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WINSTON-SALEM — Vice President Joe Biden called on graduates at Wake Forest University on Monday to seize this moment in history to change the nation for the better, warning that failure to do so would leave the country falling behind.

Biden said he’s more optimistic about the nation’s future than he was when he graduated amid political turmoil in the 1960s. He called the current times an “inflection point” in history in which graduates will play a crucial role in rebuilding economic, environmental and education policy.

“We’re either going to fundamentally change the course of history or fail the generations that come after us,” Biden said at the private liberal arts school in an address that ranged in tone from ominous to optimistic.

The former Delaware senator acknowledged the immediate challenges facing the graduating class. He likened it to his graduation from law school at Syracuse University in 1968, about the time Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.

“You, too, are graduating into a world of anxiety and uncertainty,” Biden said. “You’re going to walk across this stage without knowing for certain what’s on the other side. Good jobs are hard to find. Two wars are being waged on the other side of the world. There’s a global recession, a planet in peril and a world in flux.”

Biden, who received an honorary doctor of laws degree, warned that inaction on climate change could mean that Americans “literally drown in our indifference.”

And when talking about the nation’s potential, he wondered aloud: “Imagine a country where our carbon footprint shrinks to nothing.”

Wake Forest honored about 1,500 graduating students Monday at the campus in Winston-Salem, where some 10,000 packed the quad to watch the proceedings. Biden gave the commencement address at Syracuse on May 10 and will give the commencement at the Air Force Academy in Colorado on May 27.

At Wake Forest, Biden recited the writing of poet Maya Angelou, who also serves as a professor at the university, in which she writes about the hope the world will find “when we come to it.”

“We have at once, finally, come to it,” Biden said. “So seize it, because if you do not, it will slip from our grasp and determine the world you live in while you sit idly by.”

Wake Forest’s initial commencement speaker was to be former NBC newsman Tim Russert, who died last year.

Biden spent several minutes in his speech praising Russert, whom he described as his friend, and Russert was honored with an honorary degree.

“Tim and I came to Washington four years apart, but from similar backgrounds,” Biden said.

“We grew up in a time when our parents told us, and meant it and believed it, even though they were of modest means, that if we worked hard, played by the rules, did what we were supposed to, loved our country, there wasn’t a single thing we couldn’t do.”