Congratulations 2021 Graduates of the College of Liberal Arts!
I am honored to formally congratulate you on your graduation this afternoon from UNH. I am in awe of all that you have accomplished. I greatly admire your commitment to your education and the many ways, especially over the past 14 months, you have demonstrated adaptability and resilience. And, importantly too, the varied ways you have shown empathy and care toward those around you. Toward your fellow-classmates, faculty and staff, and toward neighbors — some local, some distant and unknown to you personally, but whose life circumstances you have grappled with as you have learned to acquire an awareness and understanding of the complexity of our global human existence.
We are now launching you into this great big world. I am confident you are well prepared to meet its demands. All those classes in which you had to dig deep — whether into a literary or theoretical text, a historical or social science study, or a music or artistic composition — were training you, whether you liked it or not, with the skills and capacity to be uncomfortable in the face of the career and life tasks that await you. Your interpretive and analytical training empowers you to take on any occupational task that not only requires but rewards independent thinking. It also empowers you to see beyond fads and surface appearances, to appreciate nuance and ambiguity, and to recognize that what is at stake in contentious political and social debates is rarely as simple or as straightforward as advocates on either side of an issue would have you believe.
This is not to say that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Quite the contrary! It typically requires work to locate, and may frequently lie in places where we might initially not think to look. Your Liberal Arts education equips you with a depth of knowledge and a breadth of skills to ask the sorts of questions, and to identify the cracks in logic, reasoning and evidence that lead to discerning the truth of whatever the issue or situation. Truth, too, of course, has its own ambiguities. Ambiguity, however, does not let you off the hook from deciding on a course of action — whether voting for candidate X over candidate Y, saying yes to one proposition and no to an equally attractive one, or committing to a life partner. Time and again, in things large and small, we are each called to take a stand, to make an independent judgment and to have the ethics to see it through.
In closing, I thank you for choosing to come to UNH. I salute your parents and families and thank them for all they have done — and will continue to do — to ensure your independence and personal growth.
Go forth! Use your education — and the freedoms conferred by human reason and democracy —to enrich the human experience in full recognition of the fundamental interdependence of individuals, communities and societies.
—Michele Dillon, Dean, College of Liberal Arts
May 22, 2021
