Ames, Iowa
Remarks
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you so much. It is a huge honor to be with you on this incredibly important day. Thanks to President [Wendy] Wintersteen, Dean [Benjamin] Withers, Dean [Laura] Jolly, and the distinguished faculty and staff of Iowa State University.
I am personally thrilled to be back in Iowa. Not far from here on a very snowy, very, very cold night in January 2008, in advance of the Iowa Caucus, I went door to door canvassing for then-Senator, upstart presidential candidate Barack Obama. That’s not the important part – I was assigned to canvas that cold, snowy night with a law professor, who was also active then on the Obama campaign. Well, there is something about Iowa, because six months later, I had married my fellow Iowa co-canvasser, and we now have two beautiful children together. So thank you Iowa, thank you.
Huge welcome to the friends, families, and loved ones of the students gathered here today. And most importantly, enormous, heartfelt congratulations to the 2024 graduates of Iowa State University.
Graduates, I know that for you – the high school class of 2020 – for many of you, this day is particularly special. For some of you, I may be the only live, non-Zoom commencement address you’ll ever get – the only commencement, in fact, where you won’t be able to simultaneously surf the internet to try to find better content.
When you started here amidst the pandemic, there was a real question about whether you would get to have the classic experiences that define one’s college years.
Well, the upside, I guess, to that uncertainty is that you likely noticed and appreciated more of the little moments on campus.
The lazy afternoons spent hammocking on central campus. Camping overnight to get prime seats in Cyclone Alley – and losing your voice screaming when Iowa State beat Kansas – go Cyclones!
And of course, being painted head to toe during “Yell Like Hell.”
I am here today to talk about how you can use what you have learned at Iowa State to make change – and I’m here to make the case that there are many different paths to doing so. And many of those paths are not straight paths.
Before I do though, I want to take a moment to thank the people who helped you get here – your families and loved ones, who supported you and lifted you up. Let us give all of these incredible people around you a huge round of applause.
I also want to highlight something that not all of you may know – which is that Iowa State has a long history with the Agency that I’m privileged to lead, that you heard a little bit about, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. As you heard, we work in some 100 countries, we respond to humanitarian crises, support democratic reformers and activists at a time of growing authoritarianism around the world. We help empower women and girls – and particularly help girls get access to education in places where that isn’t easy. We help prevent the spread of disease, and we try to drive economic growth.
Iowa State has long been a really valuable partner in those efforts. Iowa State faculty members are traveling to Kosovo, Europe’s newest country, to provide information technology students with mentoring, career guidance, and research opportunities to prepare them for a growing tech economy. We’re working together with government officials from across sub-Saharan Africa to implement policies that allow local scientists to develop drought-resistant, disease-resistant, and pest-resistant seeds. This is life-saving, life changing work.
For decades, this university and its graduates have been applying its resources, its expertise, and its trademark spirit of innovation to address some of humanity’s most pressing challenges. And that spirit of giving back – of using education to drive progress – is one that, as I understand it, dates back to the very first President of Iowa State University. In his inaugural address in 1869, he called on Iowa State graduates to use the knowledge they gained in Ames to advance what he called “greater work in the world outside” – to “feed the hungry, clothe the naked, restore the sick, and crown each revolving year with plenty.”
Some of you might know already, that you wish to do that “greater work” as he put it, “that greater work in the world outside” – that you wish to devote your lives after ISU to some form of service. But when others hear that call, you might be thinking some version of, “Sure – easy for you to say.”
Maybe you’re worried enough about landing a job, earning a good living, furnishing your first apartment. Or maybe you do want to do something about the world’s challenges – but you’re just overwhelmed by the sheer enormity and complexity of what you read about every day in the press. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, restoring the sick – this is no small feat. The world’s biggest problems are rarely neatly solvable ones. And as we see in the intensive debates and protests on college campuses, pushing for change can be messy, even risky. Figuring out even where to start can feel itself like a full-time job.
