York Times, spoke repeatedly of the

unspeakable tragedy unfolding in a place whose name was unknown before to

many, in Darfur in western Sudan. And the same moving tale unfolded here at

Carleton: it was again you, Carleton students, who reminded us repeatedly of the

unimaginable scale of forced migration and suffering and death in Darfur.

Each of these narratives – and many more there are -- speaks to the good habit I

have in mind, and it is this: your habit of passionate and hungry engagement ,

your engagement with the life of the mind and with the wider globe. Throughout

your years at Carleton, members of the Class of 2005, you have been engaged:

engaged with one another in learning, to be sure, but more, engaged in learning

with one another on the behalf of your sisters and brothers across the globe. This

Carleton habit of engagement means that you have rarely viewed yourselves as

the center or the goal of your lives’ efforts. You do as you have done because of

your engagement with those beyond yourselves.

This is a good habit, and my central bidding to you today is that we are all of us

in this together, and that you not neglect the good habit of an active and

passionately curious engagement with others. It’s what defines Carleton. It is

what has defined you throughout your time at Carleton. For this past and future

engagement, congratulations to the Carleton Class of 2005, and thank you.

The Most Popular Commencement Address Soon after adding this transcript to the site it quickly went to the top and itis now the most popular speech on this site. Can you guess? I'll give you a

hint, it's not Steve Job (he comes in close second). You might find it asurprise but it turns out, the man has good advice. Give it a try, watch or

8/12/2019 Onorable President

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/onorable-president 9/9

read the 6 rules of success. 

Looking for Ideas? 

This list is a good place to pick and choose the most fitting and inspirationalthemes. Do not forget to add personal stories or anectodes around them to

make the message stick and be more powerful. Lastly, don't forget to applythem in real life. My favorite one is:

RULE # 5. Don't wait to be invited. Create opportunities and get in the

game. 

Giving a Graduation Speech? Congratulations! While you prepare your speech, search for inspiration in

our collection of the best commencement speeches. And don't bescared;there is great opportunity awaiting for you. 2013's topcommencement speaker George Saunders and 2012's top two

commencement speakers,Neil Gaiman and David McCullough Jr., all landedbook deals following their outstanding commencement addresses. Good

luck!