165th Augustana Commencement address, May 24, 2025
Remarks from President Andrea Talentino
Congratulations to all today’s graduates. Congratulations for all you have achieved and the many ways in which you have grown, developed, and defined yourself. This is an exciting and hard-earned day. Welcome to all the family and friends, faculty, staff, and trustees who have made this day possible in one way or another, and to our speaker and his family.
Graduates, in your time at Augustana you have heard us talk often about community. The Augie community, the Rock Island community, the Quad Cities community, and others. A central Lutheran belief is that anyone who loves and serves their neighbor is doing God’s work, so serving community is a foundational value of Lutheran higher education. It is also one of the concepts that has frayed most in our nation and others over the last decade or so.
You have spent your last few years in the midst of the Augustana community, where you have been bolstered by peers, faculty, and staff who share your vision for your success and are committed to helping you attain your dreams. Now you will be entering the wider world, and part of what I hope you will take forward with you is a commitment to connecting with others and an abiding belief that helping your neighbors makes the world better.
In doing so, you will be swimming against the tide. In the United States, Americans’ knowledge and trust of their neighbors is declining. A survey conducted by the Pew Charitable Trust in March of this year revealed that only 26% of Americans say they know their neighbors, and less than half, 44%, say they trust them. Both numbers are down from the 2018 survey, when the sense of trust exceeded half, at 52 percent.
The sense of trust also correlates with similarity. The more similar respondents believed they were to their neighbors in terms of race or ethnicity, education and economic levels, the more likely they were to trust them. And interestingly, while most respondents said they would do things for their neighbor, such as watering the plants or bringing in the mail if needed, or bringing a meal to someone who was sick, many fewer respondents believed that their neighbors would respond in kind (Pew 2025).
“Neighboring,” the idea of serving those around us and building community with them was essential to Martin Luther’s articulation of faith. Lutheran ideals value service so much that they define leadership as a calling to love our neighbors and serve the common good. Neighboring is not something we do for ourselves, or for those most like us, but for the benefit of all. And it should be done without judgement. A person of faith, Luther said, “serves willingly and takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss. For a man does not serve that he may put men under obligations. He does not distinguish between friends and enemies or anticipate their thankfulness or unthankfulness, but he most freely and most willingly spends himself and all that he has” (Grimm and Lehmann, 1957: 367-68).
Graduates, you are entering a divided world, a world where we are questioning community and who can or should be a part, where we are questioning inclusion and the costs it may bring, and where we struggle to reach across differences of place and perspective to find common ground. All of these issues are important topics of political debate, yet we are growing more comfortable with pointing out what we think is wrong than searching for where there is right, defining difference rather than finding shared interest.
Which is why you are exactly what this world needs. You have spent your time on campus doing the hard work of listening, debating, compromising, and reaching across difference. You have learned to work with all kinds of people—from different parts of the US and the world--with different lived experiences, outlooks, and visions and a shared commitment to making things better. Carry those skills with you.
The time you have spent learning in the classroom, across the Quad Cities and even the globe has prepared you for the world you now enter. You know from your experience here that higher education is where we prepare impactful citizens—not just for careers, but for real life: to think critically, understand different viewpoints, and contribute to the communities we share. It is also where we learn to work side by side with people whose backgrounds we can scarcely imagine, and where we recognize that our own experience is not the totality of possibility.
One of the most eloquent voices on community in the United States was bell hooks, an author and social critic who spoke extensively about community as a space of respect and mutual responsibility. The Utne Reader named her to its 1995 list of 100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life, and Time Magazine made her one of its 100 Women of the Year in 2020. She spoke often about education as the practice of freedom, where we each hold the responsibility to ensure that we are open to ideas different from our own.
I can tell you that she practiced what she preached. I knew her as Gloria Watkins, my freshman year English professor. She encouraged us to speak honestly and embrace difference, and she held us accountable for listening to others. She went simply by Gloria, and she insisted on viewing discussions as places of openness and care, where all came equal, and equally responsible for creating the whole.
Writing as bell hooks, her pen name, she said, “Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world” (hooks, 1996).
Remember those words as you leave here today, and remember the commitment of Lutheran higher education. Making the world a better place starts with an open heart and mind, with a promise to do good by others, serve without judgment, and live with trust and good will. If you bring those qualities to your personal and professional life then you will not only build community, you will fulfill the responsibility of neighboring. God speed.
Sources:
Grimm, Harold J. and Helmut T. Lehman. (1957). Luther’s Works, Volume 31: Career of the Reformer. Fortress Press.
hooks, bell. (1996). Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Silver, Laura and Jenn Hatfield. (May 8, 2025). Pew Research Center. How connected do Americans feel to their neighbors? https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/05/08/how-connected-do-americans-feel-to-their-neighbors/. Accessed May 12, 2025.