2025 New Student Convocation

Sept. 22, 2025

Welcome to Seattle University.  

You are the cusp of an amazing intellectual and personal adventure, one that likely fills you with excitement but perhaps also no small degree of uncertainty or anxiety.  

Each of you will experience this transition differently.  

I hope you all will approach it with the confidence that the Seattle University community (and by that I mean each of us) is accompanying you on this journey of discovery and growth.   

We are committed to your success.

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In joining this university, you are becoming part of a community unlike any other you have experienced to this point in your lives.

No matter where you come from (and collectively you come from all over the country and around the world), you have likely never been part of a residential community as diverse as this one, with so many different kinds of people from different backgrounds, life experiences and identities all living and learning together.  

That diversity will stretch you – it should challenge the way you think.  

Universities are unique communities in our society because we are dedicated to the production and transmission of knowledge and to the formation and education of future leaders. 

Accomplishing these important goals requires universities to maintain a distinctive kind of culture – one characterized by intellectual adventurousness and by comfort with disagreement.

Such a culture makes universities ideal places for exploring new and innovative ideas. 

All of the foregoing is true of almost ANY university worthy of the name. But, as a Jesuit university, Seattle University adds further layers to this. 

Now, some of you have chosen to come to Seattle University  precisely BECAUSE we are a Jesuit university. 

I don’t doubt that some of you have chosen to come to Seattle University DESPITE the fact that we are a Jesuit university. 

Still others of you may be sitting in your seats this morning, asking yourselves: “Wait, Seattle University is a JESUIT university?”

But it is BECAUSE we are a Jesuit, Catholic university – committed to the view that all human beings are created in God’s image – that we seek to build an academic culture that reflects and welcomes the many diversities of the human community.

Our radical hospitality is ultimately rooted in our Jesuit, Catholic values, which teach us that all human beings, without exception or qualification, are loved by God and created in God’s image and endowed with inalienable dignity.

Seattle University therefore welcomes students, faculty and staff from all faith traditions – including many people who identify with no faith tradition and some who affirmatively reject faith altogether.  

We welcome people of all races, national origins, immigration status, sexes, gender identities, and sexualities.  We welcome people with a diversity a viewpoints, abilities, and cognitive styles.  

At Seattle University, our mission is to draw on that rich human diversity to provide you with an exceptional educational experience, to empower you to become leaders for a just and humane world, as our mission statement puts it.

At Jesuit universities, you will often hear people say that, using the tools you acquire here, we hope you will go off and “set the world on fire.”

“Wait a second,” you might be thinking. “That does not sound like a good thing.  Surely, you aren’t telling us to become arsonists.”

We’re not.

And don’t call me Shirley. 

(A little 80s reference for the Gen X’ers.)

We are not telling you to go burn everything down, either literally or metaphorically.

There is plenty of literal and rhetorical arson in our noxious and polarized public discourse already.

When Jesuit universities talk about setting the world on fire, we are echoing the words of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, who often signed his letters to the early Jesuits – men he had sent all over the world to spread the good news – by encouraging them to “set the world on fire.” 

His words echoed those of Jesus himself, who said “I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already blazing.” (Luke ch. 12)

As a Jesuit university, the fire we are trying to kindle is a lifelong passion for learning.  And not just learning, but wisdom.  And not just learning and wisdom for their own sake, but in the service of others, in the service of making the world a more just and humane place.

Many of us who grew up here in the Pacific Northwest have spent a lot of time outdoors.  That means we have built a lot of campfires.  

As I have told my sons on countless occasions, to build a fire – you need three ingredients:  FUEL, A SPARK, and AIR.

And we have plenty of fuel on campus.

You – our students – bring that fuel with you when you arrive.  

Your intellect, your energy, your ambition and your experiences and accomplishments are great combustible material for the fire we are building.  

Our admissions process is designed to assemble those ingredients into a potent mixture that will fuel rich and enlightening classroom discussions and raucous late-night debates – the proverbial 3 a.m. dorm-room argument.

But a fire cannot get going without a spark.

Many people speak about curiosity as that kind of spark.  

But I prefer Aristotle’s view of curiosity as something more enduring.  

