At SCI-Arc’s September 13, 2020 graduation ceremony, commencement speaker Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the graduating students, “to ask yourself what are the values and the models that you are developing as you organize your own work, when many of the models and the values in computing, in entertainment, in education, in politics, in healthcare are indeed failing us—they are just insufficient to meet the needs of the majority of people in our society.”

She encourages them to seize the opportunities opening at this time: “It’s an incredible moment to graduate in 2020, … when so many of these systems are failing to step into the vacuum to envision and propose, to organize and enact new kinds of value-based systems; a moment where we get to imagine a future for ourselves in ways that the world doesn’t encourage us to do.”