Image caption:
Ronald J. Daniels
President
Who will this class become?
That is the question I posed to our newest undergraduate students as they filled the Ralph S. O'Connor Recreation Center for one of my favorite traditions of the academic year: Convocation.
This year, we welcomed to the Johns Hopkins community the Class of 2029, who have the distinction of being the 150th in our institution's history.
Like the classes that came before them, they will leave their unmistakable mark on Hopkins' history. What that may be remains unknown.
Will they be like those among you who took our longstanding lacrosse rivalry with the University of Maryland to new heights (or perhaps lows), like the Class of 1947 that led the heist of Testudo, UMD's 400-pound bronze tortoise mascot, and returned it artfully rebranded with the Hopkins "H?"
Or will they break new ground, like the first co-educational classes in the 1970s, who moved into dorms and navigated—sometimes even repurposing—facilities that were designed with only men in mind?
What we do know is that the Class of 2029 is fashion-forward. They gleefully made the long-forgotten Hopkins tradition of "freshman beanies" their own, donning "Hopkins' 29" bucket hats at our Convocation ceremony. As you may have already seen, I could not resist joining them.
That sea of white bucket hats was a true sight to behold, a symbol of the shared endeavor of which they are now part.
Whatever they become over the next four years, they are taking their place in a community which has, since its founding, set out to discover and share knowledge that has made a meaningful and lasting impact on society—from GPS to the technology that knocked an asteroid off course, to treatments like those that have helped bring the mortality rate of cancer down by 33 percent.
They are joining a community of scholars and researchers engaged in debates and dialogues— from the classroom to the dorm room, from our brand-new Bloomberg Student Center at Homewood to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, DC— embodying our ethos not only to contest ideas and refuse orthodoxy, but to listen to others with different viewpoints. In doing so, they are helping to transform our understanding of the world and humanity's place in it.
This is who we have been at Johns Hopkins for 150 years.
And so, as we commence our year-and-a-half-long celebration of our sesquicentennial, I look forward to celebrating our institution's soaring successes, while also reflecting upon ways we can learn from the past to more fully realize our mission in the future.
I hope you will join us—both on and off campus—in marking this milestone that commemorates the many ways that each of you is an integral part of what Johns Hopkins was, is, and will be.
Ronald J. Daniels
President
