Change can begin with the people in front of us, says Gonzaga commencement speaker

May 9-Courage is often loud, but courage also can be quiet, said Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, former director of both the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, to the 2026 graduate class at Gonzaga University on Saturday.

Bertagnolli, a surgical oncologist, was tapped by former President Joe Biden in late 2023 to lead the NIH, the United States' primary federal medical research agency, and will become president of the National Academy of Medicine in July.

Speaking to nearly 600 graduating students and thousands of family and friends, Bertagnolli implored them to calibrate their moral compasses with courage but to also ground that courage in humility and mutual understanding.

"That means reading past the headlines and seeking to truly understand those you are in opposition to," she said. "I'm not saying that every controversy has two equally valid sides. Some things are simply wrong, but most issues exist in a landscape of competing values, legitimate trade-offs and unintended consequences."

She pointed to two kinds of courage that the graduating class must exemplify if they were to be the people the world needs now: the courage that stands in opposition to injustice, and the courage that stands in solidarity with those in need.

Oppositional courage itself comes in many forms, Bertagnalli continued. It can be loud, brazen and defiant, like that of Malala Yousafzai, who was shot for her demand for women's right to an education, or the protesters in Tiananmen Square who put themselves in the path of tanks and armed soldiers.

But this kind of courage also presents itself, Bertagnalli argued, in the case of Daryl Davis, a Black musician who for 30 years befriended members of the Ku Klux Klan in a person-to-person mission to teach them that a world existed beyond their hate. He collects the robes of those who have given up the Klan after talking with him, and claims to have gathered 200 over the decades.

"He didn't argue them into submission," Bertagnalli said. "He humanized himself to people who were dehumanizing people like him their entire lives, and that accomplished what protest and condemnation could never do."

Davis undertook this mission at great personal risk, without institutional backing and with criticism from Civil Rights organizers who believed he was legitimizing hateful people, Bertagnalli continued.

"Davis disagreed," she said. "His measure of success wasn't ideological purity - it was 200 empty Ku Klux Klan ropes."

Just as important as courage in the face of those who commit injustice, Bertagnalli argued, was the courage to stand in real solidarity with those who face it. She pointed to the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, where the average life expectancy is 49, 30 years younger than the national average, where youth commit suicide at double the national rate, and where women face six times the threat of murder and kidnapping.

"For decades, a Jesuit priest named Father John Apel made that place his home," Bertagnalli said. "He did not arrive with a policy agenda or a roster of reforms to demand; he came to serve, and he served by doing something that sounds so simple, but in practice is extraordinarily difficult."

"He showed up, day after day, year after year," she continued. "He brought with him no posture of cultural superiority, no quiet condescension dressed up as compassion. He approached the Arapaho people and their traditions with humility."

It was that humility and steadfastness that earned the trust of the people Apel ministered to, Bertagnalli said, a people who had every right and historical justification to be suspicious of the Jesuit.

"Father Apel did not stand up for what is right by making speeches or staging demonstrations," she said. "He stood up for it by being present when presence was all that anyone could offer, and by treating the humanity of every person he encountered as sacred, by being, day after day, an example of integrity and peace in a place where both were desperately scarce."

Individuals alone rarely change the systems that create injustice, Bertagnalli acknowledged, and collective action is often what remakes the world.

"But there's a temptation, particularly among those of us filled with energy and ambition, to believe that only dramatic action counts," she said. "The world is changed by marchers and organizers, yes, but it is also changed quietly, permanently, at the level of individual human lives, by people who choose to remain faithful to the people in front of them."

"Father Apel's life is proof that love, sustained and stubborn and unconditional, is itself a form of standing up for what is right," she continued. "Perhaps the deepest form of all."

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