what are commencement speeches about

The Best Commencement Speeches, Ever

Looking for some new words of wisdom? Check out our hand-picked selection of commencement addresses, going back to 1774. Search over 350 speeches by name, school, date or theme — and find out what they have in common with pop songs — on our blog: n.pr/ed .

By Jeremy Bowers, Emily Davis, Danny DeBelius, Christopher Groskopf, Anya Kamenetz, Meredith Rizzo, Sami Yenigun

Thanks to Cristina Negrut, the creator of http://graduationwisdom.com/ where many of these speeches were first collected.

May 19, 2014, Last updated: July 2, 2015

• Inner voice
• Embrace failure
• Remember history
• Don't give up
• Fight for equality
• Change the world

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Aaron Sorkin

Syracuse University

Abigail Washburn

Colorado College

Adam Savage

Sarah Lawrence College

Adrienne Rich

Douglass College

Ahmed Zewail

University of Tennessee

Connecticut College

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Harvard University

Alexis Ohanian

Carthage College

Alice Greenwald

Amy poehler, anderson cooper.

Tulane University

Andrew Young

Andy samberg, angela ahrendts.

Ball State University

Angela Davis

Pitzer College

Anita L. DeFrantz

Anna quindlen.

Villanova University

Anne Lamott

University of California, Berkeley

Anne-Marie Slaughter

Tufts University

Anthony Corvino

Binghamton University

Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw

University of Michigan

Arianna Huffington

Smith College

Vassar College

Arnold Schwarzenegger

University of Southern California

Art Buchwald

Atul gawande.

Williams College

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Barack Obama

Arizona State University

Barbara Bush

Wellesley College

Barbara Kingsolver

Duke University

Barnabas Binney

Rhode Island College (Brown University)

Barney Frank

Ben bernanke.

Princeton University

Benjamin Carson Jr.

Niagara University

Benno Schmidt Sr.

University of Missouri

Bernard Harris

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Bill Clinton

Yale University

New York University

Bill Watterson

Kenyon College

Billie Jean King

University of Massachusetts

Billy Collins

Berklee College of Music

Babson College

Auburn University

Bobby Knight

Trine University

University of Pennsylvania

Bradley Whitford

University of Wisconsin

Brian J. Dyson

Georgia Tech

Brian Kenny

Ohio Northern University

Callie Khouri

Sweet Briar College

Candy Crowley

Maharishi University

Drexel University

Carl Schramm

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Carly Fiorina

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Carrie Chapman Catt

Charles w. colson.

Geneva College

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chris gardner, chris matthews.

Fordham University

Chris Sacca

University of Minnesota

Chris Waddell

Middlebury College

Chuck Norris

Liberty University

Clayborne Carson

Colin powell.

Northeastern University

Conan O’Brien

Dartmouth College

Cornel West

Wesleyan University

Cory Booker

Cynthia enloe.

Stanford University

Daniel S. Goldin

David broder.

Kalamazoo College

David Brooks

Wake Forest University

Rice University

Sewanee: The University of the South

David Byrne

Columbia University

University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism

University of New Hampshire

David Foster Wallace

David l. calhoun.

Virginia Tech

David McCullough Jr.

Wellesley High School

David Remnick

David woodle, dennis lehane.

Eckerd College

Denzel Washington

Dillard University

Dolly Parton

Doug marlette.

Durham Academy

Douglas Smith

DeVry University

Loyola University

Drew Houston

Dwight eisenhower, earl bakken.

University of Hawaii

Knox College

Cornell University

University of Virginia

Edward O. Wilson

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Edward W. Brooke

Elias a. zerhouni, elie wiesel, ellen degeneres, emir kamenica.

University of Chicago, Booth School of Business

Eric Greitens

Whitman College

Estelle Parsons

Eugene mirman.

Lexington High School

Fareed Zakaria

Bates College

Francine du Plessix Gray

Barnard College

Frank McCourt

Franklin d. roosevelt.

Oglethorpe University

Fred Armisen

Oregon Episcopal School

Fred Rogers

Gabrielle giffords.

Scripps College

Gary Malkowski

Gallaudet University

George C. Marshall

George plimpton, george saunders, george w. bush.

Calvin College

Gerald Ford

Chicago State University

Gloria Steinem

Greil marcus.

School of Visual Arts

Guido Calabresi

Guy kawasaki, gwendolyn brooks.

University of Vermont

Marquette University

Henry A. Wallace

Howard gordon.

Goucher College

J.K. Rowling

Jaclyn rossi, james b. angell, james bryce, james carville.

Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Jamie Hyneman

Janet napolitano, janet yellen.

USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

Jason Kilar

Emerson College

Jean Andrews

University of Texas, Austin

Jefferson Smith

University of Oregon

Jeffrey Sachs

Jennie cyran, jennifer lee, jerry zucker, jessica lange, jill abramson.

Maharishi University of Management

Jimmy Iovine

Jimmy tingle, joan didion.

University of California, Riverside

Jodie Foster

Joe plumeri.

College of William and Mary

John F. Kennedy

American University

John F. Kerry

Butler University

John Jacob Scherer

Roanoke College

John Legend

Kean University

John Mackey

Bentley College

John McCain

John roberts, john seely brown.

Wheaton College

Jon Stewart

Jonathan safran foer, jonathon youshaei.

Deerfield High School

Joseph Brodsky

Joss whedon, julia keller.

Dominican University

Julianna Margulies

Los Angeles Trade Technical College

Kati Marton

Central European University

Katie Couric

Georgetown University

Kermit the Frog

Southampton College

Kirk Schneider

San Francisco State University

Kurt Vonnegut

Agnes Scott College

Larry Lucchino

Boston University

Florida State University

Leonard A. Lauder

Lewis black.

University of California, San Diego

Lewis Lapham

St. John’s College

Lisa Kudrow

Louis b. susman, lyndon baines johnson.

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Madeleine Albright

Madeleine l’engle, makoto fujimura.

Belhaven University

Margaret Atwood

University of Toronto

Margaret J. Geller

Margaret spellings.

Montgomery College

Maria Shriver

Marian fontana.

Massachusetts School of Law

Marissa Mayer

Illinois Institute of Technology

Mark S. Lewis

Marlee matlin.

Wilkes University

Martha Nussbaum

Martin marty.

Eastern Mennonite University

Martin Scorsese

New York University Tisch School of the Arts

Marvin Bell

Northwest Institute of Literary Arts

Mary Robinson

Maya rudolph, meg greenfield.

West Chester University of Pennsylvania

Melissa Harris-Perry

Meredith monk, meredith vieira, meryl streep, michael bloomberg.

University of North Carolina

Michael Dell

Michael ignatieff, michael j. burry.

University of California, Los Angeles

Michael Lewis

Michael oren.

Brandeis University

Michael Uslan

Indiana University

Michelle Obama

Spelman College

Mike Tomlin

Saint Vincent College

Mindy Kaling

Harvard Law School

Mother Teresa

Muriel siebert.

Case Western Reserve University

Natalie Portman

Neil gaiman.

The University of the Arts

University of Mary Washington

Neil deGrasse Tyson

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Njabulo S. Ndebele

Nora ephron, omid kordestani.

San Jose State University

Oprah Winfrey

Howard University

Patricia McGowan Wald

Paul glaser, paul hawken.

University of Portland

Peter Dinklage

Bennington College

Phil Rosenthal

Hofstra University

Porochista Khakpour

Desert Academy

Rachel Maddow

Rahm emanuel.

George Washington University

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Randy pausch.

Carnegie Mellon University

Ray Bradbury

Edwin O. Smith High School

Rev. David O’Connell

Rev. dennis h. holtschneider, rev. joseph l. levesque, richard costolo, richard feynman, richard russo.

Colby College

Robert Ballard

Robert krulwich, robert m. gates.

University of Georgia

Robert Pinsky

Robert rodriguez, roger goodell.

University of Massachusetts Lowell

Roger Rosenblatt

Brigham Young University

Ron Suskind

Lewis & Clark College

Ronald Reagan

Eureka College

Ronan Farrow

Dominican University of California

Russell Baker

Ruth westheimer.

Trinity College

Salman Rushdie

Bard College

Sandra Soto

University of Arizona

Sanjay Gupta

Seamus heaney, sean lebowitz, sergio marchionne.

University of Toledo

Seth MacFarlane

Sharyn alfonsi.

University of Mississippi

Sheryl Sandberg

City Colleges of Chicago

Soledad O’Brien

University of Delaware

Stephen Colbert

Northwestern University

Stephen King

Stephen r. kellert.

University of Western Sydney, Australia

Steve Ballmer

Steve blank.

Philadelphia University

Sue Monk Kidd

Sumner redstone, susan sontag, sutton foster, suzan-lori parks.

Mount Holyoke College

Terry Gross

Bryn Mawr College

Terry Teachout

Hamilton Holt School

Theodor ‘Dr. Seuss’ Geisel

Lake Forest College

Thomas L. Friedman

Tiffany shlain, tim minchin.

University of Western Australia

Tim Russert

The Art Institute of California, Sunnyvale

Toni Morrison

The Catholic University of America

Tracy Chevalier

Oberlin College

Ursula K. Le Guin

Mills College

Vaclav Havel

Vernice armour.

