Senator Chris Van Hollen: Class of 2025, If Not You, Who?

As Harvard graduates, you have the tools to succeed in many pursuits. But following a frictionless path to individual success does not necessarily lead to a better world.

Today, we face many challenges: economic inequality, climate chaos, brutal conflicts and wars, technological disruption, and a polarizing, poisonous political climate. And you, our next generation of leaders, have a say in how we respond to those challenges. You have a voice — but only if you use it.

I spent many of my early years overseas, including in India, where I was inspired by the example left by Mahatma Gandhi, who showed the power of confronting injustice in nonviolent ways — what John Lewis would later call “good trouble.” Gandhi placed great weight on the ability of individual action to resist injustice and create change. At this moment of peril, when we are facing threats to our constitutional rights of due process and freedom of speech, I believe we each have a duty to act. If not you, who?

That’s why, in April, I flew to El Salvador to seek a meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who was wrongfully abducted and deported to a notorious prison without due process. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the Trump Administration must “facilitate” his return, and his case highlights the reality that if one person’s rights are denied, everyone’s rights are threatened. Many political pundits argued that we should not highlight this form of injustice because it was a “losing issue.” If I had listened to them, I would have never taken the trip. But, in my view, it is never wrong to defend the Constitution. This is not about vouching for any one man, but for his rights.

The lesson here: be willing to take risks to do the right thing even when others are giving you a million reasons why you should keep your head down and not speak up. Do not put your finger to the wind to see which way it seems to be blowing. Instead, put your hand up when you think core values are at stake.

America’s core values, including the right to free speech, free assembly, and academic freedom are under threat everywhere. The Trump administration has snatched up students for expressing their First Amendment rights and sent them to detention centers. I have been heartened to see students standing up for the free speech rights of their peers, even when they may not all agree with the speech itself. And, as a graduate of Harvard Kennedy School, I am proud that the University is standing up to the President’s illegal bullying through its lawsuits. We must all stand in solidarity with the universities, law firms, and institutions that are resisting the assaults on their rights. At the same time, we must call out those institutions that are caving into political extortion — the capitulation will only feed the appetite of this lawless president. Hedging and equivocating in the face of authoritarianism will beat a fast path to tyranny.

The voices of students and activists have shaped some of the most important movements for change in our country. As an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, I participated in the student-led campaign to pressure the college to divest from the then-apartheid regime in South Africa. At first, the Board of Managers took only incremental steps; they devised all sorts of excuses as to why divestment would be imprudent. But the students never gave up and, after many years, Swarthmore fully divested. Years later, as a staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I applauded as Democratic and Republican senators joined together to pass the law — and then override President Reagan’s veto — to impose sanctions on the South African apartheid regime. That congressional action would never have happened but for the students, activists, and “outside agitators” who made the ripples that grew into waves that crashed down on Congress to affect change. And that has been the origin story for many of the laws that have advanced justice, equality, and democracy in America.

Change begins when individuals question the prevailing wisdom and take action to challenge the status quo. As Henry David Thoreau observed at Walden Pond, not far from where you are gathered for Commencement, it is not just the physical paths in the woods that are made by common usage, but “so with the paths which the mind travels.” And he warned, “How worn and dusty, then, must be highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!”

There are moments in history that require each of us — each of you — to blaze your own trail in the world based on the courage of your convictions. This is one of those moments. There is no time to waste.

Christopher Van Hollen Jr. is a current United States Senator representing Maryland and a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School.