The following remarks are from President Susan A. Cole to the class of 2005:

Starting with its founding in 1908, Montclair State University graduated 78,670 students in the 20th century. Our best estimate today is that we will graduate 347,000 students in the 21st century, and you are among them. Our students reflect the true face of New Jersey and the face of the world, and they have had an enormous and positive impact on New Jersey. The record-setting 2,993 graduates whose achievements we celebrate today represent the future of our society, and in the years to come, you will be in all those places where well-educated and dedicated people are working to make our world better.

But as we celebrate your accomplishments today, I think it appropriate that we keep in mind that we are a nation at war, and that there are many of your fellow students who have had to leave their University studies and who are far from their homes and families and friends in Iraq and other difficult places. I would like us, in this time of great joy, to take just a minute to think of your fellow students who are serving in the Armed Forces: Francisco H. Alarco, Nana Birikorang, Claudia Branco, David Cuomo, Nakita Desai, Leandro Enriques, Andrew Esposito, Daniel Kim, Maria Perez and Evan Siemers, and to wish them a safe and speedy return home and a chance to resume their studies. 

I would also like to take this time to remember those students who passed away this year: Sheldon Kelly, Kristine Mills, Rose Marie Tucci, Karen Sims, John Oldigs, Oleg Sagalchik, Elaine Hazel, Paul Itri, Clive Boxhill and Kristen Donohue.

Their lives were too short. We hope yours will be long and filled with happiness and accomplishment.

In your years at the University, I hope your experiences have imbued you with the habits of critical thinking that can help you face and reason through the complex issues of contemporary life and politics; with the practices of honesty that will enable you to see yourselves and others with clarity; with the virtue of humility in the face of a world so complex that any one of us can know only a fraction of what we would ideally be called upon to know; with an understanding of the dangers of self-righteousness; with a sense of the importance of the opportunity that each of you enjoys for constructive action; and, ultimately, with a firm grasp on the reality that you live, not just in New Jersey, but in the whole world and the heavy responsibility you carry to know something of that world.

I am confident that you have developed these qualities, and that you, and all of us gathered here today, have much to celebrate.