Michael Knowles to AMU Graduates: “Don’t Try to Change the World”
Ave Maria University welcomed celebrated author and commentator Michael Knowles to this year’s Commencement Exercises. Before delivering a rousing and surprising Commencement address to the more than 350 graduates, Knowles received an honorary degree, as did long time benefactor of the University, George Peter Schwartz. President Mark Middendorf and Founder and Chancellor Thomas S. Monaghan delivered remarks as well.
Knowles opened his address by acknowledging the distinctive nature of the graduates’ accomplishment. “You are among the select group of students graduating from a university that acknowledges and teaches about God, which means that you are among the relatively few graduates this year who can claim a proper university education.”
Knowles explained, referring to Christ and quoting St. John Henry Newman, “A university that neglects the Source and Summit of all knowledge can make no such claim [to being a university].”
In his counter cultural and counterintuitive message, Knowles said, “Most every modern commencement address comes down to some version of the same advice: Go out and change the world. But this is a different kind of university, so I am going to offer you different advice: Do not try to change the world.”
Knowles then posed the question, “If you are not going to change the world, what should you do?”
“You are called to act,” he said. “But more than that, you are called to interpret. For confused modern people who deny any objective meaning in history, only action matters. Hence the modern obsession with activism.”
Knowles explained that we’re called to see God moving in history, in our lives, and to be in conformity with Him. He said, “Your job is not to change the world, which you could not do even if you tried, but rather to cooperate with God’s grace to do what He wants for you. The purpose of education is to cultivate your intellect and discipline your will, such that there is no difference between what God wants for you and what you want for yourselves.”
Reflecting on their past four years, Knowles said, “You, Ave Maria graduates, I hope and trust, have an education that will allow you to make sense of the world, even to love the world, not so much for what it offers, but for what it represents. Not for its ephemeral pleasures, but for its meaning.”
“And the world points to that meaning,” Knowles concluded. “See it. Hear it. Feel it. Smell it. Taste it. And then allow that meaning to change you.”
Click the link to watch Michael Knowles’ full Commencement address and to view images of our graduates.
