Commencement 2025

June 16, 2025

Let me begin by offering my heartfelt congratulations to our graduates. Members of the Class of 2025, finishing college is no small feat.

For many of you, this moment is especially sweet, since your senior year in high school and your first year of college were disrupted by the COVID pandemic four years ago. How far you have come since then!

But none of you got here alone.

And so I’d like to take a moment at the outset to ask our graduates to join me in thanking and congratulating the parents, spouses, supporters, mentors and friends who are here, and without whom you would not be who you are or where you are today.

No wealthy, mature democracy has been as politically polarized for as long as the United States now finds itself. Jennifer McCoy and her co-authors at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace shed important light on the connection between rising polarization and the sorry state of our political discourse.

Here is what McCoy says:

When [political] polarization reaches a state of equilibrium, with a society divided into binary, mutually distrustful political camps... parties become unwilling to compromise, voters lose confidence in public institutions, and normative support for democracy may decline. [E]ach camp begins to view the opposing camp and its policies as an existential threat to its own way of life or the nation as a whole. They come to perceive the “Other” in such negative terms that a normal political adversary competing for power is transformed into an enemy to be vanquished. This can be called pernicious polarization...

Does that sound familiar?

In recent years, political polarization in the United States has been reinforced by geographic sorting, with people increasingly choosing to live near other people who think like they do.

Layering geographic sorting on top of polarization means that walking around our local communities or interacting with random strangers in the grocery store, including on our campus, we are less likely to encounter people with points of view that are very different from our own.

The result of polarization and geographic sorting is that people who disagree do not tend to encounter or engage with one another — or at least, not productively.

Those who think differently become abstractions — they are easy to caricature and dehumanize.

When people view the world in polarized, binary terms, they tend to view people they disagree with on any issue as an enemy or opponent... or a traitor, even if they agree about a great many things.

In a less polarized climate, we might recognize the world to be engaged in a complex conversation characterized by overlapping and shifting political alliances in which people find themselves cooperating with and opposing different people at different times with respect to different issues.

In this kind of multipolar conversation, the person who disagrees with you today may be the person you collaborate with tomorrow. This dynamic gives disagreement a less all-or-nothing quality.

At Seattle University, our mission is to educate and empower you to become leaders for a just and humane world. In a diverse, pluralist democracy like ours, successfully moving the world towards greater justice and humanity requires leaders who can bring us back from the binary thinking of pernicious polarization and who can interrupt the intellectual habits that are feeding it.

I’d like to briefly talk about THREE important ways you can put your Seattle University education to use to become that kind of leader.

First, you can resist the lure of ideology.

John Adams supposedly called ideology the “science of idiots.”

Pope Francis called it “poison.”

Ideology is one of those things that’s often in the eye of the beholder.

One commentator has compared it to bad breath — it’s the thing that OTHER PEOPLE suffer from.

When we call someone an ideologue or reject their reasoning as ideological, we may be revealing OURSELVES to be in the thrall of ideology.

Clear definitions can be our friend here.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “ideology” as:

A systematic scheme of ideas, usually relating to politics or society that is maintained regardless of the course of events.

The key to this definition is the last phrase — “maintained regardless of the course of events.”

Although bold ideas and uncompromising utopian dreaming are important sources of inspiration for social change, they ultimately need to be grounded in — and subordinated to — empirical realities... to “the [actual] course of events,” in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary.

When we commit ourselves to abstract ideas — “regardless of the course of events,” we often end up making things less just, and less humane, despite our best intentions.

If our answer to every policy failure is to double-down rather than to dig into the data and find ways to improve the outcomes, we are probably being ideological.

Your Seattle University education — with its Jesuit emphasis on academic rigor and interdisciplinary inquiry — has given you valuable intellectual tools to do that digging.

Use those the valuable tools you have acquired here to resist the lure of ideology and ideologues.

A second habit that will help you become effective leaders for our pluralist democracy is to push yourself to engage with people who think differently from you.

When we refuse to engage substantively with the arguments of people who disagree with us — preferring instead to pass judgment, to attack their motives, or to focus on positionality as a reason for disregarding their perspectives — we are probably engaged in an ideological exercise, rather than intellectual or genuinely inter-personal engagement.

But genuine and personal engagement should come as a natural instinct to those who have had the good fortune to experience Jesuit education.

