Class of 2025 celebrates at Winter Commencement

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and longtime Carolina historian Kathleen DuVal is well-versed in milestone moments from the past. On Sunday afternoon, she reflected on how those experiences shape the future as she addressed more than 1,400 of Carolina’s newest graduates at the Dean E. Smith Center.

Noting that Carolina was “founded in an era of great optimism,” DuVal told the Class of 2025, “our university and our democratic society depend on you, graduates, and I am optimistic about our future in your wise, good and capable hands.”

“The world is big and complicated, and easy-sounding answers to difficult problems usually aren’t right,” she said. “Whatever your majors and minors, you’ve been trained well here to face those challenges. I am confident that all of you are going to keep learning and thinking the rest of your lives, whatever you do to make your living.”

Kathleen DuVal won the Pulitzer Prize for history this past spring. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

The Winter Commencement ceremony on Dec. 14 gave families, friends, students and faculty the chance to celebrate years of graduates’ hard work and Carolina experiences that prepared them for the next chapter.

Chancellor Lee H. Roberts, who presided over the ceremony, spoke about the lasting impact of the people and experiences that students will carry with them after graduation.

“My hope is that you will remember the people and the stories that the rest of the world tends to forget, or never knew,” he said, mentioning teaching assistants who went the extra mile and Tar Heels who answered the call for help in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

Roberts also highlighted the remarkable story of neurosurgeon Dr. David L. Kelly Jr., who was awarded a retroactive Bachelor of Science in chemistry after 70 years in a special presentation during the ceremony to a standing ovation.

Dr. David Kelly finally received a Carolina diploma more than 70 years after he took his last undergraduate course. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

“As you move on to the next stage, I urge you to carry with you the stories that the world might have forgotten at the top of your mind and deep in your hearts,” Roberts said. “It is those stories, those people, that shape our state, our country and the world. It is those communities that we have a responsibility, as the nation’s first public university, to serve. We cannot wait to see how you do that and where you go from here.”

Senior Class President Rotimi Kukoyi introduced DuVal as the keynote speaker, highlighting the professor’s gift for illustrating how past experiences inform the present.

“Today we gather at a threshold: looking back at what has formed us, and forward to the future we will build,” Kukoyi said. “So, it is fitting that our guide is a historian who has spent her career showing that the past is not a dead record, but a living teacher.”

“There are those who write history, and those who redraw the map of what we thought it was,” added Kukoyi. “Dr. DuVal is a cartographer of stories.”

The graduating class included more than 600 undergraduates and more than 500 receiving master’s degrees. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

DuVal, the Carl W. Ernst Distinguished Professor of History, won a Pulitzer Prize this year for her book “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.” She reflected on the nation’s earliest days, and the University’s, noting that education was a cornerstone of the founders’ plans to establish a successful republic – and that their vision still guides Tar Heels more than 230 years later.

“UNC’s founders created our university to educate citizens,” she said. “William Richardson Davie carefully designed UNC’s first curriculum.” While Davie’s plans were viewed controversial at the time by some, DuVal noted that a supporter wrote to a local newspaper, “A republican government … demands an equal and general diffusion of knowledge, without which it cannot exist.”

“Your education here at UNC continues that tradition,” said DuVal. “That first intention of producing educated people who will do right by our state, our country and our world.”