September 23, 2026
As prepared for delivery
Good afternoon. It is my great pleasure to welcome you, the Class of 2030, to the University of Chicago! You come to us from every corner of the nation, with 48 states represented, and from 69 countries around the world. We are so happy that you chose us—you chose to be here!
This university has quite a distinctive reputation, one that is richly deserved. That, too, you chose.
You chose to come to a place known for its dedication to free inquiry and expression. In doing so, you chose not to be in a place of comfort, a place perhaps where everyone mostly agrees and either re-enforces the conventional viewpoint or chooses to stay silent. Rather, you made a different, harder choice. You sought a place famous for its culture of contestation, for its intellectual rigor. A place where you will encounter ideas that you find uncomfortable, ideas that will challenge and perhaps illuminate new areas of understanding. You chose this harder path, one that will be amply rewarded over the course of a lifetime of genuinely seeking truths.
When you chose us, you chose to do the hard work of learning how to think in the deepest liberal arts tradition. You chose a place, where, instead of embarking directly on your preferred major—sprinkled in with a few electives here and there—you will spend a great deal of time learning how to think like a humanist, a social scientist, a mathematician, a biologist, a physical scientist, and artist alike. You will spend time immersed in the study of a civilization so that you can put these many ways of thinking together and see how our conceptions of our own humanity and choices of social organization inform so much of what we do and even who we are.
You made a choice to take a path toward cultivating a life of the mind. Here, we consider this to be the path for forming a Chicago Mind, a path that, for those who actively choose it, for those who honor the required commitments, is filled with delight and joy. A path where every hard-earned moment of growth and achievement is met in community—with this community. We are so glad you are here.
Indeed, we chose you too, because we could see that you are exactly the kind of person who seeks to build a life based on the love of knowledge; the kind of person who will push for the highest level of thinking and debate while being kind and seeking to enrich the lives of others around you as they too develop this lifetime love of knowledge.
Today, I chose to start my address with the theme of the choice you have made—and the choices you will make—because I want to recognize the power of your agency. Consider the word “agency.” It comes from the Medieval Latin agentia, derived from the Latin agere, meaning "to do, to act, to drive, or to set in motion." Agency is embodied by something that acts, rather than something that is merely acted upon. You certainly have modeled agency in coming here. And in the coming years, you will develop the deeper agency of a human being who is well equipped to weigh evidence and consequence, engage in moral reasoning, and find inspiration in the witness of beauty.
Of course, today: the cousin of agency, “agents,” appears commonly in the nonhuman form of AI agents, of the tools that you can unleash to do things for you.
These are powerful tools that have already enabled stunning discoveries, and in the coming years, your generation stands to push the boundaries of human knowledge and understanding even further with them. But make no mistake. You are and will remain the true agents of human knowledge.
What do the advent of these tools of so-called machine learning and artificial intelligence mean for your education? What choice must you make as a student here? Your faculty, Chicago Minds every one, have thought hard about this and debated it vigorously in true UChicago fashion. When faced with such a profound question, they sought firm ground in foundational principles, and they have articulated for you a clear way for you to think about it and make the right choice. An early and persistent goal of ours, a hallmark of your education here, will be that you should learn to be ethical, skeptical, and ambitious about the role of AI in your education and your lives. A goal for us is that you will learn to be equally adept at thinking without machines as thinking with them. A goal for us is that you will choose this path and not just follow it.
In the early sequences of the humanities and in the social sciences core, reading and discussion-based classes will insist that you take on the hard work of making your own mind strong first-and-foremost.
Indeed, the hardest part of this, the part you will benefit the most from, will be when you actively choose to learn to write for yourself, without the aid of a machine. I promise you, you will be amply supported and challenged by the dialogue and community of your classroom in learning to formulate your own thoughts and share them with others through your writings. The foundations of knowing and understanding are best built layer by layer, without shortcut. This is to learn to think without machines.
In this way, you will have begun to form a Chicago Mind, just as the minds of the generations that have preceded you have.
But, your generation is unlike any that came before you. We are making powerful machines available to you as aids in your thinking, and we will educate you in how to bring the computational lens of thought to your studies and thinking.
It is our duty to you, and our joy as well, to ensure that your education is responsive to these developments—so that you are equipped to think with machines ambitiously. To be equipped to take these tools and advance ideas and discovery to the benefit of human flourishing.
When you leave this place, having chosen this path, you will have superpowers of the mind. You will have cultivated a Chicago Mind with the aid of our ethos of free expression, our rich tradition of intellectual rigor, our truly excellent Core, and the myriad of topics and research activities that will be open to you as you advance further. To this, together, we will have forged your path of learning how to think without machines and how to think with them. It will be my honor just a few years from now when you are graduating to stand before you and welcome you to the community of educated persons.
Once again, welcome to the University of Chicago!