Knox College Commencement Speech - Illinois Governor JB Pritzker

Good morning, Knox College. I am truly honored to be standing before you today at one of the jewels of Illinois’s higher education system. I want to thank President McGadney and the graduating class of 2025 for your kind invitation.

I want to acknowledge my dear friend and fellow honorary degree recipient, Theaster Gates. I also want to offer a heartfelt congratulations to Mary Kent Knight – a beloved member of the Knox community.

Finally, I want to thank my friend, our Illinois Senate President Don Harmon – a proud Knox College graduate who didn’t say outright that my legislative agenda would be in peril if I didn’t accept your invitation to speak today – but I can read between the lines as well as anyone. On a serious note, every Knox College graduate should take pride in President Harmon’s Prairie Fire leadership of this state.

This is the second time I’ve had the opportunity to deliver a commencement speech as Governor. The first time was at Northwestern two years ago. I wrote a whole speech about how everything you needed to know in life you could find in old episodes of “The Office.” Just before I was set to deliver the speech, I found told that Steve Carrell was going to attend the commencement – because his daughter was graduating from Northwestern that day.

So, I thought maybe for my second commencement speech I could find a situation that was a little less pressure filled. But then I found out that Knox College hosts graduation on the site of one of the most storied episodes in perhaps one of the most famous oratory battles of all time, and at an institution where the most popular undergraduate degree is “creative writing.” I’m just hoping your professors don’t decide to grade me afterward.

All of that makes this honor a little bit like being asked to host the Oscars – an enormous chance to fail spectacularly.
The problem with a commencement speech is that everyone in the audience already knows how it ends. Everything has already been done. Everything that could be said, has been said by someone, somewhere. Often delivered in the most boring manner possible.

And outside. In the sun. Wearing a robe. And a funny little hat.

I will confess though, as a dad, I love giving commencement speeches, because it gives me an opportunity to do what dads love to do most – dispense advice to a completely captive audience.

So, I thought I would start there – with some solid dad advice. It is, after all, the most valuable kind you’ll get. Advice you can actually really use in life. Advice that takes the complexities of the modern world and boils them down to the most important things.

First piece of advice: You don’t need to subscribe to every single streaming service.

Frankly, if you have Netflix, Apple Plus, and whatever HBO is calling itself these days you are mostly covered. If you want to mix in a Hulu or a Disney plus, I’m not going to fight you. But I have found that if you have access to at least one good post-apolocyliptic drama, plus one hilarious but heartwarming comedy — and either one of the two documentaries made about the Fyre Festival, all your entertainment needs will be fulfilled.

Second piece of advice — and this one is serious: Please turn off all the lights when you leave a room. Speaking on behalf of all dads, we have moved into an era of egregious lighting. And frankly – it’s killing us Fathers. You don’t need an overhead light, a table lamp AND a ring light all shining on you for a social media post. Maybe maintain some mystery. Remember that it’s always darkest before the dawn. And dawn comes with natural light so there is no need to run up the electricity bill.

Third, we need you to put air in your tires. I know that when that little tire light comes on on your dashboard you view it the same way Elon Musk views the United States Constitution, as a mere suggestion.

But if you are not putting air in your tires before the winter then you are going to end up like Elon – with a car that no one wants to drive.

I am somewhat inclined to end this speech there because frankly if you take my Dad Advice and budget your streaming services, turn off the lights and put air in your tires – you will save money, preserve the environment, and get everywhere you need to go. I’m not sure I can offer any better advice than that.

But you spent a lot of time and money to get here, so I understand that my obligations as your commencement speaker must extend to some perhaps more sage advice. After all, we are sending you out into a world that is vastly crazier than it has any right to be. I’m sorry for that.

But sometime just after the Chicago Cubs won their first world series in 108 years, things on this planet took a strange turn. We threw the timeline off in the multiverse, and I’m not sure we ever got it back.

It makes dispensing good advice especially hard. When the ground is shifting beneath you, so are the guardrails that used to keep us stable — and the perspective we rely on to understand the world around us.

When you can’t hold onto a guardrail and you can’t trust your perspective, then you have to seek truth that predates the current fashion.

So that’s what I am going to endeavor to do today – dispense some unfashionable truth.