Ashford University

Vernon Jordan

Victor hwang.

Austin Community College

Wangari Maathai

Warren burger.

Pace University

Wesley Chan

Whoopi goldberg.

Savannah College of Art and Design

Will Ferrell

William allen white, william chiu.

Halsey Junior High School

William H. Gass

Washington University

William Kunstler

State University of New York, Buffalo

Woody Hayes

Ohio State University

Wynton Marsalis

Maine College of Art

Yvonne Thornton

Tuskegee University

Zadie Smith

Zubin damania.

University of California, San Francisco

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Break down walls. Vanquish villains. Stand up and speak out. Facts and truth matter.

6 past harvard commencement speakers offer inspiring messages of justice, courage, resilience, empathy.

Harvard graduates this week will hear from two high-profile leaders, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Thursday and Sunday. Ahead of the ceremonies, we look back at Commencement addresses from recent years.

“My philosophy is very simple. When you see something that’s not right, not fair, not just, stand up, say something, and speak out.”

U.S. Rep. John Lewis

2018 The Civil Rights icon delivers a powerful message on the importance of truth, justice, and equality at a time when those values have come under assault.

Thank you so much for those kind words of introduction. I must tell you that I’m delighted, very pleased and really happy to be here. You look good! The weather is good, rain stayed away. I’m happy. It’s good to see each and every one of you. Fellows of Harvard University, members of the Board of Overseers, members of the alumni board, distinguished deans, guests, faculty and all of the students, all of the wonderful graduates, and madam president, thank you. Thank you for your leadership, thank you for getting in good trouble! Necessary trouble. To lead this great University.

I want to take just a moment to honor the tenure of a great leader, who, through her courage and vision, worked to lead this historic university to even higher heights. Madam president, thank you for being a friend, but more importantly, thank you for using your office to move Harvard toward a more all-inclusive institution. Somewhere along the way, you realized that the brilliant mind is not confined to one discipline or one way of thinking.

In fact, true genius sees connections and relationships across barriers, to build a new understanding of the world around us. Creating one Harvard is much like the work I dedicated my life to. Ever since as a young girl you wrote a letter to President Eisenhower as a little girl, you have been responding to the cry for human dignity that rings out in our world. You used your vision and your talent, you used the great resources of this university to respond to that call, and I thank you. Thank you for your contribution to human unity in our world.

Today I say to each and every one of you who graduated from this University, you must lead. You’re never too young to lead, you’re never too old to lead! We need your leadership now more than ever before. We need it! We must save our country! We must save it! We must save our democracy. There are forces in America today and around the world trying to take us to some other place. Our foremothers and forefathers brought us to this place. Maybe our foremothers and our forefathers all came to this great land in different ships but as the late great A. Philip Randolph said “we are all in the same boat now” and we must look out for each other and care for each other. You’re never too young or too old to lead! To speak up! Speak out! And get in good trouble, necessary trouble. You cannot afford to stand on the sidelines.

Another generation of young people and people not so young are inspired to get in the way. Students from Harvard, Dr. Cole, who I have been knowing for many years came to Mississippi, came to the South and gave everything you had. During the 63 young men that I knew, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwermer, and James Chaney gave their very lives while they were helping people to register to vote. The vote is precious. It’s almost sacred. It is the most powerful, nonviolent instrument or tool we have in a democratic society and we must use t if we fail to use it, we will lose it.

So during this election year, I urge you, I plead with you to do what you can to save and rescue America. To do what you can to save the planet! Save this spaceship we call earth and leave it a little cleaner, a little greener, and a little more peaceful. For generations yet unborn. We have a mission and a mandate to go out there, play a role and play it so well as Dr. King would say, that no one else can play it any better. Some of you have heard me say from time to time that I grew up in rural Alabama on a farm, picking cotton, gathering peanuts, gathering corn. Sometimes I would be out there working and my mother would say, “boy, you’re falling behind! You need to catch up.” And I would say “this is hard work.” And she said “hard work never killed anybody.” And I said “well it’s about to kill me!” We need to work hard! There is work to be done. These smart graduates will lead us. High school students lead us, and guys, I say to you, if you’re not mindful, the women are going to lead us! It is my belief, it is my feeling as a traveler of America that the women and young. People, high school students, elementary school students and College students will lead us as part of a nonviolent revolution. We will create an America that is better, a little more humane and no one, but no one can deny us of that.

I just want to say one or two words to the graduates. Take a deep breath and take it all in. But tomorrow, I hope you roll up your sleeves, because the world is waiting for talented men and women to lead it to a better place. During the 60s, people literally put their bodies on the line! Many came from this University, came from Cambridge, from Boston, throughout the state and throughout America. Just think a few short years ago that Black people and white people couldn’t be seated together on a Greyhound business or trailway bus, leaving Washington, D.C., to travel through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi. We were on our way to New Orleans to test a decision of the United States Supreme Court. We were beaten, arrested, and more than 400 of us were jailed. My seatmate was a young white gentleman from Connecticut. We arrived in a small town in South Carolina. We were beaten, left bloody. But many years later, and this was May 1961, same year that Barack Obama was born, but many years later, one of the guys that beat us came to my office in Washington. He got information from a local reporter. He was in his 70s, his son came with him in his 40s. He said, “Mr. Lewis, I’m one of the people that beat you. Beat your seatmate. I’ve been a member of the Klan.” He said “will you forgive me? I want to apologize. Will you accept my apology? Will you forgive me?” His son started crying, he started crying and I said, “I forgive you. I accept your apology.” They hugged me, I hugged them back, and I cried with them. It is the power of the way of peace, the power of love, it is the power of the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. We need to create a society where we can be reconciled and lay down the burden of hath for hate is too heavy of a burden to bear.

Fifty years ago the man that I admired, the man that was like a brother, Martin Luther King Jr., was taken from us. When we heard that Dr. King had been assassinated I was in Indianapolis, Indiana, campaigning with Bobby Kennedy. I cried. Stopped crying and I said to myself “we still have bobby.” Two months later Bobby Kennedy was gone. And I cried some more. Today we’ve got to get rid of our are tears and not be down. And not get lost in the sea of despair. We’ve got to be hopeful and keep the faith and turn the ship around. We can do it and we must do it!

Here at Harvard you’ve been well trained. You must lead. You must get out there and as Dr. King would say, be a headlight, not a taillight! It’s your time, it’s your calling. During the 60s I got arrested a few times, 40 times! And since I’ve been in Congress another five times! And I’m probably going to get arrested again! My philosophy is very simple, when you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, stand up! Say something! Speak up and speak out!

When I was growing up as a young boy in rural Alabama, 50 miles from Montgomery, I had an aunt by the name of Seneva and my aunt lived in a shotgun house. Here at Harvard you never seen a shotgun house, you don’t even know what I’m talking about. One way in, one way out. What is a shotgun house? Old house, dirt yard. Sometimes my aunt Seneva would go out on the weekend, Friday or Saturday, and take a brush broom made from dogwood branches and sweep the yard very clean. One Saturday afternoon few of my brothers and sisters, cousins, about 15 of us young children were playing in her dirt yard. And an unbelievable storm came up. The wind started blowing, the thunder started rolling and the lightning started flashing and she told us to come in. We went in. The wind continued to blow, the thunder continued to roll, the lightning continued to flash, and the rain continued to beat on this old tin roof of the shotgun house. And we cried and cried. And in one corner of the old house appeared to be lifting up. And my aunt walked over to that side to hold the house down with her body. When the other corner appeared to be lifting she had us walk to that corner, we were children walking with the wind, but we never, ever left the house! I say to each of you, each and every one of us, the wind may blow, the thunder may roll, the lightning may flash, and the rain may beat down on an old house. Call it a house of Harvard, call it a house of Cambridge, call it a house of Boston, call it the house of Washington, or Alabama or Georgia, we all live in the same house. We all must hold our little house down. So I say to you: Walk with the wind. Let the spirit of history be your guide.

Thank you very much.

“Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

J.K. Rowling

2008 Drawing from her own life story, the “Harry Potter” author urges graduates not to fear failure but to learn from it and emphasized the power of empathy and imagination.

Read the speech.

“If we break down the walls that hem us in, if we step out into the open and have the courage to embrace new beginnings, everything is possible.”

Angela Merkel

2019 Like the Berlin Wall, “anything that seems set in stone or inalterable can indeed change,” Germany’s first woman chancellor said.

Herman Hesse wrote, “In all beginnings dwells a magic force for guarding us and helping us to live.” These words by Herman Hesse inspired me when I completed my physics degree at the age of 24. That was back in 1978. The world was divided into east and west, and it was in the grips of the Cold War. I grew up in East Germany, in the GDR, the part of my country which was not free at that time, in a dictatorship. People were oppressed and under state surveillance. Political dissidents were persecuted. The East German government was afraid that the people would flee to freedom. And that’s why it built the Berlin Wall, a wall made of concrete and steel. Anyone caught trying to overcome it was arrested or shot dead. This wall, which cut Berlin in half, divided a people and it divided families. My family was also divided.My first job after college was as a physicist at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin. I lived near the Berlin Wall. I walked towards it every day on my way home from my institute. Behind it lay West Berlin, freedom. And every day, when I was very close to the wall, I had to turn away at the last minute in order to head towards my apartment. Every day, I had to turn away from freedom at the last minute. I don’t know how often I thought that I just couldn’t take it anymore. It was so frustrating.

