“The world is yours to conquer. So conquer it. By striving to succeed. By listening to people. By letting them see who you are. By laughing and especially at yourself. By going to the ocean. By doing things other than work. By finding joy. By being courageous.”
View his remarks HERE. Download his remarks HERE.
Fresno, CA — On Friday, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) delivered the commencement address at Fresno City College, becoming the first U.S. Senator to give a commencement speech in the 115-years since the college first opened.
Schiff addressed a record 2,900 graduates, offering words of encouragement and advice to graduates including on how to seek bigger challenges and opportunities, listen to others, find a passion outside their career, be a good friend, and find humor amidst life’s heaviness.
Fresno City College is California’s first community college, established in 1910. Generations of residents have earned degrees from the college, which today serves nearly 25,000 students annually. Schiff was a part-time professor at Glendale Community College where he taught political science. He continues to be a champion for California’s community colleges and access to a quality, affordable higher education.
Read the transcript of his remarks as delivered below:
Hello graduates. How are you doing tonight?
Thank you, Dr. Hall, for that very kind introduction. I also want to thank Interim President Armstrong for your incredible stewardship over the past several months. And a big congratulations to incoming President Whisenhunt. We are so excited for your leadership and what it will bring to this incredible institution.
To Chancellor Goldsmith, the trustees, the faculty, and staff of the college. To the family and friends of the graduates. And, most of all, to the class of 2025. Congratulations! You did it.
Some of you did it while raising children. Some of you did it while working one, two, or three jobs. Some of you did it while leaving school and then coming back again. After doubting yourself, then deciding to believe again. You earned every last credit. And you earned this magnificent day.
I consider it a great privilege to stand before you. To be here in the beautiful community of Fresno. In the heart of the Valley. To be surrounded by folks from all walks of life, and all backgrounds. From first generation students to students whose families have been here for generations.
This gathering serves as tangible proof that in the heartland of the state, there is a thriving community with the doors of higher education wide open, and where people can achieve remarkable things.
There are lots of reasons why I am excited to be here with you. But there is one reason in particular that I wanted to come to the Valley. To Fresno City College. To give my first graduation speech, as a U.S. Senator.
And it’s you.
It’s your stories.
It’s the mother and son who are both graduating today with degrees that will power them into service. One in a career in early childhood education and the other in public health.
It’s the instructors in math and science, in health care, in Auto Electrical Systems and Auto Suspension, whose innovative classes in the latter are at capacity, and who are training the next generation workforce that will work on hydrogen engines and electric vehicles.
It’s the students who, when they saw their friends and neighbors’ rights violated – their families separated – bravely stood up, stood together, and said they’d had enough.
You represent the future of the Valley and the future of California.
The Valley and its people are resilient and resourceful. You do hard things because they must be done. You build things. You grow things. You create opportunity where others see only difficult. You invent, you improve, you innovate. And you know the value of a hard day’s work.
And that’s why I’ll keep coming back. Because of people like you. And the opportunities that lie ahead. And the immense amount of work to be done. Good work. Important work. Nourishing work. Transformative work.
Now, I will have to admit, I’m new at this job. I have only been a United States Senator for six months. And I don’t care what they tell you, but the first time you step onto the Senate floor and raise your right hand and take that oath of office, it takes your breath away. It doesn’t matter what you were doing before — there is a jolt that goes through you with the realization of the responsibility you now hold to represent millions of people. And the history of those who went before.
You look around that chamber, and you think of the giants who once served in that place, giants like Dianne Feinstein and John McCain, and John F. Kennedy. It takes a while to sink in. To believe that you belong there. As the very wealthy magnate, John D. Rockefeller, said to my friend, the farmer, Jon Tester, when Jon was elected to the Senate for Montana and joined Rockefeller in that chamber — “we both came from very different places, but we both ended up here.” There is beauty in that, that such a thing is possible in the United States of America, just as it is possible right here in the Valley.
Now, I can tell you the first time that I knew I was really a Senator, and it wasn’t my swearing in, or when I introduced my first bill. No, it was when I asked to speak on the Senate floor in the middle of the night. It was one of those around the clock sessions, when you have to hold the floor through the night and into the morning, one of those filibusters. As the new guy, I was given the graveyard shift and told I needed to hold the floor and speak for a full hour between one and two in the morning.
