Kaur is a civil rights activist, lawyer, award-winning filmmaker, educator, interfaith leader and author whose new venture, the Revolutionary Love Project, champions the ethic of love.
Valarie Kaur, a seasoned civil rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, lawyer, interfaith leader and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, will deliver Elon University’s baccalaureate remarks on Thursday, May 21, 2020.
Baccalaureate takes place in Alumni Gym at 3 p.m. The program is open to the public, with all graduates and their families invited to attend.
Recognized as a leading Sikh American voice, Kaur has been a senior fellow at Auburn Theological Seminary since 2013. She is a native of California, where her family settled as Sikh farmers in 1913. Kaur began documenting hate crimes against Sikh and Muslim Americans after a family friend became the first person killed in a hate crime after the Sept. 11 attacks. That effort would lead her to work with director Sharat Raju to create the award-winning film “Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath.”
Kaur is an interfaith leader and the founder of Groundswell Movement, an online community of people who believe faith can be a force for good in the world. She also founded the Yale Visual Law Project, where she trained law students how to make films for social change, and co-founded Faithful Internet to build the movement for net neutrality.
Today she leads the Revolutionary Love Project, which produces stories, tools, curricula, conferences, films, TV moments and mass mobilizations that equip and inspire people to practice the ethic of love. Current projects by the initiative based at the University of Southern California focus on racism, nationalism, and hate against Sikh, Muslim, Arab and South Asian American communities.
Her new book, “See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love,” will be released June 16 by One World, a Random House imprint.
Kaur earned undergraduate degrees in religious studies and international relations at Stanford University, a master’s in theological studies at Harvard Divinity School and a law degree at Yale Law School. She has worked on complex civil rights cases, clerked on the Senate Judiciary Committee and served as a legal observer at Guantanamo Bay. She was a faculty member at the Stanford Philosophy Institute, where she taught high school students religion and philosophy, and was recognized as a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum.
Baccalaureate is a multifaith ceremony held during Commencement week. Derived from Latin, “baccalaureate” means to recognize and honor achievement and distinction. As opposed to a sermon for graduating seniors, Elon’s baccalaureate service is celebratory and inspirational, with seniors’ reflections on their time at Elon, a renowned speaker inspiring and challenging without necessarily preaching, and readings and blessings from across a variety of religious and cultural traditions.
Commencement 2020
Elon Commencement 2020 will be held on Friday, May 22. The outdoor undergraduate commencement ceremony will begin at 8:45 a.m. on Scott Plaza in front of Alamance Building. The ceremony will also include a processional of students, the student speaker, a commencement address by Elon parent Leonard Dick, an award-winning television writer and producer, and the president’s charge to graduates.
Following this outdoor ceremony, there will be two separate diploma-awarding ceremonies for the Class of 2020 held in Schar Center. The Martha and Spencer Love School of Business and the School of Communications will award diplomas at the 11:30 a.m. ceremony. Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Education will award diplomas at the 3:30 a.m. ceremony. Each ceremony will last about two hours.
For more information about Elon’s Commencement Week activities, visit www.elon.edu/commencement, which will be updated throughout the spring as events and programs are finalized.