University of Pennsylvania 2018 Commencement Address by Andrea Mitchell

Imagine you’re in a world where news is delivered by carrier pigeons, then step into the reality of Andrea Mitchell’s 2018 commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania. As a seasoned journalist and an advocate for gender equality, she painted a vivid picture of today’s hectic, high-speed news environment, while also reflecting on her own times as a Penn student.

She stressed on the importance of diversity in media, the responsibility of journalists to question those in power, and the need to navigate contemporary challenges with grace and integrity. What makes her words resonate so strongly today?

Let’s take a journey together to explore the depth of her insights.

Background

In 2018, Andrea Mitchell, a distinguished journalist and correspondent for NBC News, delivered the commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania. Her speech was a compelling mix of personal reflection, professional wisdom, and a call to action for the graduating class, emphasizing the importance of truth, integrity, and responsibility in both journalism and public life. Drawing from her extensive experience in journalism, Mitchell shared insights into the challenges and responsibilities of reporting in an era marked by rapid technological changes and deep political divisions.

Mitchell urged the graduates to remain committed to facts and truth, highlighting the critical role of informed citizenship in sustaining democracy. She stressed the necessity of accountability and the courage to speak truth to power, qualities that are indispensable in both journalism and everyday life. By recounting her journey and the lessons learned throughout her career, she inspired the new graduates to pursue their ambitions with determination and ethical rigor.

Her address at the University of Pennsylvania underscored the significance of resilience and adaptability, encouraging the audience to embrace change and engage with the world around them with an open mind and a steadfast commitment to integrity. Mitchell’s speech not only celebrated the achievements of the graduates but also challenged them to make meaningful contributions to society, equipped with the education and values instilled in them during their time at the university.

Key Takeaways

Here are 4 key takeaways from Andrea Mitchell at UPenn that focus on truth, journalism’s role, integrity, and perseverance:

• Mitchell’s advocacy for diversity and equal representation
• Importance of remaining curious and committed to continuous learning
• Power of pursuing passions amidst challenges
• Journalist’s role in holding those in power accountable

Story

Andrea Mitchell’s narrative unfolds from overcoming a failed swim test to becoming a broadcast journalism icon, embodying resilience and the readiness to seize unforeseen opportunities.

Mitchell’s story underscores the value of determination and openness to chance, linking passion discovery with the vital need for journalistic integrity and active media engagement in democracy.

Dive into her story, a testament to perseverance, the unexpected paths to fulfilling careers, and the unwavering pursuit of integrity in informing society.

Overcoming Personal Challenges

Andrea Mitchell recounts a pivotal moment in her college career that almost prevented her from graduating—a failed swim test—a requirement she hadn’t met. This personal anecdote serves as a metaphor for the unforeseen hurdles one encounters in life. Her journey to overcome this specific challenge, paralleling later professional obstacles, highlights the universal need for resilience.

Mitchell’s story is a vivid reminder that perseverance is crucial not only in fulfilling immediate goals but also in navigating the broader challenges of life and career. Her eventual triumph over this unexpected graduation obstacle mirrors the tenacity required to face and overcome the myriad of challenges that would come her way in the future.

This narrative of personal perseverance underscores the message that facing challenges head-on is essential for growth and achievement. Mitchell’s reflection on her near-miss with graduation illuminates the broader theme of resilience in the face of adversity—a quality that she points out as indispensable in both personal and professional realms. Her story encourages graduates to anticipate obstacles with a readiness to persist and adapt, illustrating that resilience is a cornerstone of success. Through her own experiences, Mitchell exemplifies the importance of steadfastness and the belief in one’s ability to surmount the unexpected challenges that life invariably presents.

The Power of Serendipity and Preparation

In her journey to a distinguished career in broadcast journalism, Andrea Mitchell highlights the role of serendipity, recounting a chance discovery of a college radio station that ultimately led her to her life’s passion. This story accentuates the unpredictable nature of career paths and the transformative potential of remaining open to unforeseen opportunities.

Mitchell’s narrative emphasizes that while life’s path can be unpredictable, readiness and openness to explore new avenues can lead to discovering one’s true calling. Her career, marked by both preparation and the willingness to embrace the unexpected, serves as an inspiring example of how serendipity, coupled with readiness, can shape one’s professional journey in significant ways.