And I thought to myself, I’ve never given a speech that long. What on earth do I have to say for a whole hour? And so, in the dead of night, there I stood, with my speech, and by the time the hour was up — I was barely halfway through my remarks. And I thought to myself, I had a whole hour to speak, and it wasn’t enough — son of a bitch, I really am a Senator!
So make yourself comfortable, I could be here awhile.
Sometimes, the Senate is really like what you see on TV. As they say, life imitates art. Life can be shaped by the art we see and read and hear instead of the other way around. But I suppose it is worth asking: just who are “they” who say that life imitates art? Why it’s the artists of course, who say that. Artists can be so vain.
Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates politics clearly. Okay, maybe it doesn’t imitate politics, but I would like to share with you nevertheless, just a few things I learned about life, from politics.
First, success is wonderful. Success is amazing, it is to be strived for. But along the road to success comes failure and that’s okay. Sometimes failure is inevitable, even necessary. Now I know that may seem like an odd bit of advice for a graduation ceremony, and I’m not saying that you should go out and seek to fail but rather that you should try hard things, and that you should not be afraid of failing at them. Now, this may run contrary to all that you have heard that you must succeed and succeed at everything. But I am hear to tell you that if you succeed at everything, you are not trying hard enough, not shooting high enough, not challenging yourself to be bigger, better, and take on harder things. There are worse things in life than failure. And far worse, is to experience the regret that comes from not trying, not striving, and always wondering what might have happened if you just gave it your all.
That famous son of Fresno, William Saroyan, once said: “Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success.”
Okay, there I go quoting an artist, instead of a politician. So let me tell you what one of my favorite politicians had to say on the subject of failure. Winston Churchill was the British Prime Minister who led his country in the fight against fascism, against the overwhelming might of the Nazi regime, and he did so when his country was practically alone.
After the war, he ran for re-election, and he was defeated. He failed. The man who almost single-handled inspired a nation to rise up against fascism, couldn’t get re-elected.
“People keep telling me that my losing is a blessing in disguise,” Churchill said. “It is, evidently, a blessing very well disguised.”
But Churchill learned from that failure. He learned from that experience. He came to understand why he had been turned out, why a weary British population wanted a fresh start after the war, that it was looking for more than an austerity budget that had characterized the wartime economy. And Churchill came back later and succeeded.
When I first ran for the state legislature, I lost. I had no experience, didn’t come from a political family, had no famous name to run on. I had no money to speak of and campaigns are expensive. I did something really dumb and cashed out my meager retirement savings and put that into my campaign. Lost it all. I ran again some years later and lost again. I was ready to give up. Been there, done that, tried. Failed. Wasn’t meant to be. But I was encouraged by one of the leaders in the legislature to try again. One last time. He was impressed by something he saw in me, something, I’m not sure I saw in myself. So I ran and I won.
Had I kept on losing, I guess I wouldn’t be speaking with you here today.
And I’m so glad that I didn’t give up. Each time I lost, each time I failed, I tried to learn from it, I tried to grow from it. Had I not run that third time, I might have spent the rest of my life wondering what might have been, if only I had tried, one last time.
Regret is worse than failure. Do your best to succeed, but do not fear coming up short, you will, it is inevitable. If what you are trying to do is hard, failure is part of the deal.
Number two: Listen carefully to what people say. Listen even more carefully to what they don’t say.
After I was finally elected to the state legislature, I was persuaded to run for Congress against the incumbent of the other party. It was going to be a really hard race, and I would be the underdog. My wife, Eve, (and yes, we are Adam and Eve), and I were out at dinner a few months before the election, when we ran into a very prominent member of the community. He was from the other party, but he was very complimentary, maybe because my wife was there, or maybe he just liked me. I don’t know.
“Adam,” he said, “you are running a great campaign. You are doing an amazing job. And Eve, you should be so proud of your husband. I feel such admiration for him. He’s like a son to me.”
Well, as we left the restaurant, Eve was amazed. “Isn’t that incredible,” she said. “Jake is going to support you.” And I responded. “He didn’t say that.” She said, “But of course he did. He said you were this and you were that, for crying out loud, he said you’re like a son to him.”
“Yes,” I replied. “But you just watch, I’m going to be the son he doesn’t support.” And sure enough, he helped my opponent!
Number three: Be open with your friends. Let your friends see who you really are. We all have a need to confide — it is part of what makes us human that to be complete we need others to see us, to hear us, to know us. Someone to share our hopes with, and our fears, our joys, our triumphs and our setbacks. So show yourself to others and be not afraid.