Now, I was not a dissident. I didn’t run up and bang against the wall. Nor, however, did I deny its existence, for I didn’t want to lie to myself. The Berlin Wall limited my opportunities. It quite literally stood in my way. However, there was one thing which this wall couldn’t do during all those years. It couldn’t impose limits on my inner thoughts. My personality, my imagination, my dreams and desires, prohibitions or coercion couldn’t limit any of that. Then came 1989. A common desire for freedom unleashed incredible forces throughout Europe. In Poland, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, as well as in East Germany, hundreds of thousands of people dared to take to the streets. The people demonstrated and brought down the wall. Something which many people, including myself, would not have believed possible became reality. Where there was once only a dark wall, a door suddenly opened. For me, too, the moment had come to walk through that door. I no longer had to turn away from freedom at the last minute. I was able to cross this border and venture out into the great wide open.

During these months, 30 years ago, I experienced firsthand that nothing has to stay the way it is. This experience, dear graduates, is the first thought I want to share with you today for your future. Anything that seems to be set in stone or inalterable can, indeed, change. In matters both large and small, it holds true that every change begins in the mind. My parents’ generation discovered this in a most painful way. My father and mother were born in 1926 and 1928.

When they weren’t as old as most of you here today, the betrayal of all civilized well values that was the Shoah and World War II had just ended. My country, Germany, had brought unimaginable suffering on Europe and the world. The victors and the defeated could easily have remained irreconcilable for many years, but instead, Europe overcame centuries old conflicts. A peaceful order based on common values rather than suppose at national strength emerged. Despite all the discussions and temporary setbacks, I firmly believe that we Europeans have United for the better. And the relationship between Germans and Americans, too, demonstrates how former wartime enemies can become friends.

It was George Marshall who gave a crucial contribution to this for the plan he announced at the commencement ceremonies in 1947 in this very place. The transatlantic partnership based on values, such as democracy and human rights, has given us an era of peace and prosperity of benefit to all sides, which has lasted for more than 70 years now. And today, it will not be long now before the politicians of my generation are no longer the subject of the exercising leadership program, and at most will be dealt with in leadership in history. Harvard class of 2019, your generation will be faced with the challenges of the 21st century in the coming decades. You are among those who will lead us into the future.

Protectionism and trade conflicts, jeopardize free international trade, and thus the very foundations of our prosperity. The digital transformation affects all facets of our lives, wars and terrorism lead to displacement and forced migration, climate change poses a threat to our planet’s natural resources, it and the resulting crises are caused by humans. Therefore, we can and must do everything humanly possible to truly master this challenge to humankind. It’s still possible. However, each and every one of us must play our part. And I say this with a measure of self criticism, get better. I will therefore do everything in my power to ensure that Germany, my country, will achieve climate neutrality by 2050. Changes for the better are possible if we tackle them together. If we were to go it alone, we could not achieve much. The second thought I want to share with you is therefore, more than ever our way of thinking and our actions have to be multilateral rather than unilateral, global rather than national, outward looking rather than isolationists. In short, we have to work together rather than alone.

You, dear graduates, will have quite different opportunities to do this in future than my generation did. After all, your smartphone probably has considerably more processing power than the copy of an IBM mainframe computer manufactured in the Soviet Union, which I was allowed to use for my dissertation in East Germany in 1986.

Today we use artificial intelligence, for example, to search through millions of images for symptoms of diseases.In order, among other things, to better diagnose cancer. In future, empathetic robots could help doctors and nurses to focus on the individual needs of patients. We cannot predict today which applications will be possible. However, the opportunities it brings are truly breathtaking.

Class of 2019, how we use these opportunities will be largely up to you as graduates. You are the ones who will be involved in deciding how our approach to how we work, communicate, get about, indeed, our entire way of life will develop. As federal chancellor, I often have to ask myself, “Am I doing the right thing?” “Am I doing something? Because it isn’t right? Or simply because it is possible.” That is something you two need to keep asking yourselves. And that is the third thought I wish to share with you today.

Are we laying down the rules for technology or is technology dictating how we interact? Do we prioritize people as individuals with their human dignity and all their many facets? Or do we see in them merely consumers, data sources, objects of surveyance. These are difficult questions.

I have learned that we can find good answers even to difficult questions if we always try to view the world through the eyes of others. If we respect other people’s history, traditions, religion, and identity. If we hold fast to our inalienable values and act in accordance with them. And if we don’t always act on our first impulses, even when there is pressure to make a snap decision.

But instead take a moment to stop. Be still. Think. Pause. Granted, that certainly takes courage. Above all it calls for truthfulness in our attitude towards others. And perhaps most importantly, it calls for us to be honest with ourselves.

What better place to begin to do so than here, in this place, where so many young people from all over the world come to learn, research, and discuss the issues of our time under the maxim of truth. That requires us not to describe lies as truth and truth as lies. It requires us not to accept shortcomings as our normality. Yet what, dear graduates, could stop you? What could stop us from doing that?

Once again, the answer is walls.

Walls in people’s minds. Walls of ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They exist between family members, as well as between groups within the society, between people of different skin colors, nations, and religions. I would like us to break down these walls. Walls that keep preventing us from envisioning the world in which, together, we want to live.

Whether we manage to do that is up to us. That’s why my full thought for you, dear graduates, to consider is this. Nothing can be taken for granted. Our individual liberties are not givens. Democracy is not something we can take for granted. Neither is peace and neither is prosperity.

But if we break down… If we break down the walls that hem us in, if we step out into the open and have the courage to embrace new beginnings, everything is possible. Walls can collapse. Dictatorships can disappear. We can halt global warming. We can eradicate starvation. We can eliminate diseases. We can give people, especially girls, access to education. We can fight the causes of displacement and forced migration. We can do all of that. Let’s not start by asking what isn’t possible, or focusing on what has always been that way. Let’s start by asking what is possible and looking for things that have never been done like that before. This is exactly what I said to the Bundestag, the German Parliament, in 2005 in my first policy statement as newly elected Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany and the first woman to hold this office. I want to use precisely these words to share with you my fifth thought. Let us surprise ourselves by showing what is possible. Let us surprise ourselves by showing what we are capable of. In my own life, it was the fall of the Berlin Wall that allowed me almost 30 years ago to step out into the open. At that point, I left my work as a scientist behind me and entered politics. That was an exciting and magical time, just as your lives will be exciting and magical.

I also experienced moments of doubt and worry, for at that time, we all knew what lay behind us, but not what might lie ahead. Perhaps that reflects a little how you, too, are feeling today, amidst all the joy of this occasion.

The six thought I also want to share with you is this. The moment when you step out into the open is also a moment of risk-taking. Letting go of the old is part of a new beginning. There is no beginning without an end, no day without night, no life without death. Our whole life consists of the difference, the space between beginning and ending.

It is what lies in between that we call life and experience. I believe at time and time again, we need to be prepared to keep bringing things to an end in order to feel the magic of new beginnings and to make the most of opportunities. That was what I learned as a student, and it is what I now in politics. Who knows what life will bring after my time as a politician? That, too, is completely open. Only one thing is clear. It will again be something different and something new.

That’s why I want to leave this wish with you. Tear down walls of ignorance and narrow mindedness for nothing has to stay as it is.

It’s six things. Take joint action in the interest of the moderate lateral global world. Keep asking yourselves, “Am I doing something because it is right, or simply because it’s possible?” Don’t forget that freedom is never something that can be taken for granted. Surprise yourself with what is possible. Remember that openness always involves risks. Letting go of the old is part of the new beginning. Above all, nothing can be taken for granted. Everything is possible. Thank you.

“In a two-hour movie, you get a handful of character-defining moments, but in real life, you face them every day. Life is one strong, long string of character-defining moments.”

Steven Spielberg

2016 Don’t shy away from the world’s pain, the filmmaker urged grads. Instead, examine it, challenge it and, while you’re at it, find “a villain to vanquish.”

Thank you, thank you, President Faust, and Paul Choi, thank you so much.

It’s an honor and a thrill to address this group of distinguished alumni and supportive friends and kvelling parents. We’ve all gathered to share in the joy of this day, so please join me in congratulating Harvard’s Class of 2016.

I can remember my own college graduation, which is easy, since it was only 14 years ago. How many of you took 37 years to graduate? Because, like most of you, I began college in my teens, but sophomore year, I was offered my dream job at Universal Studios, so I dropped out. I told my parents if my movie career didn’t go well, I’d re-enroll. It went all right.But eventually, I returned for one big reason. Most people go to college for an education, and some go for their parents, but I went for my kids. I’m the father of seven, and I kept insisting on the importance of going to college, but I hadn’t walked the walk. So, in my fifties, I re-enrolled at Cal State — Long Beach, and I earned my degree.I just have to add: It helped that they gave me course credit in paleontology for the work I did on Jurassic Park. That’s three units for Jurassic Park, thank you. Well I left college because I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and some of you know, too — but some of you don’t. Or maybe you thought you knew but are now questioning that choice. Maybe you’re sitting there trying to figure out how to tell your parents that you want to be a doctor and not a comedy writer.

