UF President Donald W. Landry, MD, PhD, delivered the keynote address at the Fall 2025 Doctoral Commencement Ceremony

Welcome vice presidents, deans and faculty. 

Welcome proud families and joyous friends. 

Welcome triumphant graduates.

The University of Florida is a colossal enterprise with over 60,000 students on a single 2000-acre campus. Each year we graduate over 14,000 thousand across fall, spring and summer terms. We have five separate commencements for this fall term for over 4,000 students, all over 2 days.

But the exercise of this moment, your exercise is the prized jewel in the crown of the University of Florida, as in that of every R1 university. This exercise honors those who have completed the highest and most demanding course of study and have completed original liberal arts scholarship or science, technology, engineering or mathematics research, scholarship and research of such distinction that we may now admit you to the society of scholars; we may now welcome you to our shared pursuit of new knowledge, a transcendent endeavor that provides the rational basis for our hope for the future, our hope for those in our communities, this state, our nation and generations to follow.

Your paths to this moment have surely varied in detail among you. But some common themes would just as surely recur in your individual narratives: moments of doubt, starts that suddenly seem dead ends, fraught discussions about which leads to follow…or abandon, perhaps even moments of desperation with your whole enterprise in doubt.

But you are those with talent, perhaps even genius among you, who embraced academic excellence as the only path forward as you groped toward truth, who recognized that truth in the academy is provisional and always subject to new disconfirming data and new insights who did not flinch from the contest of ideas that leads to truth. 

You are those who dared to enter the arena, risk years of your lives, persevere despite repeated adversity, fight off the doubts, and regroup after frank failure and who learned to solve your own problems thereby emerging on the other side of the torrent of challenge to be expected whenever original scholarship, original research is the goal.

I take you back to the struggle only to let your family and friends appreciate all the more what you have accomplished and how truly extraordinary you are.

So says the poet: 

“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” 

Perhaps that exploration is your life. 

Perhaps it is your life of faith. 

Perhaps it is your life of learning that brought you to the University of Florida and now sends you out into the world.

You may well find that this place and your time in it only grows in detail and significance and meaning. You may in this ending increase your knowledge, in the sense of new appreciation, for this magnificent university.

Consider that your University, well into its second century, is a land-grant institution founded under a charter to meet the practical educational needs of the people of the State of Florida. 

This land-grant ethos to serve the people of Florida endures at the University of Florida today. 

This ethos endures in the compassionate care of the UF Health hospital system.

This ethos endures in IFAS – the storied Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences – with research and education across all 67 counties of the state. 

This ethos is even seen to endure in the disposition of our AI supercomputer HiPerGator – not its personality but rather how it has been deployed! 

HiPerGator came to us through the good offices of UF alum Chris Malachowsky, co-founder of NVIDIA. 

Chris provided support, NVIDIA provided HiPerGator, and our Governor and legislators provided funding for 100 faculty to pursue AI-based research and AI-focused education across all colleges and divisions of the University of Florida. 

But to what avail, the land-grant ethos? 

We gave HiPerGator access to the universities of the state and all their faculty, access on the very same terms we offer to our own faculty. From whence does the fountain of generosity overflow but from the University of Florida land-grant ethos, the ethos that has quietly nurtured you during your years with us. 

In contradistinction to virtually every other university in this nation, in which a sense of true belonging is reserved for those who have attended the undergraduate college, at the University of Florida all graduates are forever members of Gator Nation and share the pride and feel the loyalty to the school and to each other that is the distinguishing characteristic of those who have immersed themselves in study and fellowship at this university of scholars.

What can we say but Go Gators!

Now, we have celebrated your accomplishments despite turmoil. We have contemplated the unique ethos of the university and the abiding bonds of Gator Nation. But finally, let us consider what will be my closing meditation at every commencement – Why are we really here?

Walker Percy, the novelist-philosopher, tells a telling tale: 

One morning a man looks at a newspaper, turns to the horoscope page, glances down, and begins to read: “You are the model of decisiveness. You analyze problems crisply. You come to terms with complex situations rapidly. Your gut decisions are unerringly true.” 

He pauses and says, “That’s me! That’s definitely me.” 

Then he glances back down, only to realize he’s looked at the wrong sign. 

He now finds his true sign, and he reads, “You are the model of circumspection. You analyze problems with the greatest care. You weigh all the options. You see the risks and the benefits, the rewards and the opportunities. And when you finally decide, your decisions are true.” 

He pulls up from the page once more, and says, “That’s me! That’s definitely me.” 

Later that night, he unpacks a telescope he had purchased the day before. Quickly he assembles it and points it to the heavens toward a disc that he sees. This disc does not twinkle, and as he focuses on it, he sees four little dots distributed in a line of either side of the disc. 

He says to himself, “Does not twinkle, must be a planet. A planet with four moons – it must be Jupiter.” And he is right.

Now Percy asks: How can a man recognize a planet four hundred million miles away that he has never seen before, and yet not recognize himself? 

We cannot recognize ourselves. 

The graduates cannot recognize themselves. 

We know ourselves only in relation to others. 

That is why you have family and friends. 

That is why some of those family and friends are here today – to tell you and to remind you who you are. 

So, our purpose today is not merely to celebrate a completion. 

It is not merely to inaugurate a new beginning. 

It is to tell you who you are. 

I recognize you as persons who have pledged to a life of service, a service to add to the body of knowledge for the benefit of humankind.

Our purpose today is to recognize you as individuals of intellectual power and promise dedicated to the pursuit of new truths. 

Today, I recognize you as scholars.