The Jesuit practice of presupposition (which has its roots in the 22nd Annotation of St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises) calls on us to — in St. Ignatius’s words — “put a good interpretation on another’s statement.”

The Jesuits teach us to listen generously and with humility for the truth that may lie in statements that initially startle or even offend us. This five-hundred year old nugget of wisdom has so much to offer us in today’s polarized climate.

In a society where robust but civil engagement across disagreement is increasingly rare, those who have had the benefit of a Jesuit education — that is to say, all of you — should be the countercultural exceptions.

But learning how to engage in productive disagreement is a skill. And, as with all skills, cultivating it requires the actual experience of disagreement.

Unfortunately, our polarization and geographic segregation are reinforced by social media algorithms that feed us information designed to do the opposite — to affirm our existing beliefs and biases by offering us a steady stream of content that either mirrors our views back at us or that presents us with the least attractive versions of opposing positions.

There is more financial profit in stoking outrage than in encouraging genuine engagement across difference.

And in a world where generative AI makes the production and dissemination of provocative misinformation easier than actual conversation and debate, it is only getting harder to engage across our disagreements.

The Jesuit call to presupposition takes effort, but its successful practice has the powerful potential to interrupt the engine of polarization.

The final virtue that you can cultivate to help us overcome our polarized political climate is civility.

A commitment to civil expression and engagement flows naturally from the rejection of ideology and the Jesuit practice of presupposition. It also reflects a deep belief in the inherent and inalienable dignity of all human beings, including human beings with whom we disagree.

Seattle University’s Jesuit, Catholic commitment to the dignity of every human being underlies our commitment to creating a diverse and inclusive campus community.

The human dignity we affirm at Seattle University is all encompassing. It extends to people of all races, religions, and national origins. It extends to people of all sexual and gender identities. It extends to people of differing physical abilities and cognitive styles. And it extends to people of differing political beliefs.

Our affirmation of human dignity includes progressives. It includes conservatives. It even includes moderates.

There is no question that norms of civility have sometimes been defined in expansive terms to keep those on the margins in their places.

I’m thinking here of the criticisms to which Martin Luther King was responding in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Randall Kennedy has argued that an excessive insistence on civility “is just a genteel way to mask the inevitable tensions and antagonisms of democratic society.”

This has no doubt been true sometimes.

But we should not dismiss a concept on the basis of its least defensible uses.

The misuse of the concept of civility by some — deploying it to make excessive demands on dissenters or to stifle legitimate protest — does not rule out its continuing importance as a civic virtue.

Of course, people can smuggle a lot into the word civility, as its critics have noted.

But in a pluralistic democracy, it is important to affirm a baseline commitment to settling our disagreements through civil dialogue and reasoned debate.

What I am thinking of here is a constrained sense of civility along the lines of what the Oxford philosopher Teresa Bejan has called “mere civility.”

What does “mere civility” rule out? Threats, slurs, gratuitous insults, and ad hominem — classic conversation stoppers — as well as harassment, violence, and the destruction of property.

It is hard for me to understand how a democracy can hope to function without a critical mass of citizens who embrace the virtue of “civility” in this modest sense.

Through our policies and practices, Seattle University has sought to instill in our students — and in all members of our community — these habits of civility, both in and out of the classroom, even when we are passionately disagreeing with one another. Especially when we are disagreeing with one another.

Continuing to practice those habits of civility will serve you well as you enter the next phase of your lives.

What binds these three virtues together — resistance to ideology, presupposition, and civility — is their implicit recognition that any one of us individually (or even any single political movement) does not have all the answers about what constitutes a just and humane society, or how best to get there.

Those with whom we disagree have something to teach us.

Cultivating these virtues keeps open the lines of dialogue and communication that allow for continuous learning. And these virtues make those who practice them more effective leaders in a diverse and divided society, leaders capable of building broader coalitions in support of the change we want to see.

In our polarized times, cultivating and practicing these virtues is no easy task.

Speaking for myself, I know that I fail to exhibit them on a daily basis.

But failing even to try to practice them is tantamount to abandoning our hope for a more just and humane world.

If that world is to come into being, it needs leaders who will be effective advocates for justice and humanity in the context of a democratic society characterized by deep disagreement about what those words even mean.

By putting to work the skills you have learned during your time at Seattle University, you can become such leaders. And if you succeed in that work, you will be the generation that helps turn the tide of pernicious polarization.

Class of 2025, congratulations, and Godspeed!