Well, what you choose to do next is what we call in the movies the “character-defining moment.” Now, these are moments you’re very familiar with, like in the last “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” when Rey realizes the force is with her. Or Indiana Jones choosing mission over fear by jumping over a pile of snakes. Now in a two-hour movie, you get a handful of character-defining moments, but in real life, you face them every day. Life is one strong, long string of character-defining moments. And I was lucky that at 18 I knew what I exactly wanted to do. But I didn’t know who I was. How could I? And how could any of us? Because for the first 25 years of our lives, we are trained to listen to voices that are not our own. Parents and professors fill our heads with wisdom and information, and then employers and mentors take their place and explain how this world really works. And usually these voices of authority make sense, but sometimes, doubt starts to creep into our heads and into our hearts. And even when we think, “that’s not quite how I see the world,” it’s kind of easier to just to nod in agreement and go along, and for a while, I let that going along define my character. Because I was repressing my own point of view, because like in that Nilsson song, “Everybody was talkin’ at me, so I couldn’t hear the echoes of my mind.” And at first, the internal voice I needed to listen to was hardly audible, and it was hardly noticeable — kind of like me in high school.

But then I started paying more attention, and my intuition kicked in. And I want to be clear that your intuition is different from your conscience. They work in tandem, but here’s the distinction: Your conscience shouts, “here’s what you should do,” while your intuition whispers, “here’s what you could do.” Listen to that voice that tells you what you could do. Nothing will define your character more than that. Because once I turned to my intuition, and I tuned into it, certain projects began to pull me into them, and others, I turned away from. And up until the 1980s, my movies were mostly, I guess what you could call “escapist.” And I don’t dismiss any of these movies — not even 1941. Not even that one. And many of these early films reflected the values that I cared deeply about, and I still do. But I was in a celluloid bubble, because I’d cut my education short, my worldview was limited to what I could dream up in my head, not what the world could teach me.

But then I directed “The Color Purple.” And this one film opened my eyes to experiences that I never could have imagined, and yet were all too real. This story was filled with deep pain and deeper truths, like when Shug Avery says, “Everything wants to be loved.” My gut, which was my intuition, told me that more people needed to meet these characters and experience these truths. And while making that film, I realized that a movie could also be a mission. I hope all of you find that sense of mission. Don’t turn away from what’s painful. Examine it. Challenge it. My job is to create a world that lasts two hours. Your job is to create a world that lasts forever. You are the future innovators, motivators, leaders and caretakers. And the way you create a better future is by studying the past.

“Jurassic Park” writer Michael Crichton, who graduated from both this college and this medical school, liked to quote a favorite professor of his who said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree. So history majors: Good choice, you’re in great shape…Not in the job market, but culturally. The rest of us have to make a little effort. Social media that we’re inundated and swarmed with is about the here and now. But I’ve been fighting and fighting inside my own family to get all my kids to look behind them, to look at what already has happened. Because to understand who they are is to understand who we were, and who their grandparents were, and then, what this country was like when they emigrated here. We are a nation of immigrants at least for now.

So to me, this means we all have to tell our own stories. We have so many stories to tell. Talk to your parents and your grandparents, if you can, and ask them about their stories. And I promise you, like I have promised my kids, you will not be bored. And that’s why I so often make movies based on real-life events. I look to history not to be didactic, cause that’s just a bonus, but I look because the past is filled with the greatest stories that have ever been told. Heroes and villains are not literary constructs, but they’re at the heart of all history.

And again, this is why it’s so important to listen to your internal whisper. It’s the same one that compelled Abraham Lincoln and Oskar Schindler to make the correct moral choices. In your defining moments, do not let your morals be swayed by convenience or expediency. Sticking to your character requires a lot of courage. And to be courageous, you’re going to need a lot of support.And if you’re lucky, you have parents like mine. I consider my mom my lucky charm. And when I was 12 years old, my father handed me a movie camera, the tool that allowed me to make sense of this world. And I am so grateful to him for that. And I am grateful that he’s here at Harvard, sitting right down there. My dad is 99 years old, which means he’s only one year younger than Widener Library. But unlike Widener, he’s had zero cosmetic work. And dad, there’s a lady behind you, also 99, and I’ll introduce you after this is over, okay? But look, if your family’s not always available, there’s backup. Near the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life” — you remember that movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life”? Clarence the Angel inscribes a book with this: “No man is a failure who has friends.” And I hope you hang on to the friendships you’ve made here at Harvard. And among your friends, I hope you find someone you want to share your life with.

I imagine some of you in this yard may be a tad cynical, but I want to be unapologetically sentimental. I spoke about the importance of intuition and how there’s no greater voice to follow. That is, until you meet the love of your life. And this is what happened when I met and married Kate, and that became the greatest character-defining moment of my life.Love, support, courage, intuition. All of these things are in your hero’s quiver, but still, a hero needs one more thing: A hero needs a villain to vanquish. And you’re all in luck. This world is full of monsters. And there’s racism, homophobia, ethnic hatred, class hatred, there’s political hatred, and there’s religious hatred.As a kid, I was bullied — for being Jewish. This was upsetting, but compared to what my parents and grandparents had faced, it felt tame. Because we truly believed that anti-Semitism was fading. And we were wrong. Over the last two years, nearly 20,000 Jews have left Europe to find higher ground. And earlier this year, I was at the Israeli embassy when President Obama stated the sad truth. He said: “We must confront the reality that around the world, anti-Semitism is on the rise. We cannot deny it.”

My own desire to confront that reality compelled me to start, in 1994, the Shoah Foundation. And since then, we’ve spoken to over 53,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses in 63 countries and taken all their video testimonies. And we’re now gathering testimonies from genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenia and Nanking. Because we must never forget that the inconceivable doesn’t happen — it happens frequently. Atrocities are happening right now. And so we wonder not just, “When will this hatred end?” but, “How did it begin?”

Now, I don’t have to tell a crowd of Red Sox fans that we are wired for tribalism. But beyond rooting for the home team, tribalism has a much darker side. Instinctively and maybe even genetically, we divide the world into “us” and “them.” So the burning question must be: How do all of us together find the “we?” How do we do that? There’s still so much work to be done, and sometimes I feel the work hasn’t even begun. And it’s not just anti-Semitism that’s surging — Islamophobia’s on the rise, too. Because there’s no difference between anyone who is discriminated against, whether it’s the Muslims, or the Jews, or minorities on the border states, or the LGBT community — it is all big one hate.

And to me, and, I think, to all of you, the only answer to more hate is more humanity. We gotta repair — we have to replace fear with curiosity. “Us” and “them” — we’ll find the “we” by connecting with each other. And by believing that we’re members of the same tribe. And by feeling empathy for every soul — even Yalies.

My son graduated from Yale, thank you …

But make sure this empathy isn’t just something that you feel. Make it something you act upon. That means vote. Peaceably protest. Speak up for those who can’t and speak up for those who may be shouting but aren’t being hard. Let your conscience shout as loud as it wants if you’re using it in the service of others.

And as an example of action in service of others, you need to look no further than this Hollywood-worthy backdrop of Memorial Church. Its south wall bears the names of Harvard alumni — like President Faust has already mentioned — students and faculty members, who gave their lives in World War II. All told, 697 souls, who once tread the ground where stand now, were lost. And at a service in this church in late 1945, Harvard President James Conant — which President Faust also mentioned — honored the brave and called upon the community to “reflect the radiance of their deeds.”

Seventy years later, this message still holds true. Because their sacrifice is not a debt that can be repaid in a single generation. It must be repaid with every generation. Just as we must never forget the atrocities, we must never forget those who fought for freedom. So as you leave this college and head out into the world, continue please to ‘reflect the radiance of their deeds,’ or as Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan would say, “Earn this.”

And please stay connected. Please never lose eye contact. This may not be a lesson you want to hear from a person who creates media, but we are spending more time looking down at our devices than we are looking in each other’s eyes. So, forgive me, but let’s start right now. Everyone here, please find someone’s eyes to look into. Students, and alumni and you too, President Faust, all of you, turn to someone you don’t know or don’t know very well. They may be standing behind you, or a couple of rows ahead. Just let your eyes meet. That’s it. That emotion you’re feeling is our shared humanity mixed in with a little social discomfort.

But, if you remember nothing else from today, I hope you remember this moment of human connection. And I hope you all had a lot of that over the past four years. Because today you start down the path of becoming the generation on which the next generation stands. And I’ve imagined many possible futures in my films, but you will determine the actual future. And I hope that it’s filled with justice and peace.

And finally, I wish you all a true, Hollywood-style happy ending. I hope you outrun the T. rex, catch the criminal and for your parents’ sake, maybe every now and then, just like E.T.: Go home. Thank you.

“Facts and truth are matters of life and death. Misinformation, disinformation, delusions, and deceit can kill.”

Martin Baron

2020 “Imperfect though [it] may be” an independent press is key to ensuring that facts are presented and truth defended in society,” the Washington Post executive editor said.