Let’s start with this. The most critical thing I’ve learned in my 60 years on this planet and my six years as Governor, is that there’s almost nothing more important in life than showing up.

Show up for your nephew’s birthday party and your cousin’s wedding. Show up to the dance recitals of your second nieces and the talent shows of your best friend’s son. When someone you love gets an award, even if it’s for best community recycler or most prolific gardener, be in the front row cheering them on.

Never cancel plans on an old friend. Always leave a meeting with your boss if your grandmother is calling. Never ever ever tell a child you are going to be somewhere you don’t intend to be.

Show up to the funerals – all of them. I know you will be at the memorials of the people you love – that’s as much for yourself as for your family. But the question you should ask when someone dies is: did someone I love, love them? Does someone who has shown me kindness in this world, care that this person is gone? Go to those funerals - your distant great Aunt, your coworker’s mom, your neighbor’s son.

When you are governor, you attend countless funerals for strangers.

Early in my first term, an Illinois state trooper died in a terrible traffic accident. He left behind a wife and two young children. I didn’t know the officer at all, but the family asked if I would deliver a eulogy at the funeral. Of course, I said yes – I understood the request was not about ME but instead about the office I represent – about honoring the trooper’s service to his state and country.

It’s hard to write a eulogy for someone you don’t know. But I realized there was something I did know about – I also lost a parent to a car crash when I was very young. I knew what that intense shock and despair was like – and I also knew that grief is like standing in a room with a gigantic balloon, one that hurts every time you touch it. But over time, the balloon loses air. Moving — Breathing — gets easier, until eventually you go long days where you never touch the balloon at all.
I knew I could look that state trooper’s family in the eye, on the most terrible day of their lives and offer them something I knew I could give – hope that one day the memory of their loved one’s life would land with joy — more powerfully than the pain of their death.

In a world where TikTok and Instagram tells you to be selfish with your schedule, I am telling you: Be generous with your time. Showing up is a unique and meaningful thing only you can do. It’s a gift that tells someone you love – there is nothing more important to me right now than being here with you.

Don’t believe me? Let me prove it to you. Graduates – stand up and turn around.

Go ahead and do it. I’m your commencement speaker you must do what I say today.

I want you to look out on this crowd and see all the people who showed up for you. All the parents and grandparents and siblings and aunts and uncles and friends. Think about how far they drove or flew to be here. Think about the hours they are willing to sit and listen to people like me just to see you walk across a stage and grab a diploma.

OK you can sit down now.

Now think about all the times these people showed up for you over the years. Think about the baseball games and the soccer matches and the band practices and the high school plays. Think about the times your mother ran to the store past nine pm because you forgot to tell her about your solar system diorama due the next day. Think about your dad searching into the far reaches of his brain to try and remember trigonometry. I hate to break it to you but your magic act in the middle school talent show was not as captivating as they made it seem.

But they were there. More often than was probably easy for them.

They showed up.

Because showing up is a great act of love. Maybe the best act of love.
It’s become increasingly rare in this world – which makes it even more special. And long after everything else in your life falls away, you will remember the times people showed up for you. Trust me. I know your hands are probably itching to grab your diploma today.

And I’m sure graduating from a renowned institution of higher learning has you feeling good about your handle on this world.

Maybe you have a little more confidence in your step today than there was yesterday.

I want you to have confidence. But I also want you to have doubt.

The truth is – nowadays, people have become far too certain of what they know and far too unwilling to admit to what they don’t know.

I wish I had a list of all the things I was absolutely certain of since I was elected Governor. In 2019, I was certain that the hardest challenge I would face was passing a balanced state budget for a state that hadn’t done that for a quarter century. In early 2020, I was pretty sure the strange flu going around would pass out of the news as quickly as it came into it. In 2024, I was certain that Joe Biden was going to be the Democratic nominee for President.

In a world like the one we live in today, we NEED confidence just to get up every day, put our pants on and go out and greet the uncertainty that awaits us. But we need doubt to survive in it.

Because doubt makes us curious. Doubt keeps us humble. Doubt makes us seek when it would be so much easier to sit idle.

Doubt prompts us to ask good questions. Questions like: am I looking at ALL the facts or just the ones I want to see?