Aristotle saw curiosity as a deeply rooted character trait.  In fact, he thought that curiosity was one of the most distinctive of human traits – a boundless thirst for (and capacity for) knowledge that makes us different from all other animals. 

But, as with other human qualities, curiosity is something that we can cultivate and grow or neglect and allow to atrophy. 

In our common text for this year, the author Monica Guzman, emphasizes the importance of curiosity – curiosity about the world but (more importantly) curiosity about other people, especially people we disagree with. 

She treats curiosity not as an ephemeral spark, but as a powerful muscle we need to build.  

Here is how she puts it:

“I see us treat our curiosity – our built-in hunger for understanding – like it’s a sweet little muse, like it just happens to us, flitting by when we’re joyfully inspired.  No.  Curiosity is big and it is badass. . . . At its strongest, it whips us into a frenzy of unstoppable learning.”

Viewed in this way, curiosity is not a fleeting spark that ignites a fire and then disappears. 

It is a fuel-additive that turbo-charges our discovery.

If curiosity is not the spark, then what is the spark that ignites our intellectual fires?  

To my mind, that spark is the experience of surprise – the unexpected insight – that unleashes a chain reaction of further inquiry and discovery. 

That surprise can be delightful. 

It can also often be deeply uncomfortable and unsettling. 

Surprise can come in the form of a sudden recognition of a truth you had not previously appreciated.  

It can also come from a visceral feeling that something you heard is wrong – even deeply wrong.  And that feeling of wrongness can motivate you to redouble your search for the truth. 

In your time at Seattle University, I hope you will experience both the pleasure of unexpected discovery and the discomfort of deep disagreement. And I hope that experience will spark your search for the truth over and over again.  If you don’t experience both of these feelings, we are not doing our jobs very well.

But you will not have those experiences, and your fire will not get ignited, if we are missing the THIRD ingredient – air.

As anyone who has built a fire knows, even if you have nice dry wood and a perfect spark, if AIR cannot reach your kindling, the fire will smolder and go out.  

You will get lots of smoke, but no heat and no light.

On a university campus, the air that allows the fuel of curiosity to catch fire is an atmosphere of free inquiry and debate; tolerance of disagreement.

You cannot experience the spark of intellectual surprise on a campus where different perspectives or divergent points of view are smothered by censorship . . . or censoriousness.

This is why, at Seattle University, our conception of diversity is so broad and inclusive.  

It includes diversity of identity, to be sure, but it also includes diversity of life experience and diversity of viewpoint.

The fire-suppressants that suffocate a culture of curiosity and discovery are many.  They include intellectual conformity, self-satisfied consensus, judgmental moralizing, rigid orthodoxy, coercive indoctrination or intimidation, and an excessive eagerness to take offense.  

They also include a lack of care in how we express ourselves; a relish in GIVING offense; disregard of norms of civility – all of which evince a lack of respect for your fellow travelers on this educational journey.

To create the swirling air in which our intellectual fires can breathe and grow, we have to resist all these tendencies. 

One last point about the importance of air:  to get our fires to burn brightly, we have to stack the wood just right, not packing it in too tight.  We need to leave plenty of space between the logs.

In the same way, to kindle your own intellectual fires, you can’t just pile one book, one class, one obligation on top of the other. 

You need to leave space for fun.  

To give air to your fires, you need to go breathe some actual fresh air.  You need to get outside.  Get out into nature.  You need to take a hike in the Cascades.  Take a ferry to Bainbridge.  Catch an SU soccer match or a basketball game.  You need the fresh air that comes from new relationships – from surprising friendships.

It is important to recognize that the fire of intellectual growth is sustained by the careful balancing of diligence and effort with rest and diversion.  

Of course, you can take relaxation too far…

To review – at Seattle University, our goal is to set your intellects on fire. 

To build that fire, we need fuel, a spark, and lots of air.  

You bring the fuel – especially your curiosity; we nurture an atmosphere of fearless inquiry and discussion and debate conducive to its ignition; and, together, the combination of these ingredients generates the spark of intellectual surprise that really gets that fire going.

Our goal is to help you kindle that flame.  But it is up to you to carry it with you, keeping it burning long after your time here is done, carefully tending it and stoking it for the rest of your lives.