“Certainty is an illusion,” Purdue University President Mitch Daniels told graduates last Saturday (May 15) at his university’s spring 2021 commencement. “Perfect safety is a mirage. Zero is always unattainable, except in the case of absolute zero where, as you remember, all motion and life itself stop.”

Daniels’ decision to exhort graduates to embrace risk doesn’t seem to have occurred in a vacuum. He is, after all, someone who took a calculated risk in the spring of 2020 in announcing that, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, Purdue would reopen for in-person activities that fall. That earned him considerable criticism. In a Washington Post oped last December about how the reopening succeeded, he referred to those “those who sent gracious messages labeling our reopening decision ‘crazy,’ ‘stupid’ or ‘delusional’ (those are the more polite ones).”

There should be no doubt that Daniels had taken informed, calculated, and, yes, science-guided risks. At 2021’s commencement, he spelled out some guiding principles that are meaningful for not only new graduates but for an entire generation of leaders who, in the fog of the pandemic, chucked their compasses. 

“The risk of failure, of a hit to one’s reputation, or just that the gains don’t outweigh the costs, all these can deter or even paralyze a person out of fulfilling the responsibility someone has entrusted to them,” he said. He noted, pointedly, “This last year, many of your elders failed this fundamental test of leadership.”

Daniels, who served as governor of Indiana from 2005 to 2013, suggested that many leaders “let their understandable human fear of uncertainty overcome their duty to balance all the interests for which they were responsible. They hid behind the advice of experts in one field but ignored the warnings of experts in other realms that they might do harm beyond the good they hoped to accomplish.” 

He in particular took aim at those who focused on “the mad pursuit of zero,” signifying leaders hell-bent on narrow forms of danger-eradication, all other costs be damned. 

Those leaders, he said, “block out other competing concerns, like the protection of mental health, the educational needs of small children, or the survival of small businesses. Pursuing one goal to the utter exclusion of all others is not to make a choice but to run from it. It’s not leadership; it’s abdication.”

Sadly, many leaders and journalists have valorized caution above all else over since the pandemic’s inception. For his part, Daniels cited relevant words from historian Jacques Barzun: “The last degree of caution is cowardice.” 

Beyond calling for graduates to reject the delusion that one can permanently eradicate all risk, and beyond observing that mature and ethical leadership requires balancing trade-offs, he encouraged the taking of risks: “Not reckless ones, but the risks that still remain after all the evidence has been considered.”

Strikingly, Daniels spoke of the curse of potential immortality, which some futurists and scientists see on the horizon, thanks to advances in biological and cyborg engineering. “In the most jarring book of recent years,” he said, “the Israeli philosopher Yuval Harari predicts that humans your age will live to see the ‘last days of death,’ when the species we call Homo sapiens becomes ‘godlings’ and immortal.”

What would be the downside? Daniels noted: “As the author explains it, if you believe you can live forever, why would you ever take a chance of any kind?” Humans would freeze themselves into safe patterns and habits, lest they wreck their chance to live on in perpetuity.

In a real sense, the hunger for immortality clashes with some of the most enduring human wisdom. “If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to,” Lao Tzu says in Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao te Ching. “If you aren’t afraid of dying, there is nothing you can’t achieve.” Those who flee from all risk can never grasp that there is something profoundly liberating and life-affirming in those words.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve argued that ethical leadership requires complicated, painful trade-offs, not sloganeering. Yet too often, our leaders have, as Daniels noted, abdicated their own value systems, becoming parochial and damagingly hyper-cautious, yet seeing themselves as saints for it. 

Daniels concluded by declaring that “the biggest risk of all is that we stop taking risks at all.” It’s a most timely and welcome admonition, not just for freshly minted college graduates, and not even just for leaders in every field, but for a broader global human community still reeling from the medical and psychological impact of the coronavirus’ punches.