Or, you simply might not be drawn to what society often presents as “change-making” – running for seats in Congress, signing petitions, organizing voter registration drives. Maybe you’re more inclined to spend your days in nature, or a research lab, or a restaurant kitchen.
But here’s what I hope I can leave you with today, as you stand on the brink of this next chapter – and that is that each of us, no matter who we are or what we do in our lives, no matter what our perch becomes – each of us can in fact be agents of change.
My own journey began, improbably, while watching a baseball game a very long time ago, in 1989.
When I first moved to this country as a nine-year-old, with thick red hair and an even thicker Dublin accent from Ireland, sports made me feel like I belonged in America. I was a Pittsburgh Pirates fanatic. I prayed for them every night during their magical 1979 World Series run – which was the main reason they came back from being down three-to-one to win the championship, were those prayers.
It is thus, maybe no surprise, that my first dream was to become a sportscaster. Unfortunately, my talent didn’t match my ambition. After writing some truly bad stories for my college newspaper, I did land an internship in the sports department at the CBS affiliate in Atlanta, Georgia. And that was how, on a sweltering June 1989 day, as I was taking notes on an Atlanta Braves-San Diego Padres game to help cut the sports highlights for the evening news, I found myself in a video booth watching the game, yes, but then suddenly seeing broadcast being beamed live from Beijing, China, from a place called Tiananmen Square. Students – many not much older than myself – were gathered in the square, pressuring the Chinese Communist Party to implement democratic reforms. But PRC soldiers advanced on those young people with assault rifles.
Later that week, American newspapers were lined with photos of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square – including one of a man, alone in a ten-lane boulevard, staring down a tank carrying only a pair of plastic shopping bags.
Watching the footage from Tiananmen Square would prove to be a moment of clarity for me – a realization that ordinary people were using whatever power they had, doing whatever they could, to stand up for what they believed in. And watching them, to my surprise, I found myself pulled to try to find ways somehow, someway, to dedicate at least some part of my life to trying to advance the cause of human dignity.
At some point in your life – if it hasn’t happened already – you will probably feel some similar pull – something will jar you and pull you to ask yourself, “What can I do? What could I do to be of use?”
Maybe you will be catalyzed by a book you read, or a documentary you come across, or a sermon you hear, or a friend's challenges right up close. Maybe it will come when the world’s crises come knocking on your door – when Canadian wildfires darken the skies above campus, for instance, or when a virus born ten thousand miles away shuts down businesses and classrooms right here in Ames.
Maybe it will stem from witnessing injustice at home or abroad. Maybe it will come from places you can't even conceive of right now.
But what do you do with these feelings? How do you avoid simply turning away from forces that you feel you can’t control? How do you parlay sometimes intense emotions into something impactful, and enduring?
My path to answering those questions, as you heard, was to become a war correspondent, then an activist, and then a government official. And I’m incredibly fortunate – I was so lucky to build the career that I have. It has led me to the White House as an advisor to President Obama, to the halls of the United Nations as UN Ambassador, and now in this job, to cities and communities on five continents as the head of USAID.
But I am not here to tell you, necessarily, to drop all of your plans, to try to change your career path to join the government or start or join a non-profit. Although, to be clear, USAID is hiring. And we desperately need young people like you in public service – so check out our website USAID.gov.
But you don't have to change whatever the path is that you have carved for yourself, however tentative it may be.
You've worked hard to define the options in the way that you have defined them. You don't have to turn away from the things you love. You just have to keep looking for opportunities to keep your eyes and your ears open in whatever you do. How can you use your skills, irrespective of your line of work for positive change – to do what ISU’s first President called, “the greater work in the world outside.”
