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Thank you, class of 2026. It is now my honor to introduce our next speaker, Chancellor Daniel Dear Meyer, an internationally renowned political scientist, management scholar, and visionary leader. Dear Meyer is Vanderbilt's ninth chancellor. Since 2020, Chancellor Demmer has led a number of ambitious initiatives to increase Vanderbilt's impact and reach and to expand its global presence and reputation. A nationally recognized leader in free speech and civil discourse. He drives efforts to create a culture of radical collaboration, open dialogue, and personal growth that embraces wide-ranging points of view so that Vanderbilt students and faculty can realize their potential and lead in a complex, everchanging world. Please join me in welcoming Chancellor Daniel Deer.
Good morning everyone. I am delighted to welcome you to this special occasion in honor of the Vanderbil class of 2026. Graduates Day is one of Vanner's most memorable traditions, made especially noteworthy this year by the memorial magic of our return to this historic and beloved venue. On this day, we gather to celebrate our newest graduates and to reflect on the shared values that define our one Vanderbilt community. We do so by recognizing a leader whose life and work challenge us to think more deeply about how we live, how we lead, and how we serve. This year, it is hard to imagine a person more suited to that role than Arthur Brooks. Author is an internationally acclaimed scholar, best-selling author, and one of the world's leading voices on happiness and the pursuit of a meaningful life. His scholarship brings together science, ancient wisdom, and public life in a way that is both intellectual, rigorous, and widely accessible. Much of his career has been devoted to a question that is both timehonored and timely, both simple and deeply profound. What does it mean to live a good life? In his work surrounding these questions offers a powerful source of hope. Arthur taught us that the secret to happiness is not simply doing what we love, but learning to love what we do to help others. He encourages us to think about success not in terms of status, but service. His work leads us on a journey toward genuine fulfillment on a path illuminated less by personal gains than good acts. Arthur Brookke is the author of more than a dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller Build the Life You Want, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, and From Strength to Strengths, an influential exploration of purpose in the Second Half of Life. His newest book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, continues that work at a moment when many in society are yearning for moral clarity, authentic well-being, and human connection. Arthur has also brought these ideas into the public square through his organizational leadership and service. As an adviser, an expert on charitable giving, he authored the widely read book Who Really Cares and supports several nonprofits with his wife Esther. Arthur previously served as president of the National Think Tank and the American Enterprise Institute. He's a contributor to CBS News, a columnist for The Free Press, and host of the podcast Office Hours where he engages audiences around the world on questions of happiness. And we are particularly happy and very proud that Arthur will join our faculty here at Vanderbilt. Beginning this July, Arthur will serve as an endowed professor of medicine, health, and society in our College of Arts and Science, where he will help to connect our scholarship with the broader world and advance our shared commitment to human flourishing. To our 2026 graduates, I am certain Arthur's words will have much to offer as you begin your next chapters and as you continue to realize the full potential of your Vanderbilt education in your own lives and in the lives of others. And now before we have the pleasure of hearing those words, I have the profound honor on behalf of Vanderbilt University of presenting to Arthur Brooks the 2026 Nichols Chancellor's Medal. The chances medal, the Nicot chances medal is awarded by Vanderbilt University to these persons who define the 20th century and exemplify the best quality of the human spirit. The medal was established by Edward and Janice Nichols in memory of Effort Carmarmac Nichols and Lucille Hamby Nichols. On behalf of Vanderbilt University, I am honored to present the Nicholas Chancellor Medal to this year's most deserving recipient, Arthur C. Brooks.
Thank you, Chancellor Dear Meyer. Thank you so much to all of you. Thank you especially to Ed and Jennis Nichols for honoring me with this Chancellor's Medal. And thanks most especially to the whole community of Vanderbilt University. I am so proud and honored to join you as a faculty member at this great university. I'm excited in the coming years to bring the science of happiness, the subject that I write, speak, and teach about to Vanderbilt, America's most entrepreneurial university. Together, I believe that we can make Vanderbilt the intellectual center for the science of happiness. Maybe the happiest university in the world. For those of you graduating, you're going to miss it. But of course, you're not because you will be a member of this community for the rest of your lives, starting 15 minutes after commencement when you get your first fundraising call. And the truth of the matter is that your quest for happiness, the subject that I study, is really still ahead of you for the next 70 or 80 years, how many years you get, maybe more. But that requires a different kind of knowledge than what you got in college. That requires an ongoing education, a journey in the business of life. And that's what I want to talk with you about today. In college, you're largely concerned with a couple of questions. How to do things and what you want to do after you finish college. Maybe you know the answers to those questions. Maybe you're still looking. You will figure out the how to and the what. Maybe at the beginning of your career. But the truth of the matter is that there's a more important question lurking behind your education and the way that you want to live, which of course is the the why of your life, the meaning of your life, your mission, your