Stanford International Relations Commencement Speech: Lloyd Lyall ‘19
The following is a speech written by Lloyd Lyall, International Relations ’19, who was selected as a student speaker at the International Relations (IR) diploma ceremony on June 16, 2019 at Stanford University.
Fellow graduates, faculty and staff, friends and family — good afternoon.
Foreign Policy magazine claims they can teach you everything you’ll remember about an B.A. in international relations in five minutes: trade is good; norms are constructed; anarchy rules; power talks, and people make mistakes. It seems simple. Is there anything else to it?
My best answer is that IR changes the way we see the world. Any upperclassman at this school can tell you that if you don’t enroll in Introduction to Wine Tasting in the first 20 seconds of enrollment it will be full. Most students would agree with me when I say it would be preferable if everyone waited five minutes to enroll in Wine and made sure they got into classes they needed first. They can also tell you that although everyone knows this, no one will wait, and everyone enrolls in Wine Tasting right away. After four years of IR we are still complicit in the madness, but we can tell you why it happens: your friends can’t credibly commit to wait to enroll; Introduction to Wine Tasting faces a commitment problem. It turns out that as IR has taught us to see this strategic interaction everywhere in everyday life. When people hoard cutlery in their dorm rooms and the kitchen runs bare, we see a tragedy of the commons. When The Daily and The Review engage in op-ed wars, we see a security dilemma. When your friend and their crush are both playing hard to get, we tell them they’re in a coordination dilemma and that their love is kind of like a stag hunt. And when a PoliSci major asks us why our major is different from their “International Relations” PoliSci track, we explain to them the difference between monopoly money and real money.
There’s no doubt that being an IR major gives us the verbiage to describe ordinary things in complicated ways. But maybe one of the best things we take from this degree is the reverse: we learned to see complicated things simply. The Kyoto Protocol and the lack of clean plates in Row Houses couldn’t be more different problems, but they’re both driven by the same core incentives: nobody wants to clean up a common mess on their own. We’re never going to learn every nuance of every future puzzle; we often don’t even know what tools we’ll have to work with. So instead, we’re learning to simplify complexity. IR is teaching us to distill common patterns from the world we observe and identify similar patterns in scenarios we’ve never seen before. We’re learning to find the familiar in the unknown and use it to shape our approach to problems we’ve never seen. I think IR is as much process as it is knowledge; it is learning how to tinker with the machinery that drives strategic choices in an uncertain world.
It’s a good time to be trained to solve from common foundations because the world we enter is as complicated and problematic as ever. From the Islamic State to Ebola, from Rakhine state to Sinjar, from refugees to terrorism, fake news, and climate change, the international quality of today’s crises is striking. The diversity of solutions required is terrifying. It’s easy to look at this scene and feel defeated. But IR majors don’t give up that easily — and I say this from experience because our class is already fighting back.
We are industrious global workers. There are graduates here today who have interned on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or in the State Department; at the American embassies in Prague and Seoul, at the Brookings Doha center, and at the United Nations in Geneva. We’re assiduous researchers. Graduates sitting in this crowd have worked under former national security advisors and secretaries of state, ambassadors, top professors and key political figures. Here today is someone who conducted fieldwork in Vietnam on the legacy of the Vietnam war and someone who scoured the Berlin archives to uncover the history of Sino-German military cooperation. There are graduates here today who have interviewed aboriginal leaders in Alaska, Rohingya representatives from Myanmar, and American presidential candidates. And we’re dynamic and interesting humans outside of academics. Sitting here today is a Stanford class president, a tour guide manager, a certified scuba diver and a penta-lingual; there are also acapella singers, freshman RAs, and a future Philadelphia Eagles NFL receiver.
What unites the vastly diverse class on this stage? We do a forest of different things, but we bring a similar toolbox to all of them: we’re the pattern finders and the problem solvers. Here’s an example. The Stanford AMENDS conference convenes young leaders from around the Middle East and North Africa to discuss understanding and progress every year. When shifts in immigration policy made it unclear whether attendees from some of those countries could come to the Stanford, one of the grads sitting here helped move that conference to Oxford so it could go ahead. It’s one of many examples of how this class has solved problems: grads here today have organized voter registration campaigns, rally students to protests, and worked on the front lines of social justice initiatives around the world. My answer to Foreign Policy is both yes and no: yes, we can distill the core of our degree in five minutes — but our ability to extract that simplicity and act on it are skills that takes years to learn.
As puzzle solvers in a complex world, I hope that we stay ambitious and tenacious. But I also hope that we remember to balance our ambition by taking time to do the things we love and spending time with the people who are important to us. I hope we judge ourselves by what we do, not how we’re recognized — and remember that sometimes making the biggest impact means helping somebody else be in the spotlight. I hope that we remember that good leadership often requires compromise, sacrifice, realistic planning and hard work, and that sometimes this means we have to give up our dream vision to come up with something that works. I also hope we remember we need not do everything: do what you love and do it well.
After today some of us are off to work in NGOs, government, or the private sector; others are off to graduate or professional school. Wherever we’re going next, one of the great strengths of being a Stanford IR graduate is that we can count on each other to be friends, advisors, and confidants. We have a lot of work still to do, and we’ll be much better at it if we help each other.
As a class, we owe a great debt to our professors, administrators, and the school, as well as our friends and family that have supported us over our undergraduate careers. I’d like to recognize Professor Tomz, who steps down this year after 7 years directing our program.
I want to leave us today with a comment on who we find patterns and solve puzzles with. There are a great many brilliant people in the world who do not have Stanford degrees — not because they’re not smart, but because the circumstances of their lives made it impossible or because they chose not to. I hope we open ourselves to passionate people with good ideas no matter where they come from or who they are, and that we wield our degrees not as crowns of intelligence but as toolkits to help us and those around us make change. It is an enormous privilege to hold a Stanford IR degree. Our job now is to bring honor to our privilege.
Friends, best of luck, and congratulations!
View more graduation highlights via Instagram. For more information about Stanford University’s 128th Commencement, click here.
