Thinking back to my own years as a student, I’m actually more than honored and humbled to be standing here. I’m also a little surprised. And I think it’s safe to say my professors, may they rest in peace, would be more like astonished.

Because mine was not a stellar academic career. Looking back on those years, I was exposed to a treasure trove of important, stimulating subjects and ideas. I learned the habits of critical thinking. But I didn’t take the time to fully digest or appreciate them.

Instead, as someone who grew up in the ’60s, called to politics and news by the idealism and activism and profound struggles of that era, my attention was drawn more to the city than to the College. Chicago itself was the greatest attraction.

It was a time of racial, cultural, and generational divisions even greater than today’s. There was rioting in the streets of our cities; the assassination of our leaders; a deeply unpopular war, halfway across the world, in which 50,000 Americans would die; and a government that lied to us about it. It felt as if things were coming apart. And Chicago—where ghettos had burned and baton-wielding police battered anti-war protesters at the Democratic National Convention—was right in the middle of it.

The College, at that time, was much more inward and monastic, focused squarely on the life of the mind. But I came to Chicago because I was focused on the life of the world. And since there was no Institute of Politics, I created my own pathways to experience it as a fledgling journalist. The problem was, I wound up spending a lot more time experiencing than studying—more hours covering the news and political events than hitting the books at Regenstein.

And this all caught up with me in my final quarter. In order to graduate with my class, I had to finish the work from five previous courses … and take four new ones. And I had to graduate, because two days later I was scheduled to begin an internship at the Chicago Tribune that I hoped would lead to a job.

I worked 24/7 to get it all done, and thought I had. But the day final grades were due, I got a message from the registrar. “Mr. Axelrod. It appears you never fulfilled your freshman swimming requirement. If you don’t pass a swim test by 3 p.m. today, you won’t be graduating with your class.”

This really happened, folks.

So, clock ticking, I raced over to Bartlett gym and found a coach to give me the test. I wasn’t a particularly good swimmer, and I told him that if I started to drown to just let me go, because I didn’t want to have to tell my friends, family, and the Chicago Tribune that I didn’t graduate because I failed the freshman swimming test. And he must have heard me, because he generously interpreted my three variations of the dog paddle as the mandatory separate strokes. I still remember staggering back to this very quadrangle on which you sit today and collapsing under a tree, depleted but triumphant.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And one small reflection of this is that 49 years later, the College no longer has a freshman swim requirement.

Listen to Axelrod’s speech in its entirety.