Mitchell’s reflection on her career’s inception points to a deeper message about the confluence of preparation and opportunity. It suggests that while one may not always have control over the opportunities that come their way, being prepared and open to explore them can lead to fulfilling and unexpected career trajectories. Her story is a testament to the idea that embracing the serendipitous nature of life with preparation and curiosity can unlock doors to passions and careers that might otherwise have remained undiscovered.

This narrative encourages individuals to remain vigilant for opportunities that align with their interests and preparedness, underscoring the power of serendipity in shaping one’s professional destiny.

The Importance of Truth and Responsible Citizenship

Andrea Mitchell places a strong emphasis on the indispensable role of journalism in maintaining the fabric of democracy, highlighting the duty of journalists to report truthfully and fearlessly. Her advocacy for honest journalism reflects a deep commitment to the principles of accountability and transparency in public discourse.

Mitchell’s call to action for an informed citizenry underscores the necessity for individuals to engage critically and constructively with the world around them. She stresses the importance of seeking truth and demanding integrity from media and political figures alike, advocating for a societal ethos that values truthfulness and responsible citizenship.

Her message about the crucial interplay between responsible journalism and civic engagement serves as a reminder of the individual’s role in sustaining democratic values. Mitchell’s emphasis on truth-seeking and critical engagement challenges listeners to not passively consume information but to actively question, verify, and seek out honest narratives.

This advocacy for informed citizenship and journalistic integrity underscores the collective responsibility in ensuring the health of democratic institutions and public discourse. Through her insights, Mitchell inspires a commitment to truth, accountability, and engaged citizenship, highlighting these values as essential pillars for a vibrant and functioning democracy.

Learnings

In University of Pennsylvania Commencement Address by Andrea Mitchell, there are 3 key learnings. Let’s delve into these:

Embracing Identity and Authenticity

Mitchell’s narrative emphasizes the importance of being true to oneself and the strength that comes from authenticity:

• Finding Strength in Authenticity: Showcases how embracing one’s authentic self and adhering to personal values can serve as a source of strength, guiding both personal and professional decisions.
• Navigating Adversity with Courage: Illustrates the importance of facing difficulties directly, viewing challenges as opportunities to grow and further affirm one’s principles and identity.

This approach underlines the significance of authenticity and courage in overcoming obstacles and staying true to oneself in various life aspects.

The Role of Community and Support

The value of community and mentorship is highlighted as fundamental to personal growth and success:

• Leveraging Community for Growth: Acknowledges the critical role that mentors, educators, and a supportive community play in overcoming challenges and achieving one’s ambitions, showing how a supportive network is invaluable for growth.
• Mentorship and Solidarity as Catalysts for Change: Advocates for the power of mentorship and collective support in driving personal development and broader societal improvements, urging graduates to offer support to others along their paths.

Mitchell’s experiences stress the importance of community engagement and the positive impact of mentorship and solidarity in fostering both individual and collective progress.

Building a Legacy of Impact

Mitchell inspires graduates to actively engage in their communities and uphold core democratic principles, emphasizing education’s role in empowerment:

• Active Participation in Shaping the Future: Encourages graduates to take an active role in their communities and the wider world, highlighting how collective efforts can address and overcome societal challenges.
• Commitment to Truth and Democratic Values: Underscores the importance of maintaining commitment to democracy, free expression, and truth-seeking as essential to societal well-being and individual integrity.
• Empowerment Through Education: Promotes the idea that education is not just a tool for personal advancement but also a means of empowering oneself to contribute positively to society, advocating for lifelong learning and intellectual curiosity.

Through these insights, Mitchell calls for a dedicated approach to creating a meaningful impact, fostering a commitment to democratic values, and the empowerment that comes from continuous learning and community involvement.

Andrea Mitchell’s University of Pennsylvania Commencement Speech

Thank you all so much: President Gutmann, Provost Pritchett, Chairman Cohen, Reverend clergy, faculty, parents, families, friends, and partners, and the combined classes of 2018. I am overjoyed, overwhelmed, and above all, humbled. This is an honor I never could have imagined, but no award, no recognition, has ever meant as much.

