President’s address to the Class of 2026

The forge: a message to the Class of 2026

MBZUAI President and University Professor, Eric Xing, delivered the President’s address to the Class of 2026 on 7 May, 2026, at MBZUAI’s Masdar City campus in Abu Dhabi.

Your Highness, Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed Al Nahyan, Excellencies, members of the Board of Trustees, dear guests, faculty, students, staff, families, and most importantly, graduates of the Class of 2026, welcome to the MBZUAI commencement ceremony.

Today we are here to celebrate the graduation of our Class of 2026 master and Ph.D. students. A few months ago, we celebrated the fifth anniversary of MBZUAI, and you are the ones who truly lived that journey, learned advanced knowledge, sharpened your craft, grew to be experts in your field, and forged your characters as the builders of society’s future.

2026 has been an eventful year. We are in a time of regional and global change that is still evolving. In this year of uncertainty, it’s important to reaffirm our commitment to science and technology in the service of society, and to reflect on the central role of universities in this pursuit.

I would like to talk about two things you should bring with you when you collect your diploma and start your next journey. What is the core function of a university, and how our university is a forge.

What is a university for? For most of the centuries-long history of these institutions – a history stretching back to Baghdad and Bologna – nobody needed to ask. A university creates knowledge, transmits it, and forms people capable of using it. That is its core business.

But gradually, almost imperceptibly, today’s university has accumulated other functions. It has become a social laboratory, a brand, a provider of therapeutic services, a real-estate operation, a venue for political expression, and a custodian of moral opinion. Each defensible on its own terms, but collectively obscuring the original purpose.

At MBZUAI, we chose differently. Knowledge creation, dissemination, and application come first. Everything else is secondary. Every role, process, and expense is measured against that. What falls short, without hesitation, we withhold. What serves, we fund.

Holding to those priorities requires a particular kind of environment. We call it a forge.

Forging is the process that turns a piece of raw material into steel. You cannot forge anything in comfort. It requires heat, pressure, and sustained intensity. The raw material does not become metal by being treated gently. Steel is forged by being subjected to conditions that would destroy anything not meant to be steel.

MBZUAI is a forge – an exacting environment by design, not by accident. We’ve built a demanding curriculum, and we’ve set the expectations high. The faculty, staff, and executives are not pastoral counselors; they are forge masters. Their job is to make people capable, not comfortable.

And this applies to everyone – students, faculty, staff, and administrators. No one is exempt from the expectation to transform. That is the deepest respect you can show a person: the belief that they can grow – a standard to be held to even when they would prefer to be left alone.

MBZUAI thrives on two spirits working together. A pirate’s daring spirit, embodying how the institution moves: fast, adaptive, disciplined. And a forge spirit shaping what happens inside: transformation under pressure.

Together they describe a philosophy of education that is out of fashion in much of the world, where universities have increasingly centered the student as consumer and the institution as service provider. A university that asks students what they want and gives it to them is not educating – it is catering.

In fact, MBZUAI itself is the product of the forge. In the era of AI, academic institutions have gradually lost ground to frontier labs and big tech giants. We are reversing that trend, with a painful self-transformation process. The proof is in what we’ve built.

When we decided to develop our own frontier AI system – the K2 LLM, the PAN world model – nobody asked whether a five-year-old university in the Gulf “should” be doing such a thing. That question would have produced a clear NO. Too small, too new, too under-resourced. But we built it. Not by being bigger, but by being smarter and more creative under the constraints. We know this work will empower more open science and knowledge creation. We simply asked what needed to exist and we built it.

Class of 2026, as you leave the forge, take the University’s spirit with you. Don’t look for soft places. Look for hard problems. The world does not need comfortable people. It needs builders shaped by difficulties and ready for whatever comes next.

You have been shaped for this moment – so keep moving, one step after another.

Thank you – congratulations – and good luck! Go Dugongs!