Good morning from my home. Like you, I wish we were together on campus.There is so much now we can no longer take for granted. The air we breathe is first among them. So, those of us who are healthy have ample reason to be grateful. I am also grateful to Harvard and to President Bacow for inviting me to be with you. To the Harvard Class of 2020, congratulations. And congratulations to the parents, professors, mentors and friends who helped you along the way. Joining you for graduation is a high honor.

For me, this is an opportunity – an opportunity to speak about subjects that I believe are of real urgency. Especially now during a worldwide health emergency.

I would like to discuss with you the need for a commitment to facts and to truth. Only a few months ago, I would have settled for emphasizing that our democracy depends on facts and truth. And it surely does. But now, as we can plainly see, it is more elemental than that.

Facts and truth are matters of life and death. Misinformation, disinformation, delusions and deceit can kill. Here is what can move us forward: Science and medicine. Study and knowledge. Expertise and reason. In other words, fact and truth. I want to tell you why free expression by all of us and an independent press, imperfect though we may be, is essential to getting at the truth. And why we must hold government to account. And hold other powerful interests to account as well.When I began thinking about these remarks, I expected, of course, to be on Harvard’s campus. And I thought: Not a bad place to talk about a free press. Not a bad place to talk about our often-testy relationship with official power.

It was in Boston, after all, where the first newspaper of the American colonies was founded. Its first edition was published September 25th, 1690. The very next day, the governor and council of Massachusetts shut it down. So, the press of this country has long known what it means to face a government that aims to silence it. Fortunately, there has been progress. With the First Amendment, James Madison championed the right of “freely examining public characters and measures.”

But it took a very long time before we as a nation fully absorbed what Madison was talking about. We took many ominous turns. We had the Alien and Sedition acts under John Adams, the Sedition and Espionage Acts under Woodrow Wilson, the McCarthy era. It was not always clear where we as a nation would end up.

Finally, witnessing the authoritarianism of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, we began to secure a free press in this country. The Supreme Court would forcefully emphasize the press’ role in guaranteeing a democracy. Justice Hugo Black said it well decades later: “The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.” Not only the secrets of government, I would add. Our duty to inform the public does not stop there. Not by a long shot.

That was evident during my years as a journalist in Boston. Amid today’s crisis, it seems like another era. And I guess it is. But I want to tell you about it — because I think it remains instructive about what a strong, independent press must do.

I started as editor of the Boston Globe in the summer of 2001. One day prior to my start date, a Globe columnist wrote about a shocking case. A priest had been accused of abusing as many as 80 kids. A lawsuit alleged that the cardinal in Boston at the time knew about the serial abuse, didn’t do anything about it — and repeatedly reassigned this priest from parish to parish, warning no one, over decades. The Archdiocese called the accusations baseless and reckless. The Globe columnist wrote that the truth might never be known. Internal documents that might reveal it had been sealed by a judge. On my first day of work, we asked the question: How do we get at the truth? Because the public deserved to know.

That question led us to challenge the judge’s secrecy order. And our journalists launched an investigation of their own. In early 2002, we published what we had learned through reporting and by prevailing in court. We published the truth: The cardinal did know about the abuse by this priest. Yet he kept him in ministry, thus enabling further abuse. Dozens of clergy in the diocese had committed similar offenses. The cardinal had covered it all up.

And a bigger truth would emerge: Covering up such abuse had been practice and policy in the Church for decades. Only now the powerful were being held to account.

Late in 2002, after hundreds of stories on this subject, I received a letter from a Father Thomas P. Doyle. Father Doyle had struggled for years – in vain — to get the Church to confront the very issue we were writing about. He expressed deep gratitude for our work. “It is momentous,” he wrote, “and its good effects will reverberate for decades.” Father Doyle did not see journalists as the enemy. He saw us an ally when one was sorely needed. So did abuse survivors. I kept Father Doyle’s letter on my desk — a daily reminder of what journalists must do when we see evidence of wrongdoing.

Harvard’s commencement speaker two years ago, civil rights pioneer John Lewis, once said this: “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.” We as journalists have the capacity – along with the constitutional right — to say and do something. We also have the obligation. And we must have the will. So must you. Every one of you has a stake in this idea of free expression. You want to be free to express your views. You should be free to hear the views of others, the same or different. You want to be free to watch any movie. To read any book. To listen to any lyrics. You should be free to say what you know is true without threat of government reprisal.And you should acknowledge this if you value these freedoms that come with democracy: Democracy cannot exist without a free and independent press. It never has.

Leaders who crave more power for themselves always move quickly to crush an independent press. Next, they destroy free expression itself. Sadly, much of the world is on that worrisome path. And efforts in this country to demonize, delegitimize and dehumanize the press give license to other governments to do the same – and to do far worse.

By the end of last year, a near-record 250 journalists worldwide were sitting in prison. Thirty of them faced accusations of “false news,” a charge virtually unheard-of only seven years earlier.

Turkey has been trading places with China as No. 1 on the list of countries that jail the most journalists. The Turkish government has shut down more than 100 media outlets and charged many journalists as terrorists. Independent media have been largely extinguished. China, of course, imposes some of the world’s tightest censorship on what its citizens can see and hear.

In Hungary, the prime minister has waged war on independent media. Harvard Nieman fellow Andras Petho, who runs an investigative reporting center there, notes that the prime minister’s business allies are “taking over hundreds of outlets and turning them into propaganda machines.”

Like other heads of state, Hungary’s prime minister has exploited the pandemic to grab more power, suppress inconvenient facts, and escalate pressure on news outlets. A new law threatens up to five-year jail terms against those accused of spreading supposedly false information. Independent news outlets have questioned how the crisis was managed. And the fear now is that such accountability journalism will lead to harassment and arrests, as it has in other countries.

In the Philippines, the courageous Maria Ressa, who founded the country’s largest online-only news site, has been battling government harassment for years on other fronts. She now faces prosecution on bogus charges of violating foreign ownership laws. By the end of last year, she had posted bail eight times. Her real violation? She brought scrutiny to the president. In Myanmar, two Reuters journalists — Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo – were imprisoned for more than 500 days for investigating the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim men and boys. Finally, a year ago, they were released. In 2018, an opinion writer for The Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi, walked into Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul to get documents he needed to marry. He was murdered there at the hands of a team sent by highest-level Saudi officials. His offense? He had sharply criticized the Saudi government. In Mexico, murderous vengeance against journalists is common. Last year, at least five were killed, more than in any other country. I think also of the risks that American journalists have taken to inform the public. Among them are colleagues I can never forget.

One is Elizabeth Neuffer. Seventeen years ago this month, I stood before her friends at the Boston Globe to report that she had died covering the war in Iraq. Elizabeth was 46, an experienced foreign correspondent, a mentor to others; vivacious and brave. Her Iraqi driver was traveling at high speed because of the risk of abductions. He lost control. Elizabeth died instantly; her translator, too. Elizabeth had a record of fearlessness in investigating war crimes and human rights abuses. Her goal: Reveal the world as it is — because someone might then make things better.

Another colleague was Anthony Shadid. In 2002, I visited Anthony, then a reporter for the Globe, after he was shot and wounded in Ramallah. Lying in a hospital in Jerusalem, it was clear that he had narrowly escaped being paralyzed. Anthony recovered and went on to report from Iraq, where he won two Pulitzer Prizes for The Washington Post. From Egypt, where he was harassed by police. From Libya, where he and three New York Times colleagues were detained by pro-government militias and physically abused. He died in 2012, at age 43, while reporting in Syria, apparently of an asthma attack. Anthony told the stories of ordinary people. Without him, their voices would have gone unheard.

And now I think constantly of reporters, photographers and videographers who risk their own well-being to be with heroic frontline health workers — frontline workers of every sort – to share their stories. Anthony, Elizabeth and my present-day colleagues sought to be eyewitnesses. To see the facts for themselves. To discover the truth and tell it. As a profession, we maintain there is such a thing as fact, there is such a thing as truth.

At Harvard, where the school’s motto is “Veritas,” presumably you do, too. Truth, we know, is not a matter of who wields power or who speaks loudest. It has nothing to do with who benefits or what is most popular. And ever since the Enlightenment, modern society has rejected the idea that truth derives from any single authority on Earth.

To determine what is factual and true, we rely on certain building blocks. Start with education. Then there is expertise. And experience. And, above all, we rely on evidence. We see that acutely now when people’s health can be jeopardized by false claims, wishful thinking and invented realities. The public’s safety requires the honest truth. Yet education, expertise, experience and evidence are being devalued, dismissed and denied. The goal is clear: to undermine the very idea of objective fact, all in pursuit of political gain. Along with that is a systematic effort to disqualify traditional independent arbiters of fact. The press tops the list of targets. But others populate the list, too: courts, historians, even scientists and medical professionals – subject-matter experts of every type.

And so today the government’s leading scientists find their motives questioned, their qualifications mocked — despite a lifetime of dedication and achievement that has made us all safer. In any democracy, we want vigorous debate about our challenges and the correct policies. But what becomes of democracy if we cannot agree on a common set of facts, if we can’t agree on what even constitutes a fact? Are we headed for extreme tribalism, believing only what our ideological soulmates say? Or do we become so cynical that we think everyone always lies for selfish reasons? Or so nihilistic that we conclude no one can ever really know what is true or false; so, no use trying to find out? Regardless, we risk entering dangerous territory. Hannah Arendt, in 1951, wrote of this in her first major work, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” There, she observed “the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts … that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and may become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition.”

