President’s Message

While it’s common to note that commencement ceremonies mark a beginning for students and their families rather than an end, this spring’s celebration also marked the start of what I hope is a new tradition for our community. I also hope it offers a small spark for all of us to re-imagine and re-engage with what it means to be part of the University of Rochester.

We celebrated a special class of students this spring, a cohort who endured two years of a global pandemic that upended nearly everything about their lives and learning. Our students—and the entire community who worked with them, supported them, and kept them safe and healthy—were undaunted by the challenges. Unified by our remarkable spirit of Meliora, we found new ways to succeed as learners, scholars, performers, teachers, clinicians, and colleagues.

We deserved a special day to celebrate, not only to mark our resilience in a challenging time, but also to appreciate our singular strengths as an institution.

So, on Friday, May 13, we brought together more than 2,000 graduating students, along with more than 6,000 family members, friends, faculty, and staff, for a truly University-wide commencement—the first all-unit spring celebration in decades.

On a sun-filled spring day in Edwin Fauver Stadium at the Brian F. Prince Athletic Complex, we celebrated the Class of 2022 and the achievements of our 4,000 degree recipients across all disciplines, programs, and academic units. It was a historic day of connection for our University.

Beyond campus, about 5,000 people in 88 countries tuned into a livestream broadcast of the ceremony hosted on the University Commencement website.

As someone who has participated in many such ceremonies during my academic life and who has watched dozens of commencements from the stands as a proud relative, I can say that it was an inspiring event, filled with energy, insightful advice, and plain old joy.

It was a wonderful way to introduce the newest members of Rochester’s remarkable alumni community.

As I said in my remarks during the ceremony, the members of the Class of 2022 make up a special group of students, and they are going to do remarkable things in their lives.

I hope they speak with great pride about their affiliation with the University and that they stay connected with the University community in one way or another over their lifetimes. I know we will be proud of them.

Those deeply felt ties to one another—our sense of being part of “One University”—is fundamental to our sense of success as an institution and key to our identity as one of the great research universities in the United States. One of the reasons we returned to an all-University commencement was to celebrate our connections across schools and disciplines and to accelerate our commitment to Rochester as a unifying idea, one in which we can take great pride and that we can build upon together.

Rochester is well known for our signature schools and academic programs that have built worldwide reputations of academic excellence. But we’re also known as a community that willingly breaks down walls between disciplines to work together to transform areas of research, technology, and avenues of discovery. We can all be proud of that too.

In a visit to Rochester this spring, National Science Foundation Director Sethuraman Panchanathan recognized that very quality of the University, describing us as a “phenomenal place of innovation” for our ability to advance scientific research by working across disciplines and approaching challenges in novel ways.

As we embark on a new strategic plan, one of our guiding principles will be to further emphasize the potential and the power that comes from a community working together. Collectively, we can transform the experiences of students, faculty, staff, and alumni and find innovative ways to demonstrate how our work as a University helps make the world ever better.

We owe a great debt to interim Provost Sarah Peyre for leading that effort over the past year, and we look forward to its continuation under our new Provost David Figlio, who officially joins us in July.

Just like the graduates in the Class of 2022, we have a remarkable future ahead of us as an institution and as a community. Far from marking the end of a journey, this spring’s University-wide commencement marked the beginning of an extraordinary time in the life of the University of Rochester, one in which we all can share.

Meliora!

Contact President Mangelsdorf at sarah (dot) mangelsdorf (at) rochester (dot) edu. Follow her on Instagram.