Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL) delivers a commencement address at Knox College.
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00:00I am truly honored to be standing before you today at one of the jewels of Illinois' higher education system.
00:13And I want to thank President McGadney and the entire graduating class of 2025 for your very, very kind invitation to join you today.
00:23I want to acknowledge my dear friend and fellow honorary degree recipient, Theaster Gates.
00:31I also want to offer a heartfelt congratulations to Mary Kent Knight to thank her for her tremendous philanthropy.
00:40She is a beloved member of this Knox College community.
00:44Thank you very much.
00:45Now, finally, I want to thank my friend, your Illinois Senate President, Don Harmon, a proud Knox College graduate.
01:05Now, he didn't say outright that my legislative agenda would be in peril if I didn't accept your invitation to speak today.
01:13But I can read between the lines as well as anybody.
01:18On a serious note, every Knox College graduate should take pride in President Don Harmon's Prairie Fire leadership of this state.
01:28Thank you for everything that you've done, Don.
01:36This is the second time that I've had the opportunity to deliver a commencement speech as governor.
01:42The first time was at Northwestern two years ago.
01:45I wrote a whole speech about how everything you needed to know in life could be found in old episodes of The Office.
01:55And just before I was set to deliver the speech, I found out, well, that Steve Carell, the star of The Office,
02:02was going to attend the commencement because his daughter was graduating from Northwestern that day.
02:08I honestly did not know that.
02:09That was extraordinarily nerve-wracking.
02:14So I thought maybe for my second commencement speech here, I could come and find a situation that was a little less pressure-filled.
02:24But then I found out that Knox College hosts graduation on the site of one of the most storied episodes
02:30in perhaps one of the most famous oratory battles of all time.
02:35And at an institution where the most popular undergraduate degree is creative writing.
02:46So now I'm nervous.
02:50I'm just hoping your professors don't decide to grade me afterward.
02:56So all of that makes this honor a little bit like being the host at the Oscars,
03:02which is simply an enormous chance to fail spectacularly.
03:07The problem with a commencement speech is that everyone in the audience already knows how it ends.
03:14We've seen graduation speeches before.
03:17Everything has already been done.
03:19Everything that could be said has been said by someone somewhere,
03:23often delivered in the most boring possible fashion.
03:27And outside, in the sun, wearing a robe, and usually a funny little hat.
03:37I will confess, though, that as a dad, I love giving commencement speeches
03:42because it gives me an opportunity to do what dads love to do most,
03:48dispense advice to a completely captive audience.
03:50So I thought I would start there with some solid dad advice.
03:58It is, after all, the most valuable kind of advice that you'll get.
04:02Advice that you can actually really use in life.
04:06Advice that takes the complexities of the modern world
04:09and boils them down to the most important things.
04:13So first piece of advice.
04:16You don't need to subscribe to every single streaming service.
04:22You don't.
04:23Frankly, if you have Netflix and Apple Plus and whatever HBO is calling itself now,
04:29you are mostly covered.
04:31If you want to mix in a little Hulu or Disney Plus, I'm not going to fight you on that.
04:36But I have found that if you have access to at least one good post-apocalyptic drama,
04:41plus one hilarious but heartwarming comedy,
04:46and either one of the two documentaries about the Fyre Festival,
04:51all your entertainment needs will be met.
04:56Second piece of advice, and this is serious,
05:01please turn off all the lights when you leave a room.
05:11But speaking on behalf of all dads,
05:14we have moved into an era of egregious lighting.
05:18And frankly, it's killing us fathers.
05:21You don't need an overhead light, a table lamp, and a ring light
05:25all shining on you for a social media post.
05:29Maybe maintain a little mystery, would you?
05:32Remember that it's always darkest before the dawn,
05:35and dawn comes with natural light,
05:38so there's no need to run up the electricity bill.
05:40Third, we need you to put air in your tires.
05:49I know that when that little tire gauge comes on on your dashboard,
05:53you view it in the same way that Elon Musk views the United States Constitution,
05:58as a mere suggestion.
06:10But if you're not putting air in your tires before the winter,
06:16then you are going to end up just like Elon with a car that no one wants to drive.
06:21Now, I'm somewhat inclined to end this speech right there,
06:30because frankly, if you take my dad advice and budget your streaming services
06:36and turn off the lights and put air in your tires,
06:39you will save money, you'll preserve the environment,
06:41and you'll get everywhere you need to go.
06:43I'm not sure I can offer any better advice than that.
06:48But you spent a lot of time and money to get here,
06:52so I understand that my obligations as your commencement speaker must extend to some perhaps more sage advice.
06:59After all, we are sending you out into the world that is a little bit crazier,
07:05in fact, vastly crazier, than it has been at any time that any of us can remember.
07:12And I'm truly sorry for that.
07:15But sometime after the Chicago Cubs won the first World Series in 108 years,
07:21the one that they won in 2016, things on this...
07:25Oh, good, we have some Cubs fans here.
07:29But sometime just after that, we threw the timeline off in the multiverse.
07:34And I'm not sure we have ever gotten it back.