I think of all the years I’ve stood and clapped and cheered, watching Penn graduates march down Locust Walk for this ceremony, a procession that never fails to bring me to tears. And then, the excitement: coming here and hearing poets and presidents, world leaders and global thinkers address our graduates. To say nothing of Bono and Denzel and Lin-Manuel, making me feel, as you can well understand at this moment, like that long-forgotten vice presidential candidate for Ross Perot back in 1992, Admiral James Stockdale, whose first words on the debate stage were, “Who am I, and why am I here?”

Even worse, I have a confession for all of you here today. I almost didn’t graduate more than a half-century ago. As commencement drew near, I had, unlike Ben Franklin, I just learned, failed to complete my gym requirement by passing the swim test. Yes, it was required. So I had to spend the last few weeks before commencement in the pool. It seemed like a waste of time, but you know, decades later, I got caught in a riptide off of Great Point on Nantucket Island. I had to tread water as I got carried out to sea for what seemed like an eternity before I was finally rescued. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it, but I was prepared. Prepared at Penn.

I am here today. I’m here today because when I arrived as an unformed 16-year-old freshman, this great university gave me choices at a time when it was not at all self-evident that women could strive to compete as equals. Penn is now vastly different than it was back in 1963, fully co-educational, diverse, even more intellectually vibrant, and physically so beautiful.

I am proud of our stellar faculty, all of the physical improvements, our architecture, our green spaces. But most of all, I am here to celebrate you today. You are what make our university so great: your intellectual capital, your research, your discoveries, your community service. As you have, we hope, forged lifelong friendships and become proud Quakers.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about what wisdom I could offer your class today. I’m struck by how many of life’s adventures are the result of accident, not design. If you are prepared to take advantage of the serendipitous, that means having the tools, the knowledge imparted by this great University, and the confidence to take chances, explore new paths, chase your dreams.

I often think about how different my life would have been had I not wandered down the third-floor corridor of Houston Hall in the fall of my freshman year to follow the sounds of classical music and discovered what was then the studio of WXPN. In those days, our FM station was entirely student-run. We programmed classical music, jazz after midnight, folk music on Saturday nights, and news.

After years of studying the violin and not fully prepared to admit my failures there, in front of that one of this great maestro’s of our era, but after years of setting the violin, I’d come to Penn having realized that I was a good but not a great violinist, and no matter how hard I practiced, I would never, to paraphrase that old joke, never get to Carnegie Hall. But I was a pretty good English student. I had loved writing since becoming the school news reporter for our hometown newspaper in the sixth grade. I had fallen in love with history and literature thanks to encouraging teachers in high school. So, exploring my interests in a liberal arts curriculum was an inviting alternative aspiration.

And then, on that day early in the fall of my freshman year, I discovered broadcast news. Which brings me to my first lesson:

Be curious. Do not presume to know who you might become, because you never finish becoming.

I look back on those early years in the College of Liberal Arts for women with gratitude, and with thanks that the College of Liberal Arts for women no longer exists. It was an artifact of a different era, as were the separate rules for women we found so constraining: the curfews, the dress code, the rules that did not apply to the men. It was an oppositional time, over civil rights and later Vietnam, the early strivings of what was to grow into the women’s movement. A decade both transformational and turbulent, marked by violence throughout: the killing of an American president only two months after my class arrived on this campus, the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964, and when we were young graduates

, the murders of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

Our generation had some very clear-cut issues: changing laws to improve civil rights, dealing with Vietnam. The generations before had the Great Depression and World War II. Today, we are living through a period that feels equally challenging and disorienting, but now the challenges are subtler, even more complex. The social dilemmas affecting race, ethnicity, gender, problems that new laws can address but not always fix.

And today, political norms are under attack from all sides, with the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to call defining deviancy down. The New York senator, a great debater, also coined the phrase, “You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.” But in today’s politics, facts are described as alternative, and truths are often relative.

Devices that we thought would liberate us can at times weigh us down. Social media that enables us to forge connections can at times be isolating. We can feel overrun by the velocity of information bombarding us day and night. And in a country more divided than at any time in recent memory, too often we retreat to our corners, becoming all too comfortable relying on news media that confirm our opinions rather than challenging or preconceived notions.

