Memorable Commencement Speeches?
In this season of rapid-fire wisdom condensed and delivered at campuses all over the world, I cannot help recalling my favorite commencement speech. (NB: I wasn’t “commencing,” mind you, but keeping in touch with the old turf.) J.K. Rowling addressed Harvard in 2008, recommending to them that they consider the benefits of failure. And consider the audience–not a group generally considered, at least as they gather at graduation, to be failure-prone. A courageous move. Whole text/video here. Money quote:
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
She’s not saying that failure is a good thing. Nor is she saying that bad news always has a silver lining, and it’ll all be OK. She directs their attention to the askesis of failure engaged mindfully. Not, perhaps, unlike the way Ignatius reminds us to remember desolation in times of consolation, to prepare ourselves for what will come. (And vice versa.) She went on to discuss imagination. Hmmm….Rowling an Ignatian? Seems so…
And you? Commencement speakers, new or old, who stick out in your mind?
Though I can’t tell you what he said, the one that sticks most in my mind is Felix Rohatyn who spoke at the commencement at Middlebury in 1982. In 2000, Lech Walesa gave a good talk (through a translator) and received a huge ovation not only for who he was, but because he had the good sense to stop when the heavens opened and the rain came pouring down.
However, for the Wasn’t a Commencement Speaker but Stole the Show Anyway Award, I would nominate Zero Mostel, who, as soon as he received his LLD in 1974, started handing out dollar bills to the college administrators and trustees, and brought down the house.
It would be uncharitable to pick the worst, so I will only say that he came from a large university that bestrides both banks of the Charles River in Cambridge, somewhat upstream from MIT.
Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2006 was one to remember. and a college drop-out too and talking about failing…. his best line.. ‘after dropping out in first year he sneaked into a calligraphy class .later he insisted the first printer would have many fonts.. and that’s why every computer in the world now has many fonts’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA
Waaaay back in 1983. Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Left-handed Commencement Address” at Mills College. (Like Rowling, also talks of failure.)
Seems to me NYT published a few good ones every year.
BTW, Elena Kagan at UNM Law Scool this year.
God knows we could use more good lawyers and maybe less of the number.
John Guare, a Georgetown alum and playwright (Six Degrees of Separation), on one of the hottest days I can remember for a GU Commencement passed on to the assembled graduates in a seven minute address advice his father had given to him: Don’t get a job like I did that trapped me for my whole life. Do what you really want to do and be free from society’s constraints about what is meaningful employment. The dismay on parents’s faces was palpable, having just dropped $160,000+ for their children’s GU education.
I do not remember the name of my commencement speaker, what he said, or what he looked like; I remember that he was boring and stupid. I think he said something about farmers. And hoplites.
I skipped mine for a Led Zeppelin concert :)
Hoplites? I don’t think I’ve heard that term since I was studying Greek a million years ago. Boring your speaker may have been, but there must have been something unconvential about him.
Robert Hoyt spoke at my high school graduation. Can’t remember what he said.
http://natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2003b/042503/042503u.htm
He was a classicist specializing in Thucydides; those guys cant shut up about hoplites.
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