September 11, 2026

I am here because I believe higher education should inspire students to use their imaginations for self and society. Students find their way in life, see their place and value among disparate beliefs and thoughts. Knowing what others know. Valuing what others bring. Doing what is only possible with others.

Westminster University is so much more than the step toward a first job; here, all students—undergraduate, graduate, and professional—develop personal meaning and build the capacity to use their talents for the common good.

Chair Chiaro, Mayor Mendenhall, President Dobkin, President Morgan, community and business leaders, thank you for participating in this occasion with me today. Thank you for the confidence you have placed in me and for the opportunity to become part of Westminster’s story.

I want to recognize the leaders who have guided Westminster before me. One of the privileges of joining a university with a history stretching back more than 150 years is knowing that none of us begins with a blank page. We inherit the work of others and, for a time, become its stewards.

In particular, I thank President Dobkin for her visionary, strategic, and steady leadership these past 8 years. Your tenure included remarkable successes and has ensured that Westminster is ready for its next chapter. I am honored to carry forward and build upon what you put in place.

I have enormous respect for the Westminster community: faculty and staff, students and alumni, and the many friends and supporters. You sustain the intellectual life and daily operations that make Westminster the close, caring community that it is.

I thank our neighbors here in Sugar House and throughout Salt Lake City. The welcome I’ve received has reminded me that place is a story that comes to life and holds meaning through people… the way we greet, carry ourselves, and build community together.

I am rejoining this dynamic, evolving Utah community, eager to work alongside others, to ensure that we all have a place and an opportunity to thrive.

Scott, thank you… for your support, unique perspectives, and dry humor, and for reminding me to pay attention to my gait—to run slowly with ease… because this is the way to enjoy a long run.

Because we find ourselves at an institution of education, I want to say a few words about teachers. My mother—whose expansive intellectual and cultural curiosity and whose tenacity of spirit—taught me to develop some of the same in myself.

Of the same lineage, I thank Uncle Jimmy, who grounded my childhood in the rewards of farm work. He taught me to drive the tractor at thirteen, a pick-up truck at fourteen, to cinch up a saddle, and properly muck out the stalls. Of course, I eventually realized that this teaching meant he didn’t have to mow the back fields himself. I learned from an early age that physical labor and intellectual labor go hand in hand. When our bodies are moving, our minds move too.

To my sister, Anna, for the letters I received as a teenager while you traveled the world. You modeled independence and exploration, and I was inspired to follow.

Lori, my cousin, your wisdom about people and life continues to anchor me.

And, the final teacher to mention today is my son, Adrian.

I’ve said this and will say it again: there is no version of the world in which I am me without you.

Since your earliest days, I’ve learned by watching you. Your calm temperament. Your non-judgmental nature. More recently, your perspectives on people, power the economy and culture have helped shaped my way of seeing the world. You continue to remind me that learning is not linear.

This dynamic is why I am so grateful to be in education, because educational spaces drive intergenerational relationships. Students are learners but they are also important teachers.

These spaces ask us to remain open to being changed by what and by whom we encounter, and this is why I felt it important to take the time to thank all of you-from Ohio, Kansas, Virginia, Oregon, Venezuela and Argentina. I am so fortunate. You have shaped the way I see the world in ways you cannot know.

That has been one of the great gifts of having formally studied ecology because an ecologist learns quickly that nothing meaningful can be understood in isolation. An inauguration appears to celebrate one person, but no one arrives alone. And no one flourishes alone.

While studying as an undergraduate in Kenya, I first encountered Ubuntu, a philosophy rooted in African Bantu cultures and often translated as “I am because we are.” My later work in rural Democratic Republic of Congo, where four cultures lived communally, deepened my understanding of the relational life that Ubuntu describes. Ubuntu teaches that we do not merely enter relationships. Relationships bring us into being.

It is clear to me that Westminster has long embraced this understanding. I experienced it personally when I served as an adjunct professor here many years ago. It continues to be the university’s enduring strength, and perhaps the first element of what people mean when they say the Westminster Way.

Westminster has an unusual advantage: its human scale. We are an intentionally sized university in a growing city with a plurality of cultures, races, religions, and languages. Our scale allows students to be known. And being known matters. We learn differently when someone believes in our possibilities and cares whether we succeed.

But being known is only part of it. Relationship is not merely affirmation. Other people complicate our thinking, reveal the limits of our perspective, and help us see what we could not see alone.

