President Jonathan Levin's remarks at Opening Convocation

First-years, transfer students, and families: Welcome to Stanford! We're glad you're here. We enjoyed watching you move in this morning. That is 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 some evidence, though it is a small sample. I expect you will hardly 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 if the rooms have changed much. The answer is no. We call it eclectic.

I chose Stanford for its openness and possibility, for its spirit of exploration. It did not disappoint, and that is one of the many reasons I am still here today, and I am 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 at Jessica in orbit, but as often happens with space missions, the launch on Saturday was postponed. I cannot 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 path and was eager to be there for her launch is that it ties into something I have been thinking about all summer. This fall, I will teach a section of COLLEGE 101, a course many of you will take. It will be a new class for me, and different. My own field is economics, so I have usually taught classes on game theory, innovation, or how to design markets. COLLEGE 101 looks at the role of education in preparing you to live a good life.

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

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

Many of these readings ask what education should look like, or share personal stories of education, in different times and places. You will discuss them all through the quarter.

The readings raise a question: What is it about a Stanford education that distinguishes it from many other forms of education across 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 and depth in one area. Stanford is different. You are starting a true journey of discovery. You will have the chance to take classes in many subjects, encounter new ideas, and you can 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 a very challenging math class. I ended up majoring in English and math. Jessica Watkins started as an engineer and switched to Earth science.

Isaiah Berlin 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, because judgment and citizenship need both mastery and exposure to different ways of thinking.

Second, the premise of a research university is that expertise matters, and that by bringing scholars together with undergraduates, everyone benefits. You will learn from professors who have devoted their lives to a field. In turn, you will ask questions and urge the professors to explain their work and why it matters. The exchange goes both ways.

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

Third, there is the experience of the campus. As Dean Shaw described, you are an impressive and wide-ranging class, but that is not why you are here. You are 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 Stanford's distinctive campus culture—the pursuit of excellence, the openness to ideas, and the sense of optimism. At the heart of this 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 that 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.