During WWII when Churchill was visiting Franklin Roosevelt, he was staying at the president’s home in Hyde Park, and he took a bath. I mean, literally, he took a bath. And inadvertently, Roosevelt walked in on Churchill when he was entirely in the buff, naked as a jay bird. Churchill was quick to reassure his friend amidst the awkwardness:
“The prime minister of Great Britain,” Churchill said, “has nothing to hide from the President of the United States.”
Please do not feel it necessary to take that analogy literally.
Fourth, go to the ocean. See it, feel it, experience it, as often as you can. It is enormous, it stretches beyond the imagination. It moves with the moon, the sound of its lapping waters is lulling, the sound of its crashing waves is terrifying, the immensity and intensity of its power will make your heart skip a beat. The vision of that moon at night, reflected off the white caps far from shore, its beam making a luminous path right towards you, wherever you are. It is magical. And next to that immensity, that endless volume of water that lays like a dark blanket over sunken ships and sunken treasure, over seals and sharks, over killer whales and tender seahorses, next to that vast expanse, no matter how big your problems may seem, they are so very small. So very insignificant. Go to the sea.
As John F. Kennedy once said: ‘Our bodies are made of water. We are drawn to the sea, and when we go back, it is as if we have returned from whence we came.’
Number five: Enjoy a good laugh. Life is heavy, find the lightness, find the humor. If it wasn’t for the late-night shows, like Stephen Colbert, I don’t know how I’d get through the day. The writer/philosopher Sartre once said: “God is a comedian playing to an audience that’s too scared to laugh.” Don’t be too scared to laugh. And sometimes the best humor, the best jokes, are the ones at your own expense. Don’t be afraid to laugh at those too.
My daughter is 26. She lives in New York. I was visiting her some time ago and people were stopping us as we walked down the sidewalk past restaurants and cafes. They were very nice. They wanted to take selfies and that kind of thing. Well, eventually, my daughter got a little annoyed. There is supposed to be only one center of attention in our family, and it’s her. The final straw was when someone asked her to hold their beer for him, while we took a photo.
“What am I now, the beer holder?” she asked.
I was wearing sunglasses and a hat and looked nothing like I do on television. And I said, “Lexi, I’m just amazed that anyone can even recognize me.” And without missing a beat she replied: “Well you know, dad — it’s the pencil neck.” I still crack up when I think about it.
Number six: Develop a passion for something that has nothing to do with your job. Churchill loved to paint. George W. Bush does also. Obama loves basketball. Roosevelt loved stamps. I love the ocean, and the Big Lebowski. Not everything is about work.
And finally, the number one lesson about life that I learned from politics:
Changing things takes courage. It is hard. And our world is desperately in need of change. Those of us who grew up in the post WWII generation have always lived in a world that was forever democratizing, with more people living in a free society, and able to express their views. And we thought that was inevitable.
That it was like Martin Luther King, Jr. And the moral arc of the universe was always bending towards justice, until suddenly, it wasn’t bending towards justice. Robert Kennedy said that moral courage was a more rare commodity than courage on the battle field. But ‘the one thing necessary for change in a world that yields most painfully to change.’
Whether you get a job now or will do so after completing your studies at another college, you will be entering the workforce at a time of the most rapid technological change. But technology has no moral compass, it is neither ethical nor unethical, neither good nor bad; how it is used, is all, is everything. Will it be a force for greater freedom or prosperity, or greater division and subjugation?
Your generation will decide. How we can build something positive, something lasting with that tool. How we can fulfill the unwritten commitment that we leave the world better off than the one we inherited. And as you decide, you must show moral courage. It begins here. In the heart. In the heartland. With a graduation. With all of you.
And you have everything that you need. A great education. An education that no one can take away. A great mind. And so much opportunity. All of our hopes. And our prayers too.
The world is yours to conquer. So conquer it. By striving to succeed. By listening to people. By letting them see who you are. By laughing and especially at yourself. By going to the ocean. By doing things other than work. By finding joy. By being courageous.
And whatever comes next for you, whether it’s a four-year university, a job, a trade, a farm, a military tour, or a break, I hope you leave here today recognizing the remarkable thing you have done. And excited to tell anyone, anywhere that you are damn proud to be a graduate of Fresno City College. And that you’re ready for the future. Because you are.
Thank you for inviting me.
And congratulations graduates!
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