Westminster’s human scale makes it difficult to simply scroll past and ignore what is uncomfortable. Here students practice living and learning in community, and a community depends upon listening. And listening is hard. Real listening requires us to leave open the possibility that another person may tell us something we need to hear. People who see things differently help us examine our assumptions, correct our errors, and sometimes change our minds.

This matters, particularly in a democratic society, because community wellness depends on our capacity to disagree seriously without losing one another, to solve collective problems, and to live together joyfully.

Students today are coming to us keenly aware of the many challenges in our society. They’re asking to be taken seriously, to be included, and respected for their ideas. They are rightfully demanding an education born from real, sustained relationships with faculty and staff. They expect Westminster to help them not just with a first job, but to develop themselves for lives of continued professional and personal growth in a world that promises to be increasingly complex and dynamic.

If our purpose is to help students flourish—not along, but in relationship—then we have to ask what kind of education makes that possible.

Years ago, I encountered a deceptively simple question posed by the environmental thinker David Orr: What is education for? Orr warned that “education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom.” He concluded, “it is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.” That phrase has stayed with me: education of a certain kind. Orr’s question is not only about what we teach. It is about the kinds of people, relationships, and communities our teaching helps bring into being.

As Westminster begins its next 150 years, that question becomes ours: What kind of education does this moment require?

We are living at a time when accelerating human demand, inequitable patterns of consumption, and the limits of natural systems are colliding. Training students for a fixed set of workforce skills is not sufficient. Our roles as educators must continue to adapt. The world does not present its most urgent problems one discipline at a time, and our education cannot either. While, of course, we will teach critical thinking, close reading, algebra and calculus, science, history, dance, painting and music, it is not enough for educational institutions to fall back on, nor scale up, traditional models.

At Westminster, having just celebrated our sesquicentennial, we are looking forward. In 2030, 2040, and again 2050, our students will inhabit a hotter and more ecologically uncertain world. They will live within increasingly diverse societies, need to leverage rapidly changing technologies, and become contributors to economic systems whose consequences cross every border.

Westminster will respond by continuing to provide spaces for research, both basic and applied, and we’ll still deliver skills-based learning that allows young adults to immediately join the workforce. Yet we will do more by entering into deeper relationship with one another, melding our disciplines, ideologies and individual egos, in order to graduate students who have the tools and the strength of character to solve the future’s problems. At Westminster, we are committed to futures thinking and hold an unwavering belief in the power of human intelligence.

This integrative work will carry us beyond campus because we exist in relationship with our city and surrounding communities, including those found in the mountains, rivers, and lakes. We will send our students into the world, beyond the Wasatch Front, with the confidence and ability to look closely, to listen well, and then do something useful. To think and to act.

This is how we practice hope because hope does not require certainty about the outcome. It requires a conviction that our actions still matter. Hope takes the form of refusing to look or step away: leading difficult conversations, working through a rugged mathematics problem, practicing the song 17 more times. What holds a community together is not the work of a heroic individual. It is people showing up, again and again, because some things simply need doing. The grass must be cut, stalls mucked, animals fed. Hope is caring for others, repairing what has broken, and returning the next day.

Again, this ethic of Ubuntu. I am because we are. I think I now understand what the African elite runners mean when they say that the way they run far and fast is through their communal daily practice of running slowly. If you watch them, you see them together, going through their drills, supporting one another. They will tell you this is their secret to being worldclass athletes.

Education at Westminster is worldclass because we too live and study communally in ways that allow us to be committed to one another’s practice.

Just last week, on this very plaza, students were celebrating this campus’ diversity by advertising their various clubs—including sports, chess, poetry, sustainability, black culture, social justice and many more. As I stopped at the tables, I was told, over and over, all are welcome. Forming and sustaining clubs is a practice in communal leadership.

In thinking about an education of a certain kind, our call, no rather… our promise, at Westminster is that we will continue to foster the conditions wherein future leaders—be they professional, civic, business, or spiritual—choose to study here because they know they will be expected to grow intellectually while simultaneously practicing ways of being that allow them to fulfill their communal responsibilities for the rest of their lives.

Leadership, as I understand it, means tending the conditions through which the community can bring forth its shared future. Extending the idea of Ubuntu, then, I say: I lead well if we lead well.

In the years ahead, our work is to preserve the closeness and care that distinguish Westminster while opening our doors more widely and extending our education even more students. The question I pose is—What will we bring forth in one another now so that those who come inherit a more generous, courageous, and fully human university?

Let’s start today. Let us pay attention to, and care for one another and to the world around us. Let us define the work that is ours to do, and do it well, together. I am deeply honored to serve as Westminster University’s twentieth president, and profoundly grateful to become this work with you.