President Gregory Washington's remarks to Mason's 2023 Winter Graduates

Remarks as prepared for delivery

Good morning! Please be seated. 

Before we begin, I would like to thank our vocalist, Anissa Clay Zelaya, for singing our National Anthem. That was out of this world, Anissa! 

Anissa is a senior in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, majoring in Vocal Performance in the Dewberry School of Music. She will graduate next spring. 

Anissa will join us again later for the singing of our Alma Mater.

I would also like to thank Dr. Michael Nickens and our very own Green Machine for the musical entertainment they provided this morning. Thank you, Doc Nix!

At the place George Mason University occupies, we give greetings and thanksgivings to the recognized Virginia tribes who have lovingly stewarded these lands for millennia including the Rappahannock, Pamunkey, Upper Mattaponi, Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Nansemond, Monacan, Mattaponi, Patawomeck, and Nottaway, past, present, and future; and to the Piscataway tribes, who have lived on both sides of the river from time immemorial.

Your education is a credit to the land that has received you. The good you will do in this world is the harvest of the soil upon which you have stood, sat, and lived. How plentiful that harvest will turn out to be in your lifetime is now entirely up to you. It’s good cause for this celebration today.

I am very pleased to welcome and congratulate the Winter Graduating Class of 2023. You made it!

Joining our graduates, faculty, and staff today are loved ones who have come from throughout the commonwealth, across the nation, and even some who have flown in from other nations just to be a part of this celebration. To each of you, I extend a warm welcome to George Mason University! And for our online viewers and listeners, we thank you for joining us as well.

Today, we honor 4,700 recipients of bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral, and law degrees, as well as more than 300 certificate recipients.  

Our graduates hail from 78 countries, 41 states, and a multitude of backgrounds. About 1 in 4 of the Patriots we’re honoring today is in the first generation of their family to earn a four-year degree.

Would our first-gen graduates please stand so we can celebrate the family history you’re making today?.... Outstanding!

All of our graduates are earning a degree from a university whose impact and stature rises by the day.

Your final year here was the year George Mason University was finally recognized by consensus as one of America’s 50 finest public universities. We are Virginia’s best for social mobility and innovation. We have known this for some time. But now the nation and the world have caught up. Truly, it is Mason’s time. Like it has been for so many, may your Mason degree be a springboard to success.

All of you have weathered quite a journey to arrive at this day. Many of you came to Mason amid the pandemic, a challenge we worked together to overcome not only as members of this university community but as citizens of the world.

We continue to be tested by global events in a time of profound challenge and change. War and atrocities around the world affect you personally. And the climate crisis has begun to accelerate at an alarming pace. In short, your world is changing right before your eyes.

To make sense of it all, you have an unprecedented volume of information at your fingertips to inform you. But you also are confronted with more misinformation and disinformation than ever, making your challenge to inform your own voice more difficult.

To be sure, no one can – or should – try to suppress your voice. You continue to be more civically engaged, more vocal, and more active in shaping the world landscape, not just reacting to it. And the world needs you to do that.

Along with the freedom our society gives you to raise your voice comes great responsibility—to learn the facts about the issues of our day, from credible sources, and to express them in ways that help us live up to the credo of George Mason University—to create a more just, peaceful, and prosperous world.

Why do I say it’s your responsibility? Because America is becoming more crowded, more volatile, and more in need of informed and involved voices to lead it than ever before. True leadership demands the brightest minds, not just the loudest voices, to carry the day. And that burden of leadership demands that you be informed, not just impassioned.

As graduates of the largest and most diverse public university in the Commonwealth of Virginia—and one of the most diverse universities nationally—you are a time machine to the future, because you already look like the America that is to come. As such, you are best equipped to listen, learn and engage on these polarizing issues. To seek understanding and common ground and work to ensure that disagreement does not collapse into incivility.

A foundation of peace is not built on agreement. It is built on bedrock of mutual respect. That is true for children squabbling on the playground, spouses arguing in the kitchen, or factions warring on fault lines around the world. Gandhi said, “The greatness of humanity is not in being human, but in being humane.”

That is your charge. I hope that your Mason education has prepared you to separate fact from fiction. To discern without demonizing. To listen as passionately as you speak – even when your heart races and your ears burn.

Who better to bear the weight of lifting us out of our downward spiral than you—future leaders who these past few years have lived, learned, and engaged in one of the most diverse environments you will find.

Mason’s diversity of origin, identity, circumstance, and thought is what we affectionately—and proudly—call, “All Together Different.” It has caused some struggles and many triumphs, but it isn’t just a Mason slogan – it’s your future. It’s our future….

Now, let me briefly tell you about a few of the graduates we’re honoring today!

• We have an IT major who exemplifies the opportunities open to Mason students. She’s served internships at Lockheed Martin, DataLock Consulting, AWS, SAS, and several other companies. She’s also a Mason peer mentor and research assistant.
• We have a criminology, law, and society major who also is earning an accelerated master’s degree in international security. She is one of the inaugural recipients of the Peraton scholarship in National Security and is a student trainee at the Department of Homeland Security as well as a member of the Intelligence Community Network at Mason.
• We have a biology major who is a first-generation graduate who has worked as an environmental field interpreter, translating environmental science content into engaging, hands-on outdoor field programs for 4,500 seventh-graders.
• And we have a bioengineering major who as a teenager came to the United States from her native Honduras for cancer treatment. She beat cancer and committed herself to helping others. She works part-time in the Inova Health System as a rehab technician and in Mason's Applied Biosensing Lab developing wearable ultrasound technology for quantitative assessment of musculoskeletal injuries in military service members. Next up for her: med school or the military.

As you can tell, this is an impressive group we’re honoring here today! Before we move on with our program, I’d like to take a moment to thank the Mason faculty and staff members who do such a tremendous job of educating, inspiring, and serving our students. Mason faculty and staff members, please stand so we can thank you for the role you have played in the lives of our graduates.

I’d also like to acknowledge our Alumni Association for its work to maintain a lifelong bond with our more than 230,000 graduates…. The winter Class of 2023 is now part of an enormous network for careers and recruitment opportunities.

Finally, I’d like to recognize our governing body, the Board of Visitors, for the tremendous job they do guiding this growing and innovative university. Would the Board of Visitors members who are here please stand and be recognized?  

It’s so great to have you here with us today to honor our graduates….

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It is now my pleasure to introduce the Rector of the George Mason University Board of Visitors, Horace Blackman, to introduce our Commencement speaker.