Should I rely solely on nervous first impressions or give a second date a chance? Should I trust everything my uncle posts on Facebook? Is it a good idea to accept a jumbo jet from a foreign country that would very much like to spy on us?

One thing I can tell you with absolute certainty is that when I go into a room as the Governor of the fifth largest state in the country, it’s not the person who speaks with absolute assuredness from beginning to end who impresses me the most. It’s the person who has the capacity to change their opinion based on new information.

All our great innovations in technology and thinking, all the imagination that drove us from the ocean to the land to the cave to the farm to the city, all our capacity for kindness and empathy is found in the space between doubt and confidence. If you can summon the bravery to find that balance, then you will unlock the potential to earn your place in posterity.

I had a few invitations to deliver commencement speeches this year.

But I wanted to come to Knox College because no place in America feels more suitable to this moment.

This college was established in 1837 in rural Illinois on the idea that slavery should be opposed “in all its forms – physical, spiritual, intellectual” and the notion that all people, regardless of race, sex or means, have the right to an education.

Ignore the coastal institutions who love to brag about their pedigree and history. You will hold a diploma from a college that outshines them in a heritage that is exceedingly rare – a community built around the concept that our lives should be lived everyday… with courage.

When we tell the stories of history, we often excuse the atrocities of our ancestors by suggesting that they were merely acting on what was popular at the time. Because we understand in our core, whether we want to admit it or not, how much easier it is to live a life that chases popularity rather than courage.

Occasionally we are confronted with stories, like the founding of Knox College, where some person or some group of people chose the unpopular, but morally courageous path. And we laud those stories as noble oddities, to be celebrated as something righteous, but rare.

Here’s the problem with that perspective, when we lionize a virtue like bravery - when we treat it like the exception, rather than the expectation – when courage is awed rather than assumed – then we build a world where the default is cowardice.
When we do the opposite, when we build a community like the one right here, where from the very start 188 years ago you made a stiff steel spine of courage the cornerstone of your campus – well then something truly great is possible.

I know that the story of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas’s very famous fifth debate on the grounds we stand on today has been told a thousand times from this very podium. I’m not going to tell it again.

But I am going to offer a perspective that perhaps casts a new light on the inheritance this diploma confers upon you today.
In the two weeks between the fourth Lincoln Douglas debate at Charleston and the fifth at Galesburg, Lincoln gave speeches in Danville, Urbana, Jacksonville, Winchester, Pittsfield, Metamora, Pekin, and Sullivan. Trust me, as a candidate, even in the modern era with planes and automobiles, that’s a lot.

The President of Illinois College would later claim that he said to Lincoln during this period: You must be having a weary time. Lincoln responded: I am, and if it were not for one thing I would retire from the contest, I know that if Mr. Douglas’ doctrine prevails it will not be fifteen years before Illinois itself will be a slave state.

Lincoln was exhausted by the time he got here to Galesburg. The crowds at the previous debates had all favored the more popular Douglas. Storms the day before, had turned the weather cold and windy. It would have been the most understandable thing in the world if he found his spirits sagging that day.

I think about the doubt he must have carried in his heart. I think about the fact that he showed up anyway.

And I think about what must it have been like for Abraham Lincoln, worn and world weary, to step through the window of Old Main, look out on this campus and see almost twenty thousand people cheering him on under a banner that read “Abe Lincoln – the Champion of Freedom.”

What courage did this community inspire in him? What fear did your predecessors help him leave behind? Only Lincoln himself has the answer to those questions, but I don’t think it was a coincidence that it was here, at Knox College, that our 16th President made the moral case for the opposition to slavery for the very first time.

Knox College expected Abraham Lincoln to be brave. And so he was. That is the legacy you take out into the world today.
To be in public office right now is to constantly ask yourself, how do I make sure I’m standing on the right side of history. There is a simple answer. The wrong side of history will always tell you to be afraid.

The right side of history will always expect you to be brave.

Expect bravery of the community around you, and bravery will show up. Expect fear and fear will rule the day.

I expect you to be brave, graduates. I expect you to go out into this world with courage. I expect you to be true to the legacy of the very earth beneath you today.

And I expect you — to expect the same of the people who would endeavor to lead this country.

Congratulations!