One hundred years ago – in 1920 – a renowned journalist and leading thinker, Walter Lippmann, harbored similar worries. Lippmann, once a writer for the Harvard Crimson, warned of a society where people “cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions … what somebody asserts, not what actually is.” Lippmann wrote those words because of concerns about the press itself. He saw our defects and hoped we might fix them, thus improving how information got to the public.

Ours is a profession that still has many flaws. We make mistakes of fact, and we make mistakes of judgment. We are at times overly impressed with what we know when much remains for us to learn. In making mistakes, we are like people in every other profession. And we, too, must be held accountable. What frequently gets lost, though, is the contribution of a free and independent press to our communities and our country — and to the truth.

I think back to the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in 1992 when the Miami Herald showed how lax zoning, inspection and building codes had contributed to the massive destruction. Homes and lives are safer today as a result. In 2016, the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia exposed how opioids had flooded the state’s depressed communities, contributing to the highest death rates in the country. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana’s newspapers were indispensable sources of reliable information for residents. The Washington Post in 2007 revealed the shameful neglect and mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital. Corrective action was immediate. The Associated Press in 2015 documented a slave trade behind our seafood supply. Two thousand slaves were freed as a result. The New York Times and The New Yorker in 2017 exposed sexual predators in elite boardrooms. A movement of accountability for abuses against women took root. The New York Times in 1971 was the first to publish the Pentagon Papers, revealing a pattern of official deceit in a war that killed more than 58,000 Americans and countless others. The Washington Post broke open the Watergate scandal in 1972. That led ultimately to the president’s resignation.Those news organizations searched for the truth and told it, undeterred by pushback or pressure or vilification.Facing the truth can cause extreme discomfort. But history shows that we as a nation become better for that reckoning. It is in the spirit of the preamble to our Constitution: “to form a more perfect union.” Toward that end, it is an act of patriotism.

W.E.B. Du Bois, the great scholar and African American activist — and the first African American to graduate with a PhD from Harvard – cautioned against the falsification of events in relating our nation’s history. In 1935, distressed at how deceitfully America’s Reconstruction period was being taught, Du Bois assailed the propaganda of the era. “Nations reel and stagger on their way,” he wrote. “They make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth be ascertainable?”

At this university, you answer that question with your motto — “Veritas.” You seek the truth — with scholarship, teaching and dialogue – knowing that it really matters.My profession shares with you that mission — the always arduous, often tortuous and yet essential pursuit of truth. It is the demand that democracy makes upon us. It is the work we must do. We will keep at it. You should, too. None of us should ever stop.

Thank you for listening. Thank you for honoring me. Good luck to you all. And please, stay well.

“While the legacy of enslavement, racism, discrimination, and exclusion still influences so much of contemporary attitudes, we must never conclude that it is too late to overcome such a legacy. For it is never too late to do justice.”

Ruth J. Simmons

2021 The president of Prairie View A&M University and former president of Brown University and Smith College exhorted graduates to fight inequality and foster diversity and inclusion.

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Good day and congratulations to the Harvard University Class of 2021.

It is a singular honor to be invited to address you on this important milestone occasion. To all completing their studies today, I offer my best wishes as you undertake the next exciting phase of your lives. That you have succeeded so well during such a time as this is commendable and augurs well for the years to come when the world will rely greatly on your knowledge, your discernment, and your empathy for those less fortunate than you.

When first approached about delivering this Commencement address, I was, frankly, taken aback. I did not immediately feel up to the task. Recalling occasions when I sat in Tercentenary Theatre looking across the expanse of graduates to the steps of Widener Library, I could not picture myself confidently delivering remarks from a dais where so many more eminent figures had stood and, indeed, made history. Growing up on a constant Jim Crow diet that offered assertions of my inferiority, I’m always that same little Black girl trying to believe in and demonstrate her worthiness. Further, I thought about the challenge of what I might impart in such a pivotal national moment when social gains seem more like losses, when clarity gives way so easily to confusion, and when much heralded progress recedes like a trompe l’oeil that was never real.

I extend greetings from the faculty, administration and students of our 145 year old institution, Prairie View A&M University. And, though I have not been anointed to do so, I also bring greetings from the collection of Historically Black and Minority Serving institutions that have the weight and privilege of advancing access, equity and opportunity for so many communities across the world. Our university, like many others HBCUs, was founded at the end of Reconstruction when Blacks were thought to be unable to perform the highest level academic study. I speak to you, in fact, from the Prairie View campus whose 1500 acres were once the site of the Alta Vista Plantation. That plantation, before being sold to the State of Texas, was the site where 400 human beings were held in slavery. Thus, our very steps as they daily tread upon vestiges of the suffering of our ancestors, call to us constantly to do our duty as full citizens. Painful as such memories are, they are a powerful force that calls us to action when challenges arise.

During the 145 years following our 1876 founding, it would take many years for most universities in our nation to grant access to Blacks. So, universities like Prairie View, designed with limited resources, served the state and nation by admitting students to whom full access to the fruits of liberty was intentionally blocked. We are therefore proud of our legacy of endurance and even prouder of the fact that we converted an assertion of the inferiority of African Americans into a triumph of human capacity. Like other HBCUs, we made a place to empower rather than disparage, to open minds rather than imprison them, to create pathways to promise rather than to stifle opportunity.

Such is the task of every true university. Those of you graduating today can well attest to that. When you first arrived at Harvard as undergraduate or post-graduate students, you most likely could not have imagined the many ways that your ability would be tested, your insights sharpened and expanded, and your prospects in life improved by studying at the University. I certainly didn’t expect such results when I arrived at Harvard and yet I know now that it is likely primarily because I studied at Harvard that I have had the deeply rich and satisfying career that I’ve enjoyed for so many years.

A product of a segregated upbringing in Houston and undergraduate study at an HBCU, I am ashamed to say that in my youth, I secretly bought into the prevailing racial assumptions of the day: that someone like me would be ill-prepared to benefit from and contribute to study at a university of Harvard’s stature. I expected to be flatfooted if not oafish in the company of well-heeled and urbane students who had the advantage of the best education and a wealth of experiences. While not outwardly immobilized by fear of failing the biggest test of my life, I was inwardly terrified that I would fail to measure up. Uncertainty and malaise governed my early days at the university.

Harvard was, you see, a place steeped in other peoples’ traditions—traditions that I could not easily access. My reaction was very much akin to the French expression denoting window shopping: “lécher les vitrines.” Those of us who are outsiders are often as mere observers looking through windows, salivating and wondering how we might ever be able to attain a sense of inclusion, acceptance and respect. Just as when, as a child, I was banned from white establishments, I identified as the outsider looking enviously at others who not only had full access to Harvard’s history and traditions but who also could so easily see themselves reflected in them. Few things that I could see at Harvard at the time represented me. Perhaps it is the memory of that feeling that moved me to remain in university life to make that experience easier for others who felt excluded.

The need to make universities more aware of how first generation and underserved communities reacted to the stultified tradition in many universities shaped my conviction about the importance of individuals feeling fully embraced and respected as learners, erasing vestiges of disparagement that inevitably accrue in an unequal society. Having been profiled and racially isolated and having carried within me for so many years the weight of that sentence, I understood that to change our country, we had to insist that everyone’s humanity, everyone’s traditions and history, everyone’s identity contributes to our learning about the world we must live in together. I came to believe what Harvard expressed in its admission philosophy: that such human differences, intentionally engaged in the educational context, are as much a resource to our intellectual growth as the magnificent tomes that we build libraries to protect and the state of the art equipment proudly arrayed in our laboratories. The encounter with difference rocks!

I believe that each of us has a solemn duty to learn about and embrace that difference. That undertaking takes not a month or a year but a lifetime of concerted action to ensure that we are equipped to play a role in caring for and improving the world we inhabit together. This responsibility should encourage us to commit to our individual as well as professional role in advancing access, equality and mutual respect.

Thus, I believe that the task of a great university is not merely to test the mettle and stamina of brilliant minds but to guide them toward enlightenment, enabling thereby the most fruitful and holistic use of their students’ intelligence and humanity. That enlightenment suggests the need for improving upon students’ self-knowledge but it also means helping them judge others fairly, using the full measure of their empathy and intelligence to do so. In an environment rich in differences of background, experience and perspectives, learning is turbo charged and intensified by the juxtaposition of these differences. Those open minded enough to benefit fully from the power of this learning opportunity are bound for leadership in this time of confusion and division. The Harvard model intentionally and successfully provides to students a head start in understanding how to mediate difference in an ever more complex reality in which some exploit those differences for corrupt purposes.

Today, irrational hatred of targeted groups is seemingly on the rise, stoked by opportunists seeking advantage for themselves and their profits. What stands between such malefactors and the destruction of our common purpose are people like you who, having experienced learning through difference, courageously stand up for the rights of those who are targeted. Your Harvard education, if you were paying close attention here, should have encouraged you to commit willingly to playing such a role. If you follow through on this commitment, in addition to anything else you accomplish in life, you will be saving lives, stanching the flow of hatred and the dissolution of our national bond. You will be serving the mighty cause of justice. If we are to thrive on this orb that we share, our schools and universities must contribute deliberately to increasing our understanding of the ways to interact meaningfully with others.

