The Best Graduation Speech Is One Nobody Remembers - The Atlantic

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Congratulations. After four years of hard work, you—or your son or daughter, or grandson or granddaughter, or neighbor or niece, or other sort of ramen eater—are graduating from college. It wasn’t easy. It was probably also very expensive. You may have thought, I’m not sure I will make it. I thought that too. And I remembered that feeling when I dropped in, last night, for late-night custard at Famous Local Diner With Not-So-Secret Custard. But I did make it, and so did you. And here we are together, having made it. The sun is shining, and the rest of your lives are ahead of you.<br>That’s the structure and message of a commencement speech. An accomplished and maybe-famous person is probably giving a similar address right now to a sea of graduation caps spread across a green lawn and under blue skies. All of those hardworking graduates will probably forget the content of the address by tomorrow, if not earlier–and that’s fine.<br>A good commencement speech is not aimed at posterity, proffered to everyone for all time. Instead, it is a temporary moment in which a speaker brings a community together in the moment they share together, and which evaporates immediately thereafter.<br>Dispensing memorable advice is “good in concept,” David Murray, who runs the Professional Speechwriters Association, told me. But it’s a high-wire act that works on vanishingly rare occasions. Think Steve Jobs at Stanford (“Stay hungry, stay foolish”), David Foster Wallace at Kenyon (“This Is Water”), Toni Morrison at Wellesley (“True adulthood””), or John F. Kennedy at American University (“Not merely peace in our time but peace for all time”). But if the speaker isn’t Morrison (who among us has such a way with words?), these speeches are best when they are disposable.<br>Drew Gilpin Faust: The strange ritual of commencement speeches<br>An old quip holds that being a commencement speaker is like being the corpse at a wake: The event needs one to take place, but the person who plays the role doesn’t have to do much. But even doing very little can still go terribly wrong. Some speakers are chosen for bad reasons, such as their relationship to a donor. Others have no relationship to the school or town and come off as clueless. Other speakers do not prepare and just wing it. Still others go dark but ask for help at the last minute, when a speech can be only salvaged instead of prepared. Some commencement speakers even show up visibly intoxicated.<br>But even for the ones who do everything right, the graduation speech poses a tricky challenge. A commencement speech is less about the speaker than the audience and the reason they are gathered for the speech. Graduation speakers ought to be renowned, of course—otherwise, why would they get to make the address? But they must make themselves understood as a part of the group that is celebrating graduation.<br>And that act requires disappearing into the background. Graduation is a ritual that works more or less the same in all cases. And as Murray put it, “the ritual is the thing.” The University of Florida speechwriter Aaron Hoover even defined a formula for it: The speaker’s job is to carry out the celebratory ritual in a way that foregrounds the graduating class, the families, and the college itself. Cosmic wisdom is less relevant than the comforting sentiment that everything is going to be okay.<br>Seen from that perspective, the supposedly greatest speeches, like those delivered by Jobs and Wallace, actually violate the principles of commencement speeches by having a life after graduation. That seems weird. But “commencement speeches are weird,” Jim Reische, special adviser to the president for executive communications at Williams College, told me.<br>Hearing Reische explain the matter, I tried to recall my own graduation speaker. It was Bill Cosby, a name that seemed impressive back then, in the 1990s, but which has since been sullied. But neither Cosby’s former glory nor his present impurity caused me to recall anything the former Pudding Pop spokesperson had actually said at my graduation. Instead, I simply recalled the fact of it—me being there, the event happening, and him being physically present for it, along with me. “Just give them a nice kind of homily, and then get them to the cocktail party and on their way,” Reische said.<br>This century has seen an arms race in commencement-address celebrity. In the past, a graduation speaker was most often a renowned scholar performing the act as an honor. In the early 2000s colleges and universities started 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, the honor became confused with opportunism (the University of Houston paid Matthew McConaughey $166,000 for a 2015 graduation speech; Katie Couric received $110,00 from the University of Oklahoma in 2006, although the news...