Ccongratulations After four years of hard work, you—or your son or daughter, or grandson or granddaughter, or neighbor or niece, or other ramen-eating type—graduate from college. It was not easy. It was also probably very expensive. You may have thought, I’m not sure I’ll make it. I thought so too. And I remembered that feeling when I went in, last night, for a midnight custard at Famous Local Food With Not-so-Secret Custard. But I made it, and so will you. And here we are together, having done it. The sun is shining, and your whole life is ahead of you.
That is the structure and message of the commencement speech. An accomplished and well-known person is probably giving the same address right now to a sea of graduation caps spread across the green grass and under the blue sky. All those hard-working graduates will probably forget the content of the address by tomorrow, if not sooner–and that’s okay.
A good commencement speech is not aimed at generations, it is given to everyone at all times. Rather, it is a moment of time in which the speaker brings the community together when they share it together, and which dissolves immediately thereafter.
Giving memorable advice is “beautiful in concept,” David Murray, who runs the Professional Speaking Writers Association, told me. But it’s a high-wire act that works very rarely. Consider Steve Jobs at Stanford (“Stay hungry, stay stupid”), David Foster Wallace as Kenyon (“This Is Water”), Toni Morrison at Wellesley (“Real Life””), or John F. Kennedy at American University (“Not only peace in our time but peace for all time”) But if the speaker is not Morrison (who among us has such a way with words?), these speeches are best when they can be thrown away.
An old adage holds that being a commencement speaker is like being a corpse at a wake: The event calls for one, but the person playing the role doesn’t have to do much. But even doing too little can go terribly wrong. Some speakers are chosen for ulterior motives, such as their relationships with donors. Others have nothing to do with the school or the town and seem to be unaware. Some speakers don’t prepare and just stick it out. Still others go into the dark but ask for help at the last minute, when a speech can only be saved rather than prepared. Some of the first speakers even look clearly drunk.
But even for those who do everything right, the graduation speech presents a difficult challenge. The opening speech is less about the speaker than the audience and the reason they are gathered for the speech. Graduation speakers have to be famous, of course—otherwise, why would they give an address? But they must understand themselves as part of a group celebrating graduation.
And that action needs to disappear. Graduation is a ritual that works more or less the same in all situations. And as Murray said, “ritual is the thing.” University of Florida speechwriter Aaron Hoover even defined formula for him: The speaker’s job is to carry out the ceremonial ritual in a way that will bring the graduates, their families and the college itself to the fore. The wisdom of the world is no better than that comforting feeling everything will be fine.
Seen from that perspective, so-called great speeches, like those given by Jobs and Wallace, actually violate the principles of commencement speeches for life after graduation. That seems strange. But “commencement speeches are amazing,” Jim Reische, special adviser to the president for executive communications at Williams College, told me.
When I heard Reische explain it, I tried to remember my own graduation speech. It was Bill Cosby, a name that seemed attractive at the time, in the 1990s, but which has been tarnished. But neither Cosby’s former glory nor his current filth made me remember anything the former pudding-pop spokesman had. he said on my graduation. Instead, I just remembered the reality of it—me being there, the event happening, and him physically being there for it, with me. “Just give them a good kind of sermon, and then send them to a dinner party and on their way,” Reische said.
This century has seen an arms race in celebrity startups. In the past, the commencement speaker was often a distinguished scholar performing the act as an honor. In the early 2000s colleges and universities began using commencement speakers to compete for prestige, Reische told me. “Some of them were paying a lot of money,” he said, and like everything else, respect was confused with opportunity (University of Houston. to be paid Matthew McConaughey $166,000 for a 2015 graduation speech; Katie Couric has been received $110,00 from the University of Oklahoma in 2006, although the news anchor reportedly donated the fee to charity). Performing the ritual properly took a back seat, at times, to a celebrity like Michelle Obama or Taylor Swift.
The process is made challenging by organizational politics. These days, many colleges and universities go through a complicated process of identifying and inviting a commencement speaker, usually involving negotiations between a committee of students and faculty, and an administration seeking to recognize an alumnus, attract donors, or beat out a competitor. Many early speakers are awarded honorary degrees, but the prestige attached to such matters has declined over the years; a pile of six-figure cash certainly seems more important than an ersatz doctorate offered to a graduate student or a former housemaid.
Controversies surrounding college speech of all kinds have further complicated matters. This week, the commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, he was yelled at after praising artificial intelligence in his explanation. Rutgers University has been cancelled Rami Elghandour’s graduation speech scheduled for Friday, after students reportedly complained about the pro-Palestinian entrepreneur’s social media posts. And New York University students took issue with Jonathan Haidt’s planned addresson the basis of choosing a social psychologist of NYU (no Atlantic contributor) and author of best-selling books such as Deception of the American Mind ignores “the real-world conflicts and systemic barriers that have defined the experience of our graduates.” These examples may seem to highlight intolerance and suppressed speech on campus. But they also show that graduation speeches are not out of the question.
No matter how much one may favor the fulfillment of free speech on campus, the graduation ceremony is not the place for such arguments. It is easy, if not always easy, to express your beliefs strongly on behalf of someone who holds them. It is much more difficult to bring an entire community of people with different ideas together to a common success. “This is a very important day for a lot of people in that audience, and the goal is to make the day about them,” Reische told me.
Speechwriters I spoke with for this story, including Reische and Beth Bowden, a speechwriter at Washington University in St. Few take up an offer of a writing consultation—even if it’s just to make sure they don’t say anything contrary to what another speaker, or a university chancellor, might have just said on stage. Some don’t even show audio checking.
Photo by Conan O’Brien Dartmouth College Lecture 2011 it can be the starting address of the instance. O’Brien allowed the place and context to take center stage, rather than his humor or fame. He said nothing to be forgiven. He cited many examples of Dartmouth and Hanover, New Hampshire, culture—a technique that former Al Gore columnist Eric Schnure calls a “howdahell,” a hook that connects a speaker to a specific audience in a specific place, so that they wonder, “What? that?” O’Brien ranked Dartmouth over his own alma mater, Harvard, where he had also given a commencement speech a decade earlier. And once he established that trust, he offered some sincere but general life advice: “Whatever you think your dream is now, it’s probably going to change.”
That effort requires humility, a virtue that feels in short supply these days. Instead, justice prevails. Last month, Barack Obama’s former speechwriter Zev Karlin-Neumann he urged celebrities preparing to stand in front of the class of 2026 to engage in politics directly in their speeches. Given the “serious crisis in our democracy,” he said, commencement speakers “owe” graduates “more than processed stories.” But given the problem, perhaps the most important work a beginner speaker can do is to rise above it, for a moment – to bring a community of people together through what they share in this fleeting moment, rather than focusing on how they are isolated.