But you, you here in the class of 2018, you have the capability, the education, and the spirit to tackle these and similar issues in a world with three times the number of people as when I graduated so many years ago. So, my next lesson:

Be open-minded. Never stop learning how to find the truth. Use the skills you’ve learned here at Penn, evaluate your sources, test your theories. Be smart consumers in this overheated environment.

Honest, fearless journalism is essential to sustaining our democracy. Honest journalism, fearless journalism, is perhaps more necessary than at any time I can recall since the civil rights movement.

But to fulfill our mission for you, the public, we must demand more of ourselves, and you must demand more of us. We must guard against errors and avoid hyperbole, make sure we do not jump to conclusions or parrot conventional wisdom.

And as new media proliferate and lines are blurred between hard news and entertainment, those of us performing traditional journalism have to stick to our core mission: providing a reality check, a factual baseline against which to measure a storm of tweets. In this regard, calling us the enemy of the people or fake news is calculated to diminish our authority, to make it more difficult to challenge false narratives, even as our politics become increasingly disconnected from facts.

Fake news is hardly a new phenomenon. Wars have been started as the result of sensational headlines based on false narratives, as long ago as 1898, when claims that a torpedo or some other external explosion blew up the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, killing hundreds on board. The cry “Remember the Maine” quickly became the pretext for the U.S. to declare war against Spain. The cause, originally unclear, on with the century later another investigation discovered that the tragedy was probably self-inflicted, possibly the result of a coal bunker fire onboard.

But these days, fake news is also what people call news they don’t agree with, and it can be information warfare, such as Russian propaganda masquerading as legitimate news to exploit societal divisions and set us against each other. As consumers and purveyors of information, it’s on us, all of us, to figure out what is real and what is not.

So, today, my final lesson is:

Be engaged. As you follow your passions and discover new pursuits, be involved citizens of your neighborhood, your community, your nation, and the world.

Express yourselves, whether it is with a blog or a book, or a painting or a play, in a classroom, by joining a movement, or just playing a game. We all know the power that sports have to bring us together. Just take it from our incredible basketball team, the first to make the March Madness tournament in 11 years.

Listen and learn, but don’t just be an observer. There is never a permanent resting place for democracy or a free press; you have to work at it every day. If you know something is wrong, write that letter to the editor, support a candidate of any political persuasion, be involved, speak up. Gain strength from the example of the teenagers in Parkland who transform tragedy into purpose. Feel empowered by the women and the men who are no longer willing to tolerate the abuse of sexual predators. Me Too and Time’s Up can teach us a kind of courage I never imagined as a 16-year-old freshman first arriving at Penn.

It was pure happenstance that I walked down the third floor of Houston Hall that day, embarking on a path of discovery that became a career of never-ending adventure, all because of a little luck, and because I was prepared to take advantage of it. Prepared because of Penn.

Now,

it’s your turn. I have no doubt that many of you will look back at your years here and realize it was full of such moments, moments that at the time seemed to be happy accidents of your own. An afternoon with friends on the quad, a late night that turned into an early morning of studying at Van Pelt, maybe inspiration even struck you one evening out at Smokey Joe’s. Hey, who am I to judge?

You have had a superb education, but in truth, it’s only the first step on your journey. Your challenges will be great, but so will the opportunities. Your careers will likely veer in directions we have yet to imagine, toward occupations that have not yet been invented.

Many of you will be leading the way in these transformations. But don’t forget your roots here on this campus. They will nourish you as you grow and thrive.

And remember, if you are rocketing through space someday, thanks to Elon Musk, the globe that you see will have no borders, no artificial boundaries, no barriers against refugees or immigrants, just glorious vistas. And finally, if you’ll permit me a little sentiment, let me share what my friend and mentor in journalism, Tim Russert, a great bear of a man from Buffalo whom we lost way too soon, used to say as I would rush off to a new assignment each morning: “Go get ’em.”

Go get ’em, class of 2018. You have made us all so proud. Thank you so much. Thank you for the honor of my lifetime.

Conclusion

In Andrea Mitchell’s 2018 address, she urged UPenn graduates to champion diversity and accountability in journalism. Interestingly, women make up just 41.7% of newsroom staff, a reminder of the ongoing need for gender equality.

Embrace the power of education, stay curious, and seek unity – these are the lessons Mitchell imparted. Her words resonated, challenging the graduates to be the change they want to see in the world.

 

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Speech Collection