Take a legendary son of Iowa State, George Washington Carver – whose love of botany brought him right here to Ames in 1890 as the university’s first Black student. Born into slavery, his lived experience gave him personal insight into the challenges facing freed slaves – many of whom became sharecroppers in the wake of the Civil War. So he used his ISU education to help sharecroppers increase their incomes by diversifying from cotton to crops like wheat, peanuts, and soybeans. And he helped develop other products from these crops, like flour or ink or soap, that those communities could make and sell. And his impact lives on, even today. And this is an amazing coincidence – just last week, I toured the largest factory in the world that produces something called Ready-to-Use Therapeutic food, which is a paste made out of peanuts that can bring a starving child back from the edge of death. And there are far too many starving kids out there in the world today. Inside the factory, three hours south of Atlanta, Georgia, hung an image of ISU’s own George Washington Carver – a prolific peanut innovator.
Maybe you’re not a botanist, of course, maybe you’re a budding chef – like some of the award-winning culinary geniuses on campus, like the the CYentists – that’s spelled C-Y, like all things seem to be. The CYentists who spent the last few weeks creating a Japanese-inspired pork loin with red wine and miso that placed first in the Iowa Pork Producers’ Association’s annual cooking contest. The CYentists help us see food not just as sustenance, but as art – something that can cross borders and bridge cultures, and inspire we-humans to do the same.
That idea, in fact, powered the career of another award-winning chef named José Andrés, who some of you may have heard of, José Andrés, his empire includes 31 restaurants and two Michelin stars. But José’s career in the world’s best restaurants also showed him how chefs can be key players in humanitarian response. When disaster strikes, they can prepare ingredients and organize kitchens quickly. They can cook large amounts of really tasty food efficiently. And they are quick studies in new dishes and techniques – allowing them to meet people in crisis with authentic tastes of home.
So José started an organization called World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that for fourteen years has provided hot meals to displaced communities – from Houston to Haiti, Tennessee to the country of Turkey, Ukraine to Armenia, to Gaza. Not even a month after Israeli air strikes killed seven of their aid workers, in fact, World Central Kitchen has resumed operations in Gaza – a powerful refusal, in José Andrés’ own words, to “stand by while so many people are desperate for the essentials of life.”
So individuals, whoever we are, can use their unique skills, whatever they are, to create change in unexpected ways. But what I have seen at USAID is that the really transformative change happens when these change agents join forces. When government officials and philanthropists work hand in hand with the private sector. When public policy experts and politicians collaborate with data experts and computer scientists.
You all are no stranger to weather disasters here in the midwest – but did you know that as a data science major, you can help communities prepare for them? As the climate crisis made natural disasters stronger and more frequent, data scientists at NASA worked with USAID to create something called SERVIR, which uses satellite imagery and real-time data to predict everything from floods, to forest fires, to attacks from crop-destroying locusts. And long term, SERVIR’s data can help predict crop yields in years of drought, or improve access to air quality information in remote, mountainous communities.
Maybe you’re a bioinformatics major, using computer software to track plant genes – well, your skills can help the poorest farmers in South Asia earn a living even with limited resources. USAID is working with Kansas State University to sequence the genes in more than 74,000 wheat varieties growing across Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan – identifying traits that can help wheat grow even amid water and fertilizer scarcities, and paving the way for new seeds that can help farmers efficiently and sustainably boost their yields.
Progress can’t be one person’s job – and in fact, enduring, sustainable progress is the job of everyone, across sectors and industries.
But such progress is only possible when all of us recognize that – when we each realize that in our own fields, with our own passions, using our own talents and skills, we can each be agents of change.
That is exactly what I believe ISU’s first president was imagining 155 years ago during his inaugural address – to see change, that “greater work in the world outside,” as your job. As all of our jobs.
And that is what I, humbly, am asking of you today, as well. Whether you pick up a sign today, don a lab coat tomorrow, or hold the hand of someone in need, I urge you never to lose your awareness of the good that you can do in your slice of the world.
To be an agent of change, wherever you find yourself.
Thank you so much. And congratulations, class of 2024!