07:38It makes dispensing good advice especially hard.
07:42When the ground is shifting beneath you, so are the guardrails that are used to keep us stable
07:48and the perspective that we rely on to understand the world around us.
07:53When you can't hold on to a guardrail and you can't trust your perspective,
07:58then you have to seek truth that predates the current fashion.
08:01So that's what I'm going to endeavor to do today, dispense some unfashionable truth.
08:08Let's start with this.
08:10The most critical thing that I've learned in my 60 years on this planet and my six years as governor
08:15is that there's almost nothing more important in life than showing up.
08:21Show up for your nephew's birthday party and your cousin's wedding.
08:26Show up to the dance recitals of your second nieces and the talent shows of your best friend's son.
08:33When someone you love gets an award, even if it's for best community recycler or most prolific gardener,
08:41be in the front row cheering them on.
08:44Never cancel plans on an old friend.
08:49Always leave a meeting with your boss if your grandmother is calling.
08:54And never, ever tell a child you are going to be somewhere that you don't intend to be.
08:59And show up, show up to the funerals, all of them.
09:12I know you will be at memorials of the people that you love.
09:15That's as much for yourself as it is for your family.
09:18But the question you should ask when someone dies is, did someone I love, love them?
09:27Does someone who has shown me kindness in the world care that this person is gone?
09:33Go to those funerals.
09:35Your distant great aunt, your co-worker's mom, your neighbor's son.
09:41When you're governor, you attend countless funerals for strangers.
09:46Early in my first term, an Illinois state trooper died in a terrible traffic accident.
09:53He left behind a wife and two young children.
09:57I didn't know the officer at all.
09:59But the family asked if I would deliver a eulogy at the funeral.
10:03And of course I said yes.
10:04I understood that the request was not about me, but instead about the office that I represent.
10:11About honoring the trooper's service to his state and to this country.
10:16It's hard to write a eulogy for someone that you don't know.
10:21But I realized that there was something I did know about.
10:25I also lost a parent to a car crash when I was very young.
10:30And I knew what the intense shock and despair was like.
10:33And I also knew that grief is like standing in a room with a gigantic balloon.
10:39One that hurts every time you touch it.
10:41But over time, the balloon loses air.
10:46Moving, breathing gets easier.
10:49Until eventually you go long days where you never touch the balloon at all.
10:53I knew I could look the state trooper's family in the eye on the most terrible days of their lives.
11:02And offer them something that I knew I could give.
11:05Hope that one day the memory of their loved one's life would land with joy.
11:11More powerfully than the pain of their death.
11:16In a world where TikTok and Instagram tells you to be selfish with your schedule, I'm telling you, be generous.
11:24Be generous with your time.
11:26Showing up is a unique and meaningful thing that only you can do.
11:31Showing up is an important gift that you can give.
11:35It's a gift that tells someone you love, there is nothing more important to me right now than being here with you.
11:44Don't believe me?
11:45Let me prove it to you.
11:47So I want to ask all the graduates today to please stand up and turn around or look around at the rest of the audience.
11:54Please stand up.
11:56Go ahead.
11:57You have to do it because I'm your commencement speaker and you have to do everything I say.
12:01Now I want you to look out at this crowd and see all the people who showed up for you.
12:07All the parents and grandparents and siblings and aunts and uncles and friends.
12:11Think about how far they drove or flew to be here.
12:15Think about the hours that they're willing to sit and listen to people like me just to see you walk across a stage and grab a diploma.
12:24Okay, you can sit down now.
12:31Now think about all the times that these people showed up for you over the years.
12:42Think about the baseball games and the soccer matches and the band practices and the high school plays.
12:48Think about the times your mother ran to the store past 9 p.m.
12:51because you forgot to tell her about your solar system diorama due the next day.
12:57Think about your dad searching into the far reaches of his brain to try and remember trigonometry.
13:04I hate to break it to you, but your magic act in the middle school talent show was not as captivating as they made it seem.
13:11But they were there most often, well, it seemed easy to them and the right thing for them to be there.
13:23They showed up for you because showing up is a great act of love, maybe the best act of love.
13:31It's become increasingly rare in this world, which makes it even more special.
13:37And long after everything else in your life falls away, you will remember the times people showed up for you.
13:44Trust me.
13:44I know your hands are probably itching to grab your diploma today, and I'm sure graduating from a renowned institution of higher learning has you feeling pretty good about your handle on the world.
13:56Maybe you have a little more confidence in your step today than there was yesterday.
14:02I want you to have confidence, but I also want you to have doubt.
14:06The truth is, nowadays, people have become far too certain of what they know and far too unwilling to admit to what they don't know.
14:17I wish I had a list of all the things that I was absolutely certain of since I was elected governor.
14:23In 2019, I was completely certain that the hardest challenge that I would face was passing a balanced budget for a state that hadn't done that for a quarter century.
14:32In early 2020, I was pretty sure the strange flu that was going around would pass out of the news as quickly as it came into it.
14:41In 2024, I was certain that Joe Biden was going to be the Democratic nominee for president.