Harvard is, in some ways, the most powerful university bully pulpit in the nation. It did not achieve that status merely through its age and wealth; it attained that status principally through the efforts of its faculty and graduates’ scholarly and professional output. Through its gates have come generations of scholars with immense intelligence and passionate purpose to whom fate bequeathed the laurels of success. But it is important that universities model in their own values and actions the high purpose that they hope to see in the actions of their scholars.

In that vein, Harvard has a special responsibility as both a prod and steward of the national conscience. It could sit on the hill and congratulate itself on its prowess but it could also use its immense stature to address the widening gaps in how different groups experience freedom and justice. I spoke earlier about the heroic work of HBCUs and minority serving institutions that keep our country open and advancing the cause of equality and access. Yet, many of them have been starved for much of their history by the legacy of underfunding and isolation from the mainstream of higher education.

I call on universities like Harvard to acknowledge the limitations imposed on these institutions over the past decades. While universities like Harvard had the wind at their back, flourishing from endowments, strong enrollments, constant curricular expansion, massive infrastructure improvements, and significant endowment growth, HBCUs often had gale force winds impeding their development. Our nation is finally coming to terms with the consequences of the underfunding of HBCUs but we are far from where we need to be if we are to be assured continued progress in the fight for equal educational benefits.

I ask the university that did so much for me to add to its luster by embracing the opportunity to stand alongside these historic and other minority serving institutions to build stronger partnerships, advocate for greater funding, and elevate the fight for parity and justice to the level it deserves. Let us not complain in a hundred years that those historically excluded from access and opportunity continue to ask how much longer it will take to gain the respect, inclusion and support that their service to the nation deserves.

Many minority serving institutions accept students from impoverished underserved communities where educational preparation often lacks the pre-requisites needed for certain careers. Children in those communities may experience the same or a worse fate than I and my peers did during the pre-Civil Rights era. Consigned to underfunded schools and alienating curricula, they must wonder as I did what will befall them in life. ublic schools saved me and they have the burden still of saving millions of children across this land. In so very many cases, these institutions are the only hope for many children and their families. Support for public education in this moment is as important as it was in the early days of the country when Horace Mann first called for universal education. For Mann, it was a matter of what our young country would need; it still is today as Mann’s emphasis on civic virtue continues to ring true.

Further, in such a moment, universities and all of you must play a leadership role in reversing the designation of the teaching profession as less intellectually worthy, less glamorous, and less important than the high-flying careers of financiers and technologists. Attention to and investment in K-12 teacher preparation and curricular content remains one of the most important ways for universities and the average citizen to contribute to the civic good.

None of us is exempt from responsibility for the future we give our children. Harvard has its role and so do all of you. I have come to ask you who graduate today what you are prepared to do to acknowledge and address the historic biases and inequities that so many continue to experience. Will your actions point us in a more uplifting direction? For, just as we recount the moral bankruptcy of those who cruelly enslaved others, we also tell the story of those who were equally guilty because they refused to challenge the practice of slavery. In the future, the history of these times will reveal both what we do and what we fail to do to address the unjust treatment of marginalized groups. Among all that you will have learned at Harvard, I hope that the consciousness of your responsibility in the struggle for equality remains with you. While the legacy of enslavement, racism, discrimination and exclusion still influences so much of contemporary attitudes, we must never conclude that it is too late to overcome such a legacy. For it is never too late to do justice.

Today, I call on all of you to declare that you will not give sanction to discriminatory actions that hold some groups back to the advantage of others. I call on you to be a force for inclusion by not choosing enclaves of wealth, privilege and tribalism such that you abandon the lessons you learned from your Harvard experience of diversity. I call on you to do your part to ensure that generations to come will no longer be standing on the outside fighting for fairness, respect and inclusion.

Today, after decades in the academy, my path has taken me back to a place where students are waging the same battles that were so hard fought when I was a teenager: safe passage in the face of bigotry, the right to vote, and equal access to educational and professional opportunities. Sandra Bland, a Prairie View alumna, was stopped for a minor traffic offense at the entrance to our campus. Jailed for this offense, she was found deceased in her cell three days later. Must every generation add more tragic evidence of the racial hatred that has troubled the world? Our work is not done as long as there are young people growing up with the thought that they matter less than others. As long as they have fewer and narrower educational opportunities. As long as they must fear for their safety every moment of every day of their lives. As long as their full participation in society is circumscribed by policies that willfully chip away at or block their rights.

Just as I ask Harvard to use its voice on behalf of minority institutions that have been unfairly treated across time, I ask you to add your voice to the cause of justice wherever you go. Help the children of need wherever they are: in underfunded public schools, in neighborhoods bereft of resources, in search of a way to belong. If they do not hear your voices advocating for them and their worth, what must they conclude about their place in the world?

If you take up the cause of these children, you are taking up the greatest cause—that of justice. Today, you earn your laurels as a scholar. Taking up the cause of justice, you will earn your laurels as a human being.

Congratulations, once again, and God speed.

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16 Best Graduation Speeches That Leave a Lasting Impression

By Kristi Kellogg and Noor Brara

Some of the most impactful and inspiring sentiments are shared during graduation speeches delivered by the leaders we look up to. Graduation speeches from celebrities , entrepreneurs, authors and other influential thinkers are motivational, inspiring, thought-provoking and just might make you reach for the nearest tissue. After four years of hard work, stress, and exhausting self-discovery, lucky graduates are privy to a life-changing speech to top it all off.

Here, we rounded up up 16 of the best graduation speeches of all time, including words of wisdom from Natalie Portman, Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and more.

1. Steve Jobs: Stanford, 2005

"You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it."

2. Michelle Obama: Tuskegee University, 2015

"I've found that this journey has been incredibly freeing. Because no matter what happened, I had the piece of mind knowing that all of the chatter, the name-calling, the doubting...all of it was just noise. It did not define me, it didn't change who I was, and most importantly, it couldn't hold me back."

3. Natalie Portman: Harvard, 2015

"I just directed my first film. I was completely unprepared, but my own ignorance to my own limitations looked like confidence and got me into the director's chair. Once there, I had to figure it all out, and my belief that I could handle these things, contrary to all evidence of my ability to do so was half the battle. The other half was very hard work. The experience was the deepest and most meaningful one of my career."

4. Amy Poehler: Harvard University, 2011

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"What I have discovered is this: You can't do it alone … Listen. Say 'yes.' Live in the moment. Make sure you play with people who have your back. Make big choices early and often."

5. Meryl Streep: Barnard College, 2010

"This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There's only change, and resistance to it and then more change."

6. David Foster Wallace: Kenyon College, 2005

"Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master."

7. Barack Obama: Howard University, 2016

"You have to go through life with more than just passion for change; you need a strategy. I’ll repeat that. I want you to have passion, but you have to have a strategy. Not just awareness, but action. Not just hashtags, but votes."

8. Kerry Washington: George Washington University, 2013

"You and you alone are the only person who can live the life that can write the story that you were meant to tell."

9. Conan O'Brien: Dartmouth College, 2011

"There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized. Today I tell you that whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality … Work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen."

10. J.K. Rowling: Harvard, 2008

"I stopped pretending to be anything than what I was. My greatest fear had been realized. I had an old typewriter and a big idea. Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

11. Oprah Winfrey: Harvard University, 2013

"Learn from every mistake because every experience, encounter, and particularly your mistakes are there to teach you and force you into being more who you are. And then figure out what is the next right move. And the key to life is to develop an internal moral, emotional G.P.S. that can tell you which way to go."

12. Joss Whedon: Wesleyan University, 2013

"You have, which is a rare thing, that ability and the responsibility to listen to the dissent in yourself, to at least give it the floor, because it is the key—not only to consciousness–but to real growth. To accept duality is to earn identity. And identity is something that you are constantly earning. It is not just who you are. It is a process that you must be active in. It's not just parroting your parents or the thoughts of your learned teachers. It is now more than ever about understanding yourself so you can become yourself."

13. George Saunders: Syracuse University, 2013

"Do all the other things, the ambitious things … Travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop)—but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness."

14. Nora Ephron: Wellesley College, 1996

"Be the heroine of your life, not the victim."

15. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Wellesley College, 2015

"As you graduate, as you deal with your excitement and your doubts today, I urge you to try and create the world you want to live in. Minister to the world in a way that can change it. Minister radically in a real, active, practical, get your hands dirty way."

16. Admiral William H. McRaven: University of Texas at Austin, 2014

"If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter. If you can't do the little things right, you will never do the big things right."

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This writer analyzed 100 graduation speeches — here are the 4 tips they all share

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Steve Jobs has been credited over the years with popularizing any number of other people’s inventions, from the personal computer to the tablet to the mobile phone. But none of these gifts may be as enduring as one of his rarely credited contributions to contemporary life — popularizing the viral commencement address.

On June 12, 2005, Jobs stood before the graduating class of Stanford University and reminded them that he had never graduated from college. “Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.” He then told three stories about his life. “That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.”

