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Esteemed Deans, members of our University’s academic community, Friends of ORT, and dear graduates, I welcome you to this graduate commencement ceremony. This is an occasion to recognize the tremendous efforts you have made to achieve your educational goals. You can be proud of yourselves; your presence here today is a testament to your determination, your skills, and your resilience.
Today is a day of pride and gratitude. A day to thank your families for standing by you, your fellow students for their mutual support, and those inspiring teachers who encouraged you along the way. We, too, wish to thank you for the trust you placed in our university. We wish to thank you for all we have learned from you. Education is a joint venture between teachers and students. We hope we have met your intellectual and professional development goals and expectations. We hope we were there for you when you needed us, and we hope to have prepared you to think freely and to be wary of dogma and fixed ideas. Our goal is to teach you how to think, not what to think.
Today, I would like to pay tribute to my dear friend, admired colleague, and co-founder of the modern ORT Uruguay,Rector Fernandez. Julio is retiring in a few days, after decades of spearheading some of the university's most important projects. If there is a simple problem, I am usually the person to contact. If you have a difficult problem, you can turn to some of the bright and experienced deans, but if a problem seems unsolvable, you would turn to Julio.
Throughout the many challenges we faced, Julio was always there with his sharp mind and remarkable composure. You never feel alone with Julio. Julio is irreplaceable, but I am confident that the new vice-rectors—Eduardo Hipogrosso, Pablo Landoni, and Daniel Oliveri—will enable us to continue our mission of providing a quality education to our fellow Uruguayans.
This year we lost a great leader and an even greater person, my dear mother, Charlotte de Grünberg. Her light has not been extinguished and continues to guide us. Throughout her challenging life, she overcame barriers that seemed insurmountable. At a time when women leaders were few and far between, she built an institution that became a household name and a source of educational opportunities for thousands of young Uruguayans. She was an innovative entrepreneur before the term itself became widely known, possessing a long-term vision and the stamina to pursue it against overwhelming odds. She founded a new university in a country accustomed to having only one. She recognized the importance of introducing technology into the national education system nearly 50 years ago, when it was largely underestimated as an educational tool. She faced prejudice and challenges as a woman, as a Jew, and as the head of a private educational institution, but she rose to them with resilience and determination.
As a refugee fleeing war and persecution, her early life was marked by fear. For years she was denied access to school, friends, and any normal way of life as a Jew during the Nazi occupation of her country, Belgium, but she refused to see herself as a victim. She found the inner strength to complete her education, raise a family, build an institution, and, in her later years, share her life story, which Ruperto Long recounted in a wonderful book with extraordinary talent and affection.
My mother was an immigrant who very soon came to take pride in her new country, and she always had the support of her lifelong partner, my dear father, Dr. José Grünberg, who is with us today. She learned our language and our customs, recognizing the many strengths of our culture and working to overcome its shortcomings. She did not work solely for her own benefit. Through ORT, she wanted to provide to many all that she had missed in her childhood: education, opportunities, and personal dignity.
She was able to foster a culture and spirit that continues to guide us today, building a team and a community united by shared values that was—and still is—like a family to her. Many of us owe her a great deal, and we are committed to carrying on her mission. Carrying on her mission is a huge responsibility, and we will do our best to live up to it.
Dear graduates. Some of you are probably thinking about your next steps. Should you seek the stability of a steady job or venture into entrepreneurship? Public service or personal development? There is no single right answer to these questions. Everyone must find their own path. Every choice carries risks, and there are always uncharted paths. Don’t wait for the perfect moment to do what you believe is important—that moment will never come. Trust yourselves. If you don’t trust yourselves, others won’t trust you.
Be prepared to risk what you value, and to value what you risk. Become leaders with integrity, empathy, and respect for those you lead. Always remember that intelligence is a gift, but empathy is an attitude.
Dear graduates. You are graduating into a world of upheaval and moral confusion. Amid this moral regression, racism has re-emerged in one of its most sinister forms: anti-Semitism. After years of claiming to be at the forefront of the fight against racism, some of the world’s leading universities have condoned the exclusion of Jewish students and professors.
How could anti-Semitism resurface after the horrifying lessons of the Holocaust, after decades of declarations and resolutions against racism and anti-Semitism? How did anti-Semitism manage to find its way back into certain societies? To borrow a phrase from the late English rabbi and philosopher Jonathan Sacks, anti-Semitism has managed to creep back into some of our societies because it is a virus and, like many viruses, it mutated, and our defenses failed to detect it. The virus of anti-Semitism is no longer spread primarily by brown shirts so much as by green flags and red berets. It is being spread by feminist organizations that deny the rape and femicide of victims who do not fit their ideological views. It is spread by media whose so-called journalists are in fact terrorists or accomplices to terrorism. It is spread by international organizations that judge the State of Israel by different standards than all other countries. The hatred of the Jews is no longer based on an allegedly different God, but on their decision to have their own state.
We should all be alarmed. Anti-Semitism has always been a symptom of a deep-seated collective illness that foreshadows the breakdown of peaceful coexistence. The reservoirs of anti-Jewish hatred being filled by certain groups are highly volatile. Societies infected by racism first invent enemies to hate and eventually destroy themselves. Anti-Semitism inexorably leads to the end of democracy, human rights, and freedom. We all have an ethical duty to fight and defeat racism and anti-Semitism. We must learn to live together without fearing those who think differently, those who pray differently, and without fearing immigrants seeking opportunity in a new country, as most of our grandparents did.
Dear graduates. Your generation is facing the challenge of new forms of intelligence, which until now have been the exclusive domain of humans. Artificial intelligence will not be just another technological shift. It will affect all human activities, raising concerns and fears that humans will be replaced by machines. However, the relationship between AI and human intelligence is not a zero-sum game; it is not necessarily true that the more jobs AI can perform, the fewer jobs will be available to humans.
Humans and machines have the potential to complement each other and create synergistic value and prosperity, although this will require humans to adapt their ways of working, learning, and collaborating with other humans and with intelligent machines. People will not compete with intelligent machines. They will compete with other people who know how to use those machines better. Indeed, the ability to learn will become a critical human skill, and our education system will need to be transformed to promote learning at every level and for every learner. Humans will constantly need to relearn and adapt accordingly.
Life will be a constant race between learning and technological change. The challenge will be to ensure that our retraining keeps pace with technological change.
Unfortunately, this is the most important missing element in the major debate on social security that is looming over our country. There is an attempt to return to how Uruguay was in 1950, with low retirement ages and no individual savings plans. But we all know what happened then, and what will happen again if these ideas prevail. If we continue to dwell on arguments from the last century, we will find ourselves not only without sustainable pensions, but also without sustainable jobs. We need to aim for a system that is fit for 2050, not for 1950. A system that promotes employability throughout working life, not just income after employment. Education in the future will need to shift from its current model, where 80 percent of learning takes place in the first 20 percent of life. We will need to figure out how to finance a system that guarantees access to lifelong learning for everyone. A system that allows them to stay one step ahead of technological change; otherwise, they will be excluded and eventually replaced.
Dear graduates. There is much to be proud of in our country, but of course, there is still much work to be done. This is your mission: to help our society take the next step in its development. Follow your own path, pursue your own ambitions, but always think about what you can contribute to the country we love so much. Make it more just, more prosperous, more innovative, and more dynamic. Whatever you do, wherever you are, always remember that ORT will always be your home.
Thank you.