purpose, your calling. That's a journey that will take you across the decades. All of us are on that particular journey. It's it's thrilling. I want to start with a little little test to see where you are on that journey. This is the test that I give my students that I've been giving my students for 10 years now. Two question exam for you. I want you to think about these questions inside your head to see where you are in your progress on the why of your life. Question number one. Why are you alive? Now, now maybe you answer that question inside your head with respect to who created you or for what purpose or for both? Here's the second question, maybe a harder one. Why would you give your life right now happily? Now, if your answers to that question come to your mind immediately, good. Good. We're going to refine those ideas today and and you will refine these ideas in the decades to come. But if you don't have questions, which many people don't, that's good, too, because now you know where to start. Now, you can't find answers to why am I alive and for what would I give my life in the traditional places that we see today online. Ask Claude or Gemini or Chad GPT what you'd die for and you'll get useless nonsense. It'll tell you, well, that's a very nice question that you're answering. It's not helpful. See, you have to seek this by being fully alive in real life. In your deepest self, in your way. Now, 25 years ago, the first time I gave a graduation talk in my academic career, I I wouldn't have given a speech about finding life's meaning, most people felt they knew what it was back then. But today, well, that isn't true. This is the biggest crisis that we face. We all see the stunning statistics about the tripling of clinical depression among adults under 30, the doubling of generalized anxiety, loneliness, addiction, even self harm. What lies behind these stunning statistics is the feeling that life doesn't have meaning, that we don't know what we're meant to do. And this is a strange thing. I look at data all day long. I'm a quantitative social scientist and I've been looking at data on the answer to the question, does your life feel meaningless? The answer was no for practically everybody until 2008. In 2008, suddenly it exploded. Can you think of something that happened around 2008? I'll remind you that there's something in your pocket that wouldn't have been there before 2008. And I'm going to come back to that. But I see this crisis around me. I see it in my students. Look, I see it in my children. My kids are 28, 26, and 23, and they struggle just like everybody else with finding life's meaning and finding that it feels more empty than it used to. My middle son, his name is Carlos, turning 26 this month, as a matter of fact. And when my son Carlos was an 18-year-old graduating from high school, well, he's my middle son, so he's obviously a problem. He was no exception to that rule of social science, but I mean, it was always sort of the same thing. Bright boy, not living up to his uh his his highest potential. We got a call from the headmaster of his prep school every week or so. Carlos just got an F in math. Carlos didn't pass history. Carlos didn't show up for his exams today. Carlos might not graduate with his class. And finally, my wife, who's an optimist, she's from Spain. They're very optimistic people. She said, "Well, at least we know he's not cheating." But here's the problem. He wasn't even having fun. It was just scrolling and gaming and watching videos. There was nothing good happening there. Life didn't have any meaning at all. Now, when it came time for Carlos to go to college at 18, I asked him to write a little business plan. What was in the business plan? Tell me the answers to the questions. Where are you going to find the answers to your two questions? Why am I alive? For what would I give my life? And he did a very preuncter job. He said, "I guess I'll go to college and maybe I'll study business and then I'll play some sports and get I said, "No, no, no, no. I don't believe it." Why? Because, hey, I'm a business school professor. You know what's supposed to go in a business plan? Something I'm going to believe cuz he's the entrepreneur of his life and I'm the venture capitalist. And and and so I said, "Try again. Do something bolder where you actually might find the answers to these questions. So he did. He revised his business plan. He did something different. He didn't go to college the way you did. He took a different path. Carlos went and worked on a farm in Idaho, a dryland wheat farm, 16 hours a day, pulling rocks out of the soil, the low man and the hierarchy. Made 11 bucks an hour. Didn't have anything to spend it on because there was nothing to spend money on there. And after 13 months, then he went to the second part of his business plan to find the why of his life. He joined the US Marine Corps. He went to a boot camp in Paris Island, South Carolina, the infantry training battalion at a camp lune. And then he joined the scout sniper platoon at a camp Pendleton in California. And that was hard. Hardest thing he ever did. But I'm telling you, it changed his life. Changed all of our lives, as a matter of fact, because he he came out after four years a changed man at age 23. You will know them by their fruits. He was married and had a son at 23. That's a subversive act in America today. Today, just turning 26, he has two sons and a sense of purpose. I'm going to tell you what it is in a minute. I'm going to tell you what his answers to those questions are. But first, let me tell you what was going wrong in the first place and what's going wrong for a lot of people and what can go wrong for a lot of us. Your great degree from Vanderbilt is no insurance against the meaninglessness crisis. What's going wrong is that we're using our brains wrong. There's a wonderful theory in that's it's it's um very current in neuroscience today. It's called hemispheric lateralization. That's just an esoteric way of saying the two hemispheres of your brain, right and left, do different things. We put the fancy words on it because that's how we get tenure. The right side of your brain and the left side of your brain, well, they're they have managerial control over two different parts of life. Let me explain