(C&S President Raj Vinnakota delivered the 2026 commencement address at Muhlenberg College, challenging graduates to resist becoming spectators to their own lives and instead choose participation, community, and civic responsibility. Here are a part of his remarks below) ~
“At my college graduation, my generation was told something very different. My generation was told to:
Stand out.
Be the entrepreneur.
Be the star.
And, some of that advice was good. Some of it inspired me.
It was part of the motivation to launch the first SEED School, a public boarding school for students who hadn’t been given the opportunities that others take for granted. Launching the school wasn’t easy. Funders told my co-founder and me that it couldn’t work. Policymakers wouldn’t return our calls. Parents weren’t sure what to make of a skinny Indian kid and his friend trying to start a school in Anacostia, DC. But it did work.
And one reason it worked is because we built it with a community of people. People with different backgrounds and experiences who decided to show up, again and again, even when it was hard. A community that continues to support that school, 28 years after we founded it.
My generation was taught how to build ourselves. But not always how to build communities.
And over time, that worldview shaped the country we handed to you.
A country where people have more followers and fewer friends.
Where everyone has opinions and fewer roll up their sleeves together.
You grew up watching adults argue about everything and agree on almost nothing. Politicians. Parents. Sometimes even professors.
And many of those same adults turned around and asked why your generation seemed so disconnected. Why you weren’t more civic-minded? Why you didn’t care?
The audacity.
But here’s the remarkable thing.
Despite everything. Despite the cynicism. Despite what you inherited. Your generation does care. Your generation wants to show up for one another and your communities.
The problem is not that your generation lacks motivation.
The problem is that the systems around you increasingly reward watching instead of participating. Commenting instead of committing. Reacting instead of building.
The internet gave us millions of observers, thousands of critics, and plenty of idea people. But it has not given us enough doers.
What we need now are more people willing to participate.
I’ve watched young people from completely different backgrounds come together to solve a real problem facing their community. And something changes in those moments.
People stop performing and start listening.
They stop seeing each other as profiles or opinions and start seeing each other as human beings.
The good news is: all of you have experienced what this looks like here at Muhlenberg.
You’ve lived, learned, argued, celebrated, struggled, and grown alongside people who see the world differently than you.
That is why the relationships you built at Muhlenberg matter so much.
Don’t lose that after today.
Protect them. Continue to nurture them. They are more valuable than you know.
So I’m not here to tell you to change the world.
I’m here to ask you to participate in it.
Don’t become spectators to your own lives.
Start simple and think about one thing.
A neighbor. A classroom. A local sports team. Anyone who needs help.
It doesn’t have to be grand. It just has to be real.
My hope is that your generation is defined not by what you posted, but by what you built. Not what you tried individually, but what you did as a community. Not by those who critiqued, but those who participated. Together.
Congratulations, Class of 2026!
In other news, Memorial Day is upon us ~ The Jersey shore is filled with so many childhood memories. The hour-long trek down the Garden State Parkway, otherwise referred to as a five lane parking lot and the culmination of the heat, sweat and exhaustion thrust upon me by the summer are just two.
While I liked the beach, I dreaded the drive. There were no I-Pads and no cellphones to entertain me, so most of the time, I fell asleep. Other times, I scoured the road for unique license plates and brought them to the attention of my mom and dad.
Inside the car, music my mother or my father chose played. There were distinct differences in their preferences, my father preferred soulful guitars, songs that told stories of lost love, death, betrayal, and yearning. My mother preferred joyful, rhythmic, horns, drums, trumpet, and Salsa. I preferred neither.
Why couldn’t I stay with my friends jumping rope or riding my bicycle around the block for the umpteenth time? The answer was always the same, “because we said so.”
I imagined all of the neighborhood fun I was missing out on because we were going to the beach. I felt like the shore was worlds away from my neighborhood. I believed adventures, new friendships, conquests, and the most fun I would ever have was taking place, all without me.
My arrival back home was always the same, my friends ran to my parent’s car, greeted me with excitement, and asked me to join them for a little while. Sometimes my parents allowed me to come back outside after having a shower and other times I was sun drunk or too tired.
My world was made bigger on those days we took trips to the shore. I wish I realized that back then.
Today, I want nothing more than to sit in the back of my father’s car, my mother in the front seat singing along with the radio, the warm summer breeze dancing across my arms and the sun kissing my skin.
During my father’s visit this summer, I will ask him to go down the shore. I will drive, listen to his music, and to his stories. I will glance in the rearview mirror and imagine my mother in the back seat with the summer breeze dancing on her arms and the sun kissing her skin.
There is no denying childhood memories grow bigger and brighter as we grow older. The ordinary somehow becomes a treasure, people become giants, and the past becomes something you want to revisit.
Did You Know? A Massive Hot Dog Season: The extended summer period from Memorial Day to Labor Day is “peak hot dog season.” Americans are expected to consume around 818 hot dogs every single second – totaling roughly 7 billion hot dogs over the summer months.