The President's Remarks
To the Class of 2023:
I want to congratulate all of you here today, not only as graduates but also as pioneers. Pioneers are characterized by vision, courage, persistence, and leadership. As we celebrate your achievements, however, it is important also to recognize how your success was nurtured along the way by parents, teachers, mentors, and friends. They deserve the first line of thanks.
But why are you pioneers?
“There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worthwhile,” said Alfred P. Sloan, former chairman of General Motors and the original visionary for GMI, “especially when it is new and different.”
You, the Class of 2023, can certainly lay claim to perseverance and resilience, having overcome so many obstacles. But you are also pioneers because you are of a new time—a time not of hanging on but of pushing on. A time of looking ahead to the future, now rushing at us after being temporarily paused.
You are pioneers because you are Kettering’s first graduates in these forwardlooking times—the first post-Boldly Forward Campaign class, the first post-Learning Commons class. You were at Kettering when we took off our masks and again turned our faces to the sun.
You are pioneers in a new world because you are setting sail upstream into a future of constant transformation, where the automotive industry has become the mobility industry, machines have become technology, and information has broken out of its channels to flood every inch of the planet. Today, once discreet disciplines are broad platforms where they unite in once-unimaginable combinations.
This future awaits you to confront it, mold it, and define it. And you are fully prepared to do so. You need only to trust yourselves and to commit to a pioneering mindset that can future-proof your years to come. Keep exploring, seek new adventures, and don’t settle for complacency.
Congratulations to all of you for arriving at this day. And thank you for giving us the opportunity to mentor you a small part of the way. Now, go create the future, for you are Kettering Built.
Dr. Robert K. McMahan, President, Kettering University