Delivered May 29, 2025
Good afternoon graduates, families, friends and supporters, faculty. I’m so happy you’re all here today to celebrate the Class of 2025! Every moment of our time at King’s brought us here: the academic joy when we learned something that reminded us why we came to university in the first place; the unparalleled fulfillment of getting an A from your favourite professor; every sleepless night writing papers and every seemingly interminable semester. University was interesting, and fun, and difficult, and I hope that in the end it was worth it. I’m honoured to have been chosen to represent you all once more as your valedictorian, after you chose me to represent you as your King’s Students’ Union President for two years. I tried to never take your trust in me for granted.
It’s a strange time to be celebrating, in the world we’re emerging into. I have to admit that for me, the joy of completing my undergraduate degree often pales in comparison to the crushing weight of the injustice we all witness every day. There’s the anti-trans crusade in the UK and fascist American immigration policy. The climate crisis rages on in forest fires and hurricanes while corporations continue massive amounts of destructive resource extraction for a profit. We witness images of genocide and crises occurring from Palestine and Sudan to Myanmar and the Congo, and here in so-called “Canada” our politicians don’t seem to care that there is still no clean water on so many First Nations reserves. When it comes to our universities, our provincial government in Nova Scotia is restricting academic freedom and undermining the independent governance of the educational institutions we graduate from today, while across the border the U.S. government detains and deports students like Mahmoud Khalil, simply for saying that genocide is wrong. It feels impossible to go through this day without reminding us all that there are no universities left in Gaza. There were, in fact, already no universities left in Gaza a year ago, when the Class of 2024 walked across this stage, and the destruction has continued while the world looks on.
I’m sure some of you are sighing about me bringing politics into this celebration, but the truth is that it was already political. Our education is political, what we choose to celebrate is political, and our choices from here on out are too. It is a personal choice to get a university education, but it is a political reality to be able to.
The fact that we are able to graduate today makes us, on the local and global scale, the lucky ones. That’s not to say it wasn’t hard—it was hard, for all of us, in a hundred different ways for a hundred different reasons, none of which are minimized by acknowledging that we stand here in a privileged position. I keep asking myself: what do we do with that? How do we take that knowledge and find something to hope for, something to do that isn’t turn away; isn’t to retreat to our own comfort in willful ignorance? The best I can offer is this: one, we have to face the world in all its complexity. Two, we have to believe it can be better. And three, we have to have the courage to act to make it so.
Our world is beautiful and it is terrible and it is everything in between. For every great moment each of us had at King’s, there is a flaw in our education system keeping it inaccessible to disabled, low-income, and racialized people, allowing our institutions’ money to fund violence, genocide and resource extraction, and protecting powerful people who’ve hurt our vulnerable peers. On social media, in between pictures of our friends and family and influencers’ travel vlogs, there are people begging for donations to keep their families alive, because the systems that we were told would protect them have failed them. Recognizing our advantages and the flaws in our institutions and our world isn’t a bad thing—it’s necessary. It validates our own struggles because it shows us where we had help and where we persevered. It helps us understand our place in the world and it shows us the tools we can use to help ourselves and each other.
It can also be horribly discouraging to always be looking around the corner for the bad part. Hope, then, is necessary. It’s important to notice the people in your community who dedicate themselves to making justice a reality. Whether it’s folks giving out food to their unhoused neighbours, or calling out racism in their workplace, or going to the city council meeting to talk about safe consumption sites, or those who take direct action when bigotry rears its ugly head, it matters that there are people doing something to chip away at the weight on all of our shoulders.
Something that helps me hold onto hope, too, is gratitude. Today, I am grateful that I got my education here, from the faculty and my fellow students who taught me so much, with the help of our TAs, student support staff, Prince Hall staff and custodians, and so many others. University was more than our classes—it was every society event and night out and friend that opened our eyes to something new. I am grateful for my family, who I wouldn’t have made it here without, and for my friends, who made the bad parts bearable and the good parts better. I am also grateful to have had the privilege of living and learning on this land, in K’jipuktuk, part of the unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people. Those of us who are settlers here cannot take our presence on this land for granted, and we must both recognize and deconstruct colonial systems. I hope you all have plenty to be grateful for too, and that you will use the things you care about to fuel you.
Which brings us to the third, and most difficult, part: action. I believe that human suffering is preventable. I don’t take suffering to mean friendship breakups, struggling through a tricky essay or learning how to cook in your first apartment—these are the normal hardships of growing. Suffering means people going hungry, being imprisoned or losing whole families to mass violence—suffering is designed. It is the result of structural violence, and the powers that benefit from it are the ones who will try to convince you otherwise. They will tell you that as long as it’s someone else who is suffering, you should let it happen. Because it needs to happen; because there’s simply nothing anyone can do. This is always a lie.
It’s easy to brush off an accusation of complicity in someone else’s suffering by gesturing to those who are more powerful than you. It is true that many of us are beholden to higher powers of government and industry, structures that dwarf us in size and scope. Still, the reality of injustice is that it is both the result of systems that are so much bigger than any of us, and that those systems are maintained by the actions of individuals. If we abdicate our responsibility to act by saying someone else can do more, no one will ever do anything. We can choose to accept business as usual, or we can choose to resist. The world is what we make it—one where our governments properly fund our universities and our food systems, where no one tacitly supports a genocide happening across the ocean because it’s “too complicated” to talk about, where trans people are loved, supported, and frankly left alone—that’s made possible by people too.
I get it—it’s tempting to put your head down and make as little trouble as possible amidst the skyrocketing cost of living, the global rise of fascism and an ever-present underlying fear. It’s hard to find time and energy to do anything but work to survive and try to escape the real world in your free time. But if there’s anything I learned while at King’s, it’s that contributing to your community is the only way to make the world better. Collective effort for good is, in my experience, the best way to find meaning, and friendship, and hope.
When I first began thinking about this ceremony, the fanfare of conferring us degrees, I thought about what that means—to “confer.” The word “confer” can mean “to bestow”—as we are given degrees today, in recognition of our hard work. It can mean “to meet with and deliberate”—as we reflect on and celebrate our time as students together. And it can mean “to invest with a characteristic.”
That characteristic is responsibility. In leaving this place where we did so much learning, we are conferred a responsibility to fight for a better world. We have to take what we’ve gained, the knowledge and skills we’ve worked for, and turn it into something good. We have to keep learning, to keep growing, to keep caring especially when it’s hard, and to keep trying, no matter what. Even when it feels like all odds are against us, the promise of a better world is worth fighting for, and I believe in us. I believe in people. I believe that we changed each other for the better here at King’s, and that we can likewise change the world.
There is hope for us, and for the world we are growing into—but only if we face it, hold onto each other and our belief in a brighter future, and act like the world depends on us, because it does.
Congratulations to the Class of 2025.