The Commencement Speech Is Bigger Than We Know
By Ben Fulton
May 15, 2026
Among other phrases and apothegms, Winston Churchill gave us the words “the end of the beginning,” also the title of his well-known 1943 book. We can decide for ourselves if T.S. Eliot put it slightly better in his 1942 poetic work Four Quartets when he wrote, “The end is where we start from.”
Writing poems of genius will never be tantamount to the serious (deadly serious) business of defeating European fascism. Both phrases, though, are common currency because change and evolution are such tricky beasts to pin down. We not only want, but need, to draw lines of demarcation wherever we sense change or evolution that needs boundaries. Naming and locating points of end and points of departure satisfy us. It can even be funny. Groucho Marx taught us that “A man is never complete until he is married—after that, he is finished.”
Marriage and divorce aside, few ceremonies mark that line as do graduation and commencement. Half a day perspiring in robe and cap while listening to the dulcet tones of a commencement speaker is not a big ask in terms of time. It is the fact that you spent four years (or many more) cowing to institutional demands to get that far in life that weighs on commencement with a disproportional importance. Some way, somehow, commencement speakers come to embody the ideals and principles of millions of hard-working students who, some way, somehow, want their ideals and principles embodied in the choice of commencement speakers across hundreds of institutions of higher education. Basic laws of probability tell us the majority of these choices will not match, or even result in a catastrophic misalignment. But students will be students, and the tradition of objecting to commencement speakers is at least as old as the Vietnam War.
This graduation season offers perhaps the most varied menu of objections ever, from booing pronouncements on AI at the University of Central Florida, objecting to the now-standard yarn that today’s university students are unduly shielded from unpleasant ideas, and protesting the awesome face of tech-power at the University of Arizona.
Clearly, university students crave one last valiant stand against the impositions of institutional power before finding themselves in the open field of a ruthless job market where there is little meaningful opportunity to join in a collective protest, much less one that gets written up in the local or national media. As your parents’ old friend at a cocktail party might say, “Good for you!” But also, as your parents may have said the day you came home with a nose or tongue piercing, “It must have been a riot doing that. Just don’t fool yourself for long that the world will care.”
My own father put it this way a few days after I picked up my BA degree from the registrar’s office at the University of Utah in 1993: “You want to show someone you’re powerful? Write them the biggest check you can afford, then ask them for a favor worth twice that amount.”
Like so many parents, my father had a way of warming the heart with the indignities he withstood over years of climbing ladders, at work and in the U.S. Army, rather than with tales of perseverance that paid off. When I gave him my mouthful of a response—something about the dangers of cynicism and the light of idealism—I remember him clapping my shoulder to ask if I wanted another bowl of chili before we put out the fire. His graduation gift to me was a camping trip in Uinta Mountains.
The most wonderful aspect of commencement speeches today is that there is nothing to prevent anyone, student or not, from choosing their own. Yes, it is a pain to sit through 50-plus minutes of pronouncements by someone who will never know you enough to recommend a menu item, let alone match your personal politics. But really, is not a 90-minute staff or business meeting that devolves into futility within the first five minutes far, far worse?
The irony of students protesting a speaker who maintains that students lack the will, not only to listen to someone they disagree with, but who may also bore them to tears in the bargain, is not the point. (It could be. But would not that, too, bore us to tears?)
The point is that every time commencement season rolls around, we forget that we live in a multiverse of commencement speeches, an embarrassment of how-to-begin-your-life-as-an-adult riches, a surfeit of sincere, heartfelt advice forged from a variety of furnaces at almost every gauge of temperature. What sort of fool would limit themselves to just one? From the studied stoicism of David Brooks, the charm of Dolly Parton, the antiquity of Dwight Eisenhower, and the cult status of David Foster Wallace, a graduate could spend weeks soaking in platitudes of one form or another. Wallace’s speech in particular has grown in stature, due mostly to the fact that he committed suicide three years after delivering it in 2005 at Kenyon College. The authority to speak up before an audience is not the same as speaking down, or repressing, the realities of life. All it means is that the speaker has a beguiling way with words, the talent to make us all believe in the power of thoughts, metaphors, anecdotes, and ideals.
What the rebellious spirit of today’s student body strains to acknowledge is that there are too many superlative commencement speeches to choose from to be angry or upset over any single one. The rebel knows, as do most of us, that there is no substitute for indignation, anger, or a hearty “Boooh!” in the moment of passion. There is also no substitute for learning to forget personal indignations to read and partake of speeches—so many varied speeches—that feed our individual souls.
As Aristotle wrote centuries ago in his Rhetoric, one pillar of success for the speaker is his or her ethos, or ability to read the room and convey a message with enough personality to make it stunning, heartfelt, and even true. Thanks to the media and even the double-edged blessing of the internet, that room is large, and getting larger. This commencement season, why not abandon the nagging voice inside our own heads for a moment to roam its most marvelous moments?
