Susan Rice, then the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, returned to her alma mater to deliver the 2010 commencement address. She began by cataloguing the staggering changes since her own graduation in 1986 — the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of China, the election of the first African American president. But she cautioned the graduates that none of this progress had happened automatically. Progress is the product of human agency, she declared. Things get better because people make them better, and things go wrong when people get too comfortable or fail to take risks. Never trust that abstract forces of history will end a war, that luck will cure a disease, or that prayers alone will save a child.