It seems only yesterday that you were here, tassels waving, ready to receive your diplomas and change the world, and now look at you — about to deliver a commencement address of your own. Your personal assistants and speechwriters must be so proud. Before I go on, let’s acknowledge them for a moment. This is their day as much as yours.
(Pause for applause.)
I realize, of course, that I’m the last thing standing between you and your big moment! I say that because every graduation speaker is required to say it. Also, you must look back on your own commencement speakers with a mix of nostalgia and disdain. Ah, when Tom Brokaw spoke at my 1993 University of Notre Dame graduation, his concluding line — “It’s easy to make a buck; it’s harder to make a difference. Go Irish!” — was memorable mainly for its mastery of the platitude-plus-local-reference combo mandatory in all commencement addresses. (Bravo, sir, and for you, go Coyotes!)
It’s an honor to address you today. In preparing my remarks, I consulted two new books: “The World Is Waiting for You,” an anthology of 18 commencement speeches by left-leaning speakers, and “Remembering Who We Are,” a collection of 30 commencement addresses by conservatives. These texts not only gave me the stock quotes and foreign phrases that are de rigueur in commencement addresses, but they also helped me identify the eight steps to making a purposeful graduation speech — assuming that purpose is to deliver unprotestable, unchallenging, C-SPAN-friendly remarks that will leave graduates, relatives and administrators cheery and intellectually unencumbered.
Remind graduates that “commencement” is not an end but actually means “beginning.” The members of your audience may be about to receive college degrees, but there is a chance they remain illiterate. So educate them! “To commence is to begin — to start something new, to enter new terrain, to launch a career begun here at Rutgers,” Nobel-winning novelist Toni Morrison explained in 2011. Likewise, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told the graduates of Benedictine College in 2013 that “we call this a commencement because there’s no end to your spiritual journey.”
It’s not clear what they learned in college, so at least you will have taught these seniors the meaning of one more word before they commence their journeys to all that world-changing.
Apologize on behalf of the past. “You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenges ever bequeathed to any generation,” environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken told the University of Portland in 2009. “The generations before you failed.”
Such mea culpas are especially effective when you assume the burden of guilt yourself; admitting you’re awful makes you look so self-aware. “For all our self-congratulation, for all our now-accustomed first-person self-referencing, we of the present ‘me’ establishment have, I fear, failed our promise and not matched our accustomed boasts,” historian Victor Davis Hanson told Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy last year. “Let us be frank: We are passing on to you graduates an America now mired in $18 trillion of aggregate debt. It is torn apart by red and blue political divisions, ethnic tensions and class warfare.”
Of course, your apology may be rejected. “I know I speak for many when I say that this is not the world that my generation meant to bequeath yours,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali said at Brandeis University in 2014 — or would have said if the school hadn’t rescinded the invitation over her views of Islam. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do but publish your intended remarks on the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, where many more people will be exposed to them than in the safe space of Waltham, Mass.
Suck up to the graduates. No matter how disastrous the world is, tell your listeners that they can fix it. “Your generation should be the model for my generation because you totally rock,” journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen gushed to Grinnell College’s 2011 class. “You’re more philanthropic, more tolerant, more balanced and open-minded than any in living history.” And if that feels like too much, you can always just tell them they look terrific. “Check yourself out,” Wynton Marsalis said to Connecticut College graduates in 2001, “because it’s a beautiful thing.”
Think of the tuition checks these families have written to make it to this day — or the loan payments still due. They’ve earned this last ego stroke.
Be predictable. You’re here because of your reputation. Don’t disappoint. If you’re liberal, you’re contractually obligated to invoke the Other and lament climate change. If you’re conservative, you must extol free markets and mock esoteric university course offerings. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) mocked another school’s class on “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame” in his 2013 remarks to Hillsdale College — perfect! If you’re Gloria Steinem, be sure to cover decades of feminist rebellion. If you’re Antonin Scalia, don’t forget to cite the Federalist Papers.
If you’re Noam Chomsky, just relax and be yourself.
Toss in some wordplay. Predictability doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun. Marian Wright Edelman offered this gem at Muhlenberg College in 2008: “My generation learned that to accomplish anything, we had to get off the dime. Your generation must learn to get off the paradigm.” Sure, it’s meaningless, but when “dime” and “paradigm” come together in your mind, how can you pass up this chance at faux profundity? (“Brother, can you spare a paradigm” would also have been acceptable.) Clever turns of phrase transform meaningless points into memorable ones and pedestrian ideas into wisdom. Take advantage! As Quindlen sagely put it, “What is the point of free speech if we’re always afraid to speak freely?”
Condemn as many “isms” as possible. “Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it leads to murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism?” Howard Zinn reminded Spelman College’s 2005 graduates. And Marsalis admonished Connecticut College seniors to “remember how you’re going to combat world hunger, desegregate the schools, attack commercialism, sexism, fascism, racism and every other kind of ‘ism,’ because there’s a bunch of ‘isms’ that haven’t been found yet.” Never forget, speakers, there is nothing as pernicious as an undiscovered “ism.”
The most erudite attack on “isms” — because it comes in a pathologically long sentence, so it must be smart — was launched by playwright Tony Kushner at Vassar College in 2002: “I am the kind of homosexual sexual minoritarian who believes that sexual minoritarian liberation is inextricable from the grand project of advancing federally protected civil rights, and cannot be separated from the liberation struggles of other oppressed populations, cannot be achieved isolated from the global struggle for the abolition of the legacy of colonialism, cannot be achieved isolated from the global resistance movement against militarism and imperialism and racism and fundamentalisms of all sorts, the global movement for the furtherance of social and economic justice, the globalist, anti-tribalist, identity-based movement for pluralist democracy.” Note the juxtaposition of “isms” (bad) and “ists” (good) — genius.
Humblebrag. With modesty, explain why you’re up here and they’re down there. “I must start by saying that I feel a little bit like a pretender to the throne,” novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told Kalamazoo College graduates in 2009, before quickly reminding them that they’d all been assigned to read her debut novel, “Purple Hibiscus,” when they began college four years earlier. Pecking order reestablished.
If you’re not all that famous yourself, it helps to remind your audience that you spend time with famous people. In his speech at Randolph-Macon College last year, journalist Brit Hume talked about the time Charlton Heston called him up (“Brit, please call me Chuck,” Heston told him). And Juan Williams reminisced to Whitman College in 2010 about the time he interviewed Nelson Mandela, which happened in part because Mandela had read Williams’s book while in jail. Nicely done.
Make your address in the form of a list. This is self-evident. Former solicitor general Theodore Olson gave the University of Georgia School of Law graduates of 2005 a list of “10 simple keys to failure.” At Muhlenberg College, Edelman offered seven life lessons (one was “there is no free lunch”). And in 2007, Nobel-winning economist Thomas Sargent provided graduates from the University of California at Berkeley an eight-point rundown of the lessons provided by his profession. Remember: Lists are great for a number of reasons.
And I almost forgot: Wear sunscreen! You may have heard that before. (Was it Vonnegut?) Even if your speech is short, you’ll be on that dais for a long time, and it can get really sunny this time of year. Especially with climate change.
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