“Our story starts now,” said Marcos Vinicius Reginaldo de Souza, M.A. ’26, giving voice to the palpable excitement in the room as he addressed his fellow graduates during commencement on May 22.
Friends and family from across the world — the Class of 2026 hails from 15 U.S. states and 22 countries across six continents — joined students, faculty, staff, and board members in the Soka Performing Arts Center to honor 114 undergraduates receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and five graduate students receiving a Master of Arts in Educational Leadership and Societal Change.
In his welcome remarks, President Edward M. Feasel shared lessons from his own career, advising graduates to hold on to patience and perseverance “as you traverse through your journey to create value in your lives and in your communities in the decades to come.” The Soka community, he said, believes in them and their ability to make a positive impact on the world. “Please return home to SUA again and again,” he said, “to remind yourself of your goals, the determinations you made, and the indomitable spirit you developed while you were here.”
Keynote speaker Dr. Sarah Ann Wider, emerita professor of English and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Colgate University, drew on the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and SUA founder Daisaku Ikeda to invite graduates to center generosity and encouragement and build a world where everyone can thrive.
“We know what disheartens us, perhaps all too well,” Wider said, citing “cruelty from one human being toward another or by one government toward those who differ from them or through actions that harm the very planet itself.”
Emerson was also familiar, she said, with the struggle to remain hopeful and push for change in a world that seems deeply rooted in injustice. “It is cheap and easy to destroy,” he wrote in the 1850s, a time when the United States had not only rejected abolition, but hardened policies that supported enslavement. It’s a failure of imagination, Emerson argued, to diminish hope with cynicism; it’s much harder work “to add energy, to inspire hope … to redeem nations by new thought, by firm action.”
Bringing Emerson’s entreaty closer to our present moment, Wider proposed weaving his ideas with Ikeda’s philosophy of global citizenship, which requires “perceiving the interconnectedness of all life” and “recognizing the inherent equality and possibilities within all people.”
“That is the work of imaginative empathy,” Wider said. “That is the work of heartening.”
And this work, she said, is something SUA students and graduates are already practicing. Prior to commencement, Wider had requested that seniors share something at SUA that had heartened them in difficult times. She was moved by their responses, which emphasized friendship, small acts of care, and an appreciation for the natural landscape surrounding SUA’s campus.
“As the seniors remarked, this is not a world existing solely in our imaginations,” Wider concluded, “but one we bring into existence each day, acknowledging and celebrating all we have found, learned, envisioned — our profound interconnectedness in this shared world, joining together in this shared work — to be the hearteners of the world.”
Four student speakers — one graduate student and three undergraduates — addressed their peers during the ceremony, tracing their paths to SUA and their visions for what comes next.
De Souza, who is from São Paulo, Brazil, spoke on behalf of the graduate cohort. He credited the program’s emphasis on critical social awareness and attentiveness to every individual for helping him view himself and his work differently.
“The type of education I received in this program helped me to see that I can be joyful, queer, perceptive, intuitive, and sometimes messy,” he said, “because I learned that I don’t need to be perfect to stand up and fight for what I believe is right.” He hopes to build opportunities for emerging queer storytellers as a filmmaker and researcher.
“The next chapter might be foggy,” he said, “but as storytellers and educators, we no longer wait for the light. We are the ones who illuminate the way. We don’t find the right moment. We create it.”
Representing the undergraduate class, Bidisha Kaphle ’26, of Kathmandu, Nepal, reflected on how a Soka education had made world events personal, helping her and her classmates connect headlines about conflict, displacement, and injustice to people they knew.
“Soka University of America is a school that was built on the foundation of peace and humanity, the very values needed in the world today,” she said. “Graduating from this university, we are now well able to take our education and experience to pour into safeguarding, building, and standing up with our communities.”
She invoked a Nepali proverb — “to tolerate injustice is a greater sin than to commit it” — and called on her classmates to stand firm against the challenges ahead. “I hope we fight, rebel, and protest. I ask us to be difficult, to not shrink in our values, and to be who our community has always needed.”
Elena Nava ’26, of Minneapolis, Minnesota, shared that her path to SUA began with loss. Having trained for the Air Force, she was disqualified after heart surgery — a moment of devastation that, in retrospect, she said led her where she was meant to be. At SUA, she discovered a passion for art and storytelling, studied abroad in Cuba, and lived on a nonprofit school bus. She emphasized how SUA helps students build genuine connections across differences.
“If we can learn to coexist with people who think differently from us,” she said, “people we’ve had conflicts with, and still work together toward something bigger than ourselves, then we become unstoppable.”
She urged her classmates to bring that capacity with them after graduation. “It is our responsibility to carry what we’ve learned here into the world,” she said. “To listen to those who are different from us. To stay curious. To stay open. And to lead with empathy.”
Jun Sawada ’26, also from São Paulo, Brazil, closed the student addresses by reflecting on the personal transformation and growth that students experience at SUA. He drew on his own story coping with grief after the death of his close friend, Lucas Colombo ’27, and his renewed ambition to pursue a career as a filmmaker — a dream that he and Colombo had shared. Last summer, Sawada became the first Brazilian and the first SUA student to intern at Ryan Coogler’s Proximity Media. This achievement was made possible, he said, by a community that drove him to the metro at 5 a.m., offered him couches to sleep on in Los Angeles, and helped him prepare meals for the long workweek.
“I’m a proud piece of this international village,” he said, “and with you, Class of 2026, I can be anything. As [Professor] Chika [Esiobu] would say, I am because we are.”
This year’s Founder’s Award, which honors a graduating senior who exemplifies the university’s ideals through service and academic achievement, was conferred on Mareva Dijoux ’26 toward the end of the ceremony. Originally from Brive-la-Gaillarde, France, Dijoux double-concentrated in Environmental Studies and International Studies, and she contributed to campus sustainability initiatives as a Soka Sustainability Educator. She dedicated the award to her mother and brother, who were present in the audience to share the moment.
The ceremony concluded with the SUA Student Choir and Orchestra performing “The Light of Hope,” a song composed by Ikeda and Wayne Green. As the Class of 2026 filed out of the theater to the sunny reception on Founders Walk, they carried with them Wider’s closing charge: not only to be heartened, but also to become hearteners themselves, contributing their energy to the common benefit of the world they now go out to shape.
