And many, many more students practice less visible but no less important individual acts of commitment in communities near and far. Our UI community must continue its vital role in helping you and future generations of students lay the groundwork for a lifetime of civic engagement. The people of Iowa haven chosen to entrust us with the role of educating young people, and to entrust us with scarce tax dollars to do so. The federal government, and public and private foundations, do likewise with research dollars that could be spent elsewhere. Our alumni and friends entrust us with their donations, which could have been passed on to their children or spent on personal consumption.
Students trust faculty to know their stuff and to strive for excellence in their fields.
Faculty trust students to give their best efforts to learning and to behave honorably. When you leave the University of Iowa, we hope you retain your commitment to this community, but we also want you to bring the social capital you have developed here to your new communities. We want you to be a positive force keeping social trust alive, growing social trust in others, and radiating social trust as if it were the most rational thing in the world. We want you to invest that social trust in civic engagement. So let me leave you with a challenge.