Commencement Address by Ambassador Susan E. Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, at Stanford University

Imagine the world and what it will be like when one of you comes back a quarter century from now to deliver the commencement address. In 1986, when I graduated, the Soviet Union was bristling with 45,000 nuclear weapons, and the Berlin Wall was impenetrable. Nelson Mandela was clocking his 23rd year in prison in apartheid South Africa. Osama bin Laden was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda didn’t exist.

We’ve seen amazing technological advances. In 1986, only 0.2 percent of the U.S. population had a cell phone, which were bricks about 10 inches long. IBM announced its first laptop, which weighed 12 pounds. Twenty-four-hour cable news was in its infancy.

The face of America has changed too. In 1986, 8 percent of the U.S. population was Hispanic; today, it’s about 15 percent. The number of African Americans serving in Congress has doubled, and the number of women and Latinos has tripled. And, if on my graduation day, someone had told me that I would live to see the first African American president, much less serve in his cabinet, I would have asked them what they were smoking.

So much change has transpired just in my adult lifetime, and you will see so much more in yours. But it doesn’t just happen. Progress is the product of human agency. Things get better because we make them better; and things go wrong when we get too comfortable, when we fail to take risks or seize opportunities. Never trust that the abstract forces of history will end a war, or that luck will cure a disease, or that prayers alone will save a child.

If you want change, you have to make it. If we want progress, we have to drive it. ... - Commencement Address by Ambassador Susan E. Rice, U.S. Permanent ...

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