how they work. The left side of your brain is the complicated side. It's the facts and information side. It answers all the how-to and what questions. You used it a lot in college. You got good at different things. Those weren't the meaning of your life, but you learn skills. Left side of your brain. There's a wonderful neuroscientist here at Vanderbilt, James Booth, who shows in his research that the language centers in your brain are largely left hemispheric. Why? Because if you can answer a question with precision, it's usually a how to and what question. And that's a really important thing to do. In the right hemisphere, we don't find precision. We find intuition. The right side of your brain deals with not complicated problems based on information and facts, but but but complex problems of mystery and love and transcendence and faith, the meaning questions of your life. Those are the right hemisphere questions. These can't be taught. They can't even be completely articulated. They have to be lived. That's where the life and life resides. The why questions of your life. My car is a complicated left hemisphere thing. I don't know how it works, but I could figure it out with enough information. My marriage is a complex thing. I understand it perfectly and I will never solve it. It's I mean before I came out here today, I got a text from my wife and she said, "Good luck. I love you. I believe it. Tonight when I get home, she might be super mad at me. I don't know. And that's why I love my marriage." See, here's the thing. We get really good at the complicated left side stuff, but what we care about are the complex things on the right. That's the life and life. And here we have a problem, my friends. Life today is all on the left hand side. Since 2008 or so, we've gone from asking complex questions about mystery and meaning to being bombarded by data and information about complicated questions that we never even asked. We've created the means to stay in the left hemisphere all day, every day. How do I know that? Because the average American looks at her or his phone 205 times, which is a singular act of forcing yourself into the into the non-meaning part of your brain. Life has become kind of a simulation of real life, hasn't it? You can't actually simulate meaning. You can just look at things that seem like they they might be important. In short, we stopped using our brains, right? And in the process, we got rid of the sense of meaning. And that's what we need to get back. Now, first of all, why do we do such a crazy thing? Why why would we do such a a self-destructive thing? And here's the answer. Cuz we solved a problem. Boredom. People hate being bored because it's boring. We don't want to be bored. We don't like it. But mother nature doesn't care. Mother nature wants you to be bored. When you're bored, when you're undistracted by other matters, your brain uses the what's called the default mode network, a series of structures that leads to mind wandering, to flights of fancy, to questions of meaning. If you can keep that off, you won't be bored, but you won't find meaning. I have a colleague, his name is Daniel Gilbert, a great psychologist, one of the great visionary psychologists of our time, as a matter of fact, and he's done experiments on boredom to see how much we hate it. He brings undergraduates into his laboratory because they'll do anything for 20 bucks and and and he asks them to sit in a chair and do nothing. Just sit in a chair and do nothing. Nothing to look at, nothing to listen to. They can only actually do one thing. They get a little key fob with a a button on it. If they press the button, they self-administer a painful electric shock. He wants to know, "What do you prefer, boredom or pain?" 25% of the women shock themselves. Two-thirds of the men. So this is really an experiment about the difference between the genders actually I think. But the whole point is this that thing in your pocket it's just a shock machine so that you won't be bored. And and here's the problem. It's actually weirdly made life unexplainably boring. If I, you know, if I go back and I think about my great-grandfather, Leroy Brooks, born in 1862, I don't know anything really about him, but I I strongly suspect that his brain worked differently than mine today. I bet he never came home and said to his wife, my great-grandmother, "Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today." But, and here's the thing. And here's the irony. From moment to moment behind that mule, his life was excruciatingly boring. But his life overall wasn't boring. Not one bit. But if you spend 12 hours a day looking at your phone, you're never bored moment to moment. But your life is a grind. That's the irony. When you don't use your brain the way it's designed. So what do we do? What do we do? What are this? What's the assignment? What's my homework for all of you as you graduate? First of all, stop being managed. Stand up, as they said in the 60s, to the man. Actually, stand up to the machine. There's evidence that's overwhelming that technology is highly addictive. Some of the top neuroscientists in the world are showing this, such as a professor right here, Erin Kelliperry, who runs Vanderbilt's Center for Addiction Research and actually has used the best science available to show that social social media is addictive as our screens just like drugs and alcohol. So, what do we need? We need the discipline that would come from any other activity. It's actually quite simple. I teach this all the time in my classes to my students. I talk about the the neurocognitive programming of not using your device for the first hour of the day. The important neurochemicals that you get by not using your devices as you eat, the importance to your relationships as you don't use them in the last hour before you go to sleep. We need to have that kind of discipline. Second, we need to live in an old-fashioned way, more like my great-grandfather Leroy, things that he would have taken for granted. For example, asking the big questions that can't be Googled, questions that don't have clear answers. Look, why are you alive? And for what will you give your life are not googleable questions, and that's how you know they're questions of meaning. And when you simply ask