As University Provost and on behalf of the entire University at Buffalo community, I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to our 2006 UB graduates.
As your Provost, I relish occasions in which we celebrate our students’ achievements. And, this day, I celebrate with you, your family, and your friends your remarkable achievements to date. It is, also, with a sense of heightened expectation, that today - with an eye to the future - we anticipate a lifetime of yet to be imagined successes.
As I look upon our UB graduates gathered here today, I know that I am looking upon our next generation’s artists and poets, historians and senators, scientists and teachers, and industry and business leaders. But, I am not concerned with what you are going to do next; instead I am interested in how you are going to do it.
Under the sage tutelage of your faculty mentors, you have the intellectual foundation to be leaders in your chosen professions. You have immersed yourself in your field of inquiry – probing issues only to realize their inherent complexity; inquiring to achieve enlightened understanding. Through your formal education, you have become seekers of knowledge and discoverers of multiple realities; you have cultivated your ability to uncover fact from fiction; and you have become proficient at discerning among competing claims.
So I ask, not what are you going to do next, but, instead how will you lead; how will you define your leadership?
Our world today is amazingly complex, inter-connected, dynamic, tragic, mystifying, and replete with opportunity. It is a requirement of our current and future leadership to appreciate these disparate realities.
Leaders in the 21st century must bring to the fore an intellectual curiosity characterized by an astute ability to investigate all relevant possibilities. Leaders in the 21st century must understand the myriad cascading affects decisions have on peoples, nations, and our physical environs. And, leaders in the 21st century must be principled and conduct themselves personally and professionally with the utmost integrity and civility of heart.
How will you lead? How will you define your leadership?
As a leader in the 21st century, you have a responsibility to purposefully and thoughtfully engage in the critical issues that impact the members of our local and global communities. As a citizen leader, you have the responsibility to apply your disciplinary knowledge and professional and life experiences for the benefit of humanity.
To be a true citizen leader, however, you must concurrently acknowledge that unraveling complex issues - human, social, global, and environmental - cannot be accomplished by one.
This past year, our nation suffered from one of the worst natural disasters in our history. On a terribly grand scale, Hurricane Katrina reminded us that the entire repertoire of knowledge, expertise, and skills of our community leaders and disciplinary experts must be brought to bear if we are to build and maintain resilient communities. Social workers and engineers, architects and microbiologists, physicians and geologists, information technologists and economists, must work together – side-by-side – to mitigate the effects of disasters on humanity and our physical world. And ultimately, through working together, we can strengthen our communities for all its members.
At the University at Buffalo, we believe we must also evolve our thinking, our leadership, through the way we approach our research, scholarship, and creative activities. As a community of scholars, we have developed an innovative paradigm for furthering our tripartite mission: research, teaching, and public service. Known as UB2020 and manifest, in part, through our Strategic Strengths initiative, we are harnessing our university’s intellectual strengths by bringing together faculty scholars from across our academic departments. Through this paradigm, UB faculty are collaborating on issues of critical social importance. With an eye toward the future, our faculty are also thinking beyond the issues of the moment and contemplating questions of tomorrow.
It is my sincerest hope that your experiences at the University at Buffalo have been truly transformative. It is my hope your passion for inquiry and discovery never fades; it is my hope you will serve your community with integrity and humility; and it is my hope you will respect, and value diverse intellectual and cultural perspectives to inform your understanding of the human condition and the physical world.
This September, the University at Buffalo will be honored to host His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In anticipation of this visit, I thought it both appropriate and meaningful to share with you excerpts from the Dalai Lama’s speech at the “Forum 2000” Conference held in Prague on 4 September 1997.
"Today’s world requires us to accept the oneness of humanity. In the past, isolated communities could afford to think of one another as fundamentally separate…But nowadays, whatever happens in one region eventually affects many other areas. Within the context of our new interdependence, self-interest clearly lies in considering the interest of others.
I believe that we must consciously develop a greater sense of universal responsibility. We must learn to work together not just for our own individual self, family or nation, but for the benefit of all mankind. Universal responsibility is the best foundation both for our personal happiness and for world peace, the equitable use of our natural resources, and through a concern for future generations, the proper care of the environment.
It is natural that we should face obstacles in pursuit of our goals. But if we remain passive, making no effort to solve the problems we meet, conflicts will arise and hindrances will grow. Transforming these obstacles into opportunities for positive growth is a challenge to our human ingenuity. To achieve this requires patience, compassion, and the use of our intelligence."
To our graduates: This is the beginning of the next chapter in your life. So I ask you - to ask yourself: How do I want to lead?
As you contemplate this question, be confident in knowing that you embody the intellectual resources, abilities, and motivation to make learning and discovery a part of your being; to understand life through a global lens; to value how inter-disciplinary collaborations have the potential to impact the most compelling issues of our time; and to live a principled life so that you – through your life’s work – may in some meaningful way benefit others.
Again, I wish my sincerest and most heartfelt congratulations to our 2006 University at Buffalo graduates – our leaders of tomorrow.
Satish K. Tripathi
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Last Modified: Friday January 04 2008