Sarah Augustine urges Class of 2025 to “grow for the life of the people” in Goshen College’s 127th Commencement address
Read the full text of Augustine’s address here.
View photos from the Commencement ceremony.
View photos from academic receptions.
View photos from the Nurses’ Pinning Ceremony.
In the 127th Goshen College Commencement on April 27, Sarah Augustine delivered a powerful address to the Class of 2025 with her speech, “You are enough,” encouraging the 190 graduates to embrace hope, creativity and collective action as they step into their future.
Augustine, executive director and co-founder of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, welcomed the graduates into the next phase of their lives, where they are called to “cease to be simply consumers of information, and become creators.”
She dismissed the common sentiment often expressed by older generations (such as her own) that young people “hold the key to our survival.” Instead, Augustine said, solving the kind of “wicked problems” of our time — complex, tangled, global issues — will require all of society to grow and work together.
Breaking entrenched paradigms of society, she said, will require visionaries and revolutionaries “who have not been trained by power to ascend to power. They will come from outside the halls of power — from places like Goshen College, where justice and peace are not lofty aspirations, but are assumed to be possible.”
Augustine closed her speech with a metaphor: in Shinnecock Bay, New York, the Shinnecock people plant sea kelp in a hostile, polluted bay, where the kelp thrive and work to shift the ecological balance toward life, despite the pollutants and sewage.
“We know we are sending you into a hostile environment,” she said in closing. “But we ask you to grow, for the people. For the life of the people. You take our prayers with you.”
Augustine is an Indigenous leader who has spent her life as an advocate for Indigenous rights. She has represented Indigenous communities to international bodies such as the United Nations, the World Council of Churches and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
She has served as faculty at multiple institutions, including Goshen College. A regular columnist for Anabaptist World, she is the author of The Land is Not Empty and co-author of So We & Our Children May Live.
After the ceremony was over, the faculty lined the main corridor of the Recreation-Fitness Center and applauded the departing seniors as they walked through an “applause tunnel” — a tradition that also marks the beginning of each academic year to welcome students back to campus.
Class of 2025 by the numbers:
- Total graduates: 190
- Bachelor of Arts degree recipients: 149
- Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree recipients: 21
- Bachelor of Science degree recipients: 1
- Master of Science in Nursing degree recipients: 7
- Master of Business Administration degree recipients: 6
- Master of Social Work degree recipients: 4
- Master of Arts in Environmental Education degree recipients: 2
- Total graduates from Indiana: 85
- Countries represented: 25
- States represented: 20
Photos by Mackenzie Miller