bigger questions, you open up the right hemisphere of your brain. There's a developmental psychologist right here at Vanderbilt University, Georgin Trose, who's shown that kids learn deeply when they're asked what she calls dialogic questions. What does that just mean? That just means they don't have answers. It just makes you think. The answers that the questions that don't have answers are the really human questions. That means deep conversations without devices talking about God and death and love and on love. This is what else could have been taken for granted and no longer is one of the most complex things to do. The first assignment for many of you graduating from college, give your heart away which really opens up the right side. Fall in love. Truly a scary thing. Impossible to solve. I defy you to find an algorithm, an app that will adequately solve the problem of romantic love because it's so complex. I teach my students that to be a true entrepreneur in life, don't risk your money, risk your heart. I was talking about this to a large group of 20-somethings in Washington DC, the world's most dysfunctional dating market. And I said, "If if you really want to be a life entrepreneur, show it. Take the risk. Give your heart away." Two weeks later, I was on an airplane and a young guy came up to me and he said, "I saw that speech in DC about giving my heart away, being a real entrepreneur. I can't get it out of my head." I said, "Thank you." He said, "I'm on my way." right now to confess my love to a woman that I've secretly admired for two years. She has no idea. And I said, "It was only a speech." I ran into him 3 months later at a holiday party. I came up to him. I said, "Remember me?" And he said, "Yep." I said, "Um, so how'd it go?" And he said, "She shot me down." It was so bad, he said, that she introduced me to the guy that she was in love with. It was a complete humiliation. And I said, "I'm sorry." I was very contrite. I said, "I don't mean to wreck your life. I was This is, you know," And he said, "No, I've actually been meaning to call you and thank you." I said, "Thank me for what?" He said, "That was the thing I was most worried about in my life. I was so scared." and the thing I was most afraid of happened and I didn't die and now I'm okay for the rest of my life. He found meaning through the suffering. And last but not least is a sense of transcendence in your life, your faith, your service to others. You learn a lot about the physics of life in the how-to and what, but the metaphysics of life, that's that's where the action is. That's what ties it all together. Look to something outside of yourself in a spirit of love. Stand in awe. This will illuminate the meaning of your life like literally nothing else. Your faith, your religion, your spirituality, if you have that, faith is a very right-brain phenomenon. In point of fact, as a behavioral scientist, I will tell you that my Christian faith is the single most important thing in my life because I need both hemispheres of my brain. This may be true for you and it may not. And there are other ways, however, for you to find this transcendence. For example, in the service of love for others, especially those with whom you have nothing in common, who can't really give you anything in return. To people who don't have the privilege that you have from graduating from this great university who don't have this education but who do need the benefit of what you can give to serve and love even I don't know people you disagree with what a crazy subversive idea that is to love others in a spirit of transcending yourself across ideological differences. Now that's a hard thing to do that defies your animal impulses. It serves your moral aspirations, which is your most complex self. Here's an exhortation to that. In this modern world where people hate each other because of an a different of differences of opinion, here's an exhortation to find the meaning in your life of not doing that. Here's a quote. Seek out other stories, other viewpoints, even those you don't like, so that you might better know the world, and be continuously reminded of our common humanity. In other words, by listening with compassion to your enemies, you'll find the meaning in your life. Those aren't my words, by the way. It's not my quote. Those are the words of your chancellor, Daniel Deeremire, in last year's commencement. Want to know why I'm here? Because this is a university that lives those values. And I want to be part of this. That's what I want to be part of. I want to be part of that. When my son Carlos came back from the US Marine Corps, he had answers. He was living answers. What did he had he done in the Marine Corps? He'd had deep conversations all night long without devices which were illegal. He had close friendships that he will hold for life, people that he truly loves. He fell in love with somebody and married her at the age of 22. He served others, even risking his life to do that. And in so doing, he found the meaning of his life. Here's his answers. I asked him when he came out of the service. Son, why are you alive? And he said, because God made me to serve others. For what would you give your life? He said, that's an easy question. I signed a contract with the government. I would give my life obviously for my faith and my family, but for my fellow Marines and for the United States of America. That's my boy. That's why he's happy. And finally at 26, he's actually ready for college. He's finishing up two years of community college, getting ready to transfer to the big leagues. Said, "Where do you want to go, son?" And he said, "Well, what about Vanderbilt?" And I said, "They only let in 2.9%. We have very high standards at my new school," I said. And Carlos said, "Dad, don't you know a guy? Maybe." Look, his path is not your path. His beliefs, his values are not your beliefs and not your values. You have to find your own. And that's the thrill. That's where it begins. That's the fun in life. That's the journey that awaits. I'm so proud to be in this community and watch all of you start that journey and as you continue through your lives staying connected to this great university to be part of your life and part of your journey as well. God bless you. Congratulations and thank you.