14:47In a world like the one we live in today, we need confidence just to get up every day, put your pants on, go out and greet the uncertainty that awaits us.
14:57But we need doubt to survive in it.
15:01Because doubt makes us curious.
15:03Doubt keeps us humble.
15:06Doubt makes us seek when it would be so much easier just to sit idle.
15:12Doubt prompts us to ask good questions.
15:15Questions like, am I looking at all the facts or just the ones I want to see?
15:21Should I rely solely on nervous first impressions or should I give a second date a chance?
15:27Should I trust everything that my uncle posts on Facebook?
15:32Is it a good idea to accept a jumbo jet from a foreign country that would very much like to spy on us?
15:38And one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty is that when I go into a room as the governor of the fifth largest state in the country,
15:54it's not the person who speaks with absolute assuredness from beginning to end who impresses me the most.
15:59It's the person who has the capacity to change their opinion based on new information.
16:05All our great innovations in technology and thinking, all the imagination that drove us from the ocean to the land,
16:13to the cave, to the farm, to the city, all our capacity for kindness and empathy is found in the space between doubt and confidence.
16:23If you can summon the bravery to find that balance, then you will unlock the potential to earn your place in posterity.
16:33I had a few invitations to deliver commencement speeches this year, but I wanted to come to Knox College because no place in America feels more suitable to this moment in history.
17:14Ignore the coastal institutions who love to brag about their pedigree and history.
17:28You will hold a diploma from a college that outshines them in a heritage that is exceedingly rare,
17:34a community built around the concept that our lives should be lived every day with courage.
17:41When we tell the stories of history, we often excuse the atrocities of our ancestors by suggesting that they were merely acting on what was popular at that time.
17:53Because we understand in our core, whether we want to admit it or not, how much easier it is to live a life that chases popularity rather than courage.
18:02Occasionally, we are confronted with stories like the founding of Knox College, where some person or some group of people chose the unpopular but morally courageous path.
18:15And we laud those stories as noble oddities to be celebrated as something righteous, but rare.
18:22Here's the problem with that perspective.
18:25When we lionize a virtue like bravery, when we treat it like the exception rather than the expectation,
18:33when courage is awed rather than assumed, then we build a world where the default is cowardice.
18:40When we do the opposite, when we build a community like the one right here, where from the very start, 188 years ago,
18:49you made a stiff steel spine of courage the cornerstone of your campus, well, then something truly great is possible.
18:56I know that the story of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas' very famous fifth debate on the grounds we stand on today
19:06has been told a thousand times from this very podium, and I'm not going to tell it again.
19:13But I am going to offer a perspective that perhaps casts a new light on the inheritance this diploma confers upon you today.
19:22In the two weeks before the fourth Lincoln-Douglas debate at Charleston and the fifth at Galesburg,
19:31Lincoln gave speeches in Danville, Urbana, Jacksonville, Winchester, Pittsfield, Metamora, Pekin, and Sullivan.
19:40Trust me, as a candidate, even in the modern era with planes and automobiles, that's a lot.
19:46The president of Illinois College would later claim that he said to Lincoln during this period,
19:52you must be having a weary time, and Lincoln responded, I am, and if it were not for one thing, I would retire from the contest.
20:02I know that if Mr. Douglas' doctrine prevails, it will not be 15 years before Illinois itself will be a slave state.
20:11Lincoln was exhausted by the time he got here to Galesburg.
20:15The crowds at the previous debates had all favored the more popular Douglas.
20:21Storms the day before had turned the weather cold and windy here.
20:25It would have been the most understandable thing in the world if he found his spirit sagging that day.
20:31I think about the doubt he must have carried in his heart.
20:35I think about the fact that he showed up anyway.
20:37And I think about what must it have been like for Abraham Lincoln, worn and world-weary,
20:47to step through the window of Old Main, look out on this campus,
20:51and see almost 20,000 people cheering him on under a banner that read,
20:57Abe Lincoln, the champion of freedom.
21:00What courage did this community inspire in him?
21:05What fear did your predecessors have him leave behind?
21:10Only Lincoln himself has the answers to those questions,
21:13but I don't think it was a coincidence that it was here at Knox College
21:18that our 16th president made the moral case for the opposition to slavery for the very first time.
21:26Knox College expected Abraham Lincoln to be brave, and so he was.
21:32And that is the legacy that you take out into the world today.
21:37To be in public office right now...
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21:42To be in public office right now is to constantly ask yourself,
21:54How do I make sure I'm standing on the right side of history?
21:58There is a simple answer.
22:00The wrong side of history will always tell you to be afraid.
22:05The right side of history will always expect you to be brave.
22:09applause
22:11Expect bravery of the community around you, and bravery will show up.
22:26Expect fear, and fear will rule the day.
22:29So, graduates, I expect you to be brave.
22:33I expect you to go out into this world with courage.
22:36I expect you to be true to the legacy of the very earth beneath you today.
22:42I expect you to expect the same of the people who would endeavor to lead this country.
22:48Thank you, and congratulations, graduates.
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