President Jonathan Levin's remarks at Opening Convocation

In welcoming the Class of 2030, Levin celebrated Stanford's culture of exploration, expertise, and optimism."The future is something you build rather than something that happens to you."

Following is the prepared text of remarks by Stanford President Jonathan Levin at the 136th Convocation Ceremony on Sept. 15, 2026:

First-years, transfer students, and families: Welcome to Stanford!

We're so glad you're here. We enjoyed seeing you moving in this morning. That's one of my favorite moments of the year. Parents and families, we especially enjoyed seeing the look of pride on your faces.

Let me start with a prediction, based on evidence, although admittedly a small sample size. I predict that you are unlikely to remember much of this talk. But you will remember the feeling of arriving at Stanford.

That has certainly been the case for me. In the fall of 1990, I flew across the country, and a blue Super Shuttle bus dropped me and my two duffel bags in front of Wilbur Hall. I remember the feeling as if it were yesterday – walking around campus in the sun, meeting a few people in my dorm who I still talk with today, and seeing my room for the first time. Some of you might wonder, have the rooms changed much? The answer is no. We call it eclectic.

I had chosen Stanford for its sense of openness and possibility, for its spirit of exploration. It did not disappoint, and that is one of the many reasons I'm still here today, and I'm so excited to see you launch on your own voyages.

This weekend I was scheduled to be in Florida to watch the launch of another Stanford explorer. Jessica Watkins arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2006. She wanted to be an astronaut. Of course, I grew up wanting to play center field for the New York Yankees, so these things don't always work out, but in Jessica's case, it did.

At Stanford, Jessica studied geological and environmental sciences. She was a star on the women's rugby team – winning a national championship as a sophomore. She did a summer internship at the NASA Ames Research Center, and studied how to grow plants in Martian soil. Those experiences set her up to pursue a PhD and, eventually, to be selected into NASA's astronaut program. Today, she's the commander of the Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station – her second trip there. By the way, Stanford has graduated 27 astronauts, and more female astronauts than any civilian university.

I was hoping to point up at Jessica in orbit, but as often happens with space missions, the launch on Saturday was postponed. I can't wait to be there when it happens, and maybe one day to see Jessica put her geology training to work walking around on the moon, or even Mars.

One of the reasons I love Jessica's trajectory and was so eager to be there for her launch is that it ties into something I've been thinking about all summer.

This fall, I'm teaching a section of COLLEGE 101, a course many of you will take. It'll be a new class for me, and different. My field is economics, so I've usually taught classes on game theory or innovation or how to design markets. COLLEGE 101 is about the role of education in preparing you to live a good life.

A feature of our freshman curriculum is that we invite faculty from all across campus to teach in it. That's why some of you will have literary scholars while others have a physicist, or a physician, or an economist who's become a university president.

So this summer, I've done a lot of reading: Plato, Du Bois, Tagore, Dangarembga, Epicurus, Seneca. Tara Westover's memoir. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Many of the readings are about what education should look like, or personal accounts of education, at different times and places. You'll get to talk about them all through the quarter.

The readings raised a question: What is it about a Stanford education that distinguishes it from the many and varied forms of education over time and place? How will it prepare you for a good life?

I think there are three answers.

First, the freedom to explore. Many educational traditions are narrow by design: a fixed course of study, depth in a particular area. Stanford is different. You're embarking on a true journey of discovery. You'll have the opportunity to take classes and encounter new ideas across many fields, and to change your mind. Changing your mind is a big part of education.

My freshman year at Stanford I arrived with no idea what I wanted to study. I took a class on Eastern philosophy, a seminar on Dostoyevsky, and what for me was an incredibly challenging math class. I ended up majoring in English and math. Jessica Watkins started as an engineer and switched into Earth science.

Isaiah Berlin famously described two types of thinkers – the fox who knows many things and the hedgehog who knows one big thing. A liberal education aims to give you some of both, the theory being that judgment and citizenship require both mastery and exposure to different ways of thinking.

Second, the premise of a research university is that expertise matters, and that by putting scholars together with undergraduates, everyone benefits. You will learn from faculty who have devoted their entire lives to a field. In turn, you'll ask questions and push the faculty to explain their field and why it matters. The exchange runs in both directions.

All of us on the faculty have experienced this. One of my favorite research projects started when one of my advisees spent his junior summer working for a used car dealership in Tucson, Arizona. The business was fascinating, and we ended up writing a paper about it. I learned a ton and I think he did too. A few years later, he and his classmates started what is by far the most successful used car company in the United States.

Third, there is the experience of the campus. As Dean Shaw described, you're an impressive and wide-ranging class, but that's not why you're here. You're here for who you are going to become, and much of that will be shaped by each other – in dorms, in dining halls, in rehearsal rooms, cheering on Stanford teams, or perhaps occasionally swimming in the fountains.

What I hope you will share and embrace is the distinctive culture of Stanford's campus – the pursuit of excellence, the openness to ideas, and the sense of optimism. At the heart of Stanford's culture is a belief in our ability to work together and solve problems, a belief that the future is something you build rather than something that happens to you.

You, the class of 2030, are arriving at a particularly momentous time, when rapid technological change promises to transform discovery, education, and many aspects of our lives. Even here, in a place which launched the semiconductor industry, modern computer architecture, and the internet age, no one can forecast exactly how it will unfold.

But consider the following. Suppose you were starting with a blank sheet of paper, and asked to design a place to be at the current moment. What attributes would you want? A place with the freedom to explore and adapt. A place with expertise across many disciplines – science, technology, humanities, arts, the social sciences. A place that is forward-looking and problem-solving. So what I can tell you with confidence is that you are in the right place.