That speech , coinciding as it did with the rise of internet virality (the first TED Talk would be posted on TED.com exactly 12 months later; the iPhone was introduced exactly 12 months after that), launched a global obsession with pithy, inspirational talks. Jobs’s speech has since been viewed more than 40 million times on YouTube.

Graduation speeches, long viewed as the burdensome interruption before diplomas were granted and mortar boards were tossed, have since become big business. Kurt Vonnegut, Ann Patchett, Carl Hiaasen, J.K. Rowling, Mary Karr, David Foster Wallace and many others have all had their commencement speeches published as books.

I’ve been fortunate to give a handful of commencement addresses over the years, and I confess to a fascination with the genre. The internet has been a boon this hobby. There are thousands of commencement speeches on the web. Can we learn anything from their messages?

I’ve spent the last few years gathering and coding hundreds of life stories, looking for patterns and takeaways that could help all of us live with more meaning, purpose and joy. I decided to put some of my coding tools to work, analyzing 100 of the most popular recent commencement speeches.

Here are the four tips they all contain:

1. Dream big

“I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. There are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name. They all travel as if they are pack dogs and stick to each other like glue. The best people want to work the big challenges.” — Larry Page at University of Michigan , 2009

“We don’t beat the reaper by living longer. We beat the reaper by living well and living fully. For the reaper is always going to come for all of us. The question is: What do we do between the time we are born, and the time he shows up? Because when he shows up, it’s too late to do all the things that you’re always gonna, kinda get around to.” — Randy Pausch at Carnegie Mellon University , 2009

“Graduates, we need you. We need you to run companies and make decisions about who has access to capital. We need you to serve at the highest levels of government and determine our country’s standing in the world. We need you to work in our hospitals and in our courtrooms and in our schools. We need you to shape the future of technology. We need you because your perspective — the sum total of your intellect and your lived experience — will make our country stronger.” — Kamala Harris at Tennessee State University , 2022

2. Work hard

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.” — Steve Jobs at Stanford University , 2005

“I just directed my first film. I was completely unprepared, but my own ignorance to my own limitations looked like confidence and got me into the director’s chair. Once there, I had to figure it all out, and my belief that I could handle these things, contrary to all evidence of my ability to do so was half the battle. The other half was very hard work. The experience was the deepest and most meaningful one of my career.” — Natalie Portman at Harvard University , 2015

“When you’re doing the work you’re meant to do, it feels right and every day is a bonus, regardless of what you’re getting paid … But make it your life’s work to remake the world because there is nothing more beautiful or more worthwhile than working to leave something better for humanity.” — Oprah Winfrey at Stanford University , 2008

3. Make mistakes

”Fail big. That’s right. Fail big … It’s a new world out there, and it’s a mean world out there, and you only live once. So do what you feel passionate about. Take chances, professionally. Don’t be afraid to fail. There’s an old IQ test with nine dots, and you had to draw five lines with a pencil within these nine dots without lifting the pencil, and the only way to do it was to go outside the box. So don’t be afraid to go outside the box.” — Denzel Washington at University of Pennsylvania , 2011

“The world doesn’t care how many times you fall down, as long as it’s one fewer than the number of times you get back up.” — Aaron Sorkin at Syracuse University , 2013

“My experience has been that my mistakes led to the best thing in my life. Being embarrassed when you mess up is part of the human experience of getting back up dusting yourself off and seeing who still wants to hang out with you afterward and laugh about it. That’s a gift. The times I was told no or wasn’t included wasn’t chosen, didn’t win, didn’t make the cut, looking back it really feels like those moments we’re as important if not more crucial than the moments I was told yes.” — Taylor Swift at NYU , 2022

“Work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen.” — Conan O’Brien at Dartmouth College , 2011

“Empathy and kindness are the true signs of emotional intelligence.” — Will Ferrell at the University of Southern California , 2017

“So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded … sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly. Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet. It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.” — George Saunders at Syracuse University , 2013

So what can we learn from these themes?

Every era in American life has its own standards of what it means to be a success. Shortly after America’s founding, success was all about character. Led by Benjamin Franklin, Americans embraced virtue, industry, and frugality. In the twentieth century, success was all about personality. Led by Dale Carnegie, Americans embraced salesmanship, reinvention and charisma. Today, led by Steve Jobs, Americans are embracing meaning, authenticity and bliss. Or, as Kermit the Frog put it in a 1996 commencement speech at Southampton College , “May success and a smile always be yours … even when you’re knee-deep in the sticky muck of life.”

Dream, work, fail and smile are as good a foursome of American identity today as I know. And if those ideas don’t inspire you, you can always embrace the far more practical advice erroneously attributed to Kurt Vonnegut in a commencement speech that he never gave at MIT, but was instead delivered by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich in an imaginary speech to graduates she published in an old-fashioned newspaper, “Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97: Wear sunscreen.”

This post was adapted from one published on his newsletter The Nonlinear Life; go here to subscribe.

Watch his TEDxIEMadrid Talk now:

About the author

Bruce Feiler is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, including The Secrets of Happy Families and Council of Dads, both of which became the subject of TED Talks. His latest book, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age, from which this post and TEDx Talk are adapted, describes his journey across America, collecting hundreds of life stories, exploring how we can navigate life’s growing number of transitions with more meaning, purpose and joy. To learn more, visit brucefeiler.com, follow him on Twitter (@brucefeiler), or sign up for his newsletter The Nonlinear Life. 

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• communication
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The 15 Best Commencement Speeches of All Time

Table of Contents

T here’s a lot of pressure on speakers delivering a commencement speech.

They have to say something inspiring, engaging, and memorable—and if that wasn’t hard enough, they have to remain composed in front of hundreds or thousands of people. 

Universities handpick some of the most prestigious public speakers to give graduation speeches. As a result, there’s no shortage of commencement speech examples to watch and learn from. 

We’ve picked out 15 of the very best from recent times, including videos, transcripts, and the best quote from each.

What are the ingredients of the best commencement speeches?

Before we get to the speeches, perhaps you’ve come across this article because you’re on the lookout for your own graduation speech ideas to deliver at an upcoming address. 

If so, we’ve outlined the commonalities all of the best graduation speeches on this list share, so you can start crafting an address that will leave a lasting impression.

They include personal anecdotes

As you read through the graduation speech examples on this list, you’ll notice that nearly all of them start with a personal anecdote of some sort. This may be just a casual reference to one’s personal life, or a longer, more detailed story—or even a set of stories that are woven throughout the speech. 

Anecdotes can create a captivating hook for your speech, and also make you more relatable, so that students identify with your main points.

They have a clear central theme

Most graduation speeches range from ten minutes to thirty minutes, but all of the best ones can be boiled down to one or two sentences. This is because a good graduation speech will be crafted around a central point: one specific concept that the speaker wants to demonstrate. 

If you’re looking for graduation speech ideas, start with the primary point you want to make and build your speech around that. Choose too many points, and you’ll have a meandering speech that will leave listeners confused or overwhelmed.

They feature powerful one-liners 

You’ll see we’ve included our favorite quotes from each of the graduation speeches below. In most cases, it was hard to just pick one line! A good graduation speech should have a few standout moments—one or two sentences that will stick in the minds of anyone who hears the speech. 

The brilliant one-liners will rarely show up on the first draft of your speech, so don’t worry about being too clever when you’re just starting out. As you edit and hone the speech, the best lines will write themselves.

They are applicable to a broad audience 

It’s not uncommon for commencement speech-givers to make comments about the specific school they are speaking to; a commencement address at at a technical school will naturally have different themes than one at a liberal arts college. 

But ultimately, the graduation speech you give should be applicable to a broad audience. Every person in the graduating class should be able to resonate with the message on some level, and the most memorable graduation speeches apply to all young adults who are preparing to start living on their own.

The 15 best commencement speeches of all time

Kamala harris commencement speech .

Tennessee State University, Class of 2022

Read the transcript

Why it’s so good: Vice President Harris had a tough job—addressing a class of students who had experienced a global pandemic that disrupted their college experience. She took the stage and gave an inspiring speech encouraging students to seize the moment and adopt a sense of leadership. Listening to her speak, it’s no surprise her eloquence helped bring her to the White House. 

Best quote: “I look at this unsettled world and, yes, I then see the challenges, but I’m here to tell you, I also see the opportunities. The opportunities for your leadership. The future of our country and our world will be shaped by you.”

Jim Carrey commencement speech

Maharishi University of Management, Class of 2014

Why it’s so good: Actor Jim Carrey is introduced as “the funniest man on Earth,” and though he comes out with a bunch of great jokes, his speech delivers insightful, thought-provoking, and touching comments about what life will be like after graduation. 

Best quote: “You can spend your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about the pathway to the future, but all there will ever be is what’s happening here, and the decisions we make in this moment, which are based in either love or fear.”

Taylor Swift commencement speech

New York University, Class of 2022

Why it’s so good: Taylor Swift, in some ways, is the voice of the generation (though you may roll your eyes at that statement if you aren’t a fan). Either way, this graduation speech she gave speaks directly to the GenZ audience she addressed in a way older speakers might not be able to achieve.

Best quote: “Never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth. The people who wanted it the least were the ones I wanted to date and be friends with in high school. The people who want it most are the people I now hire to work for my company. ”

Steve Jobs commencement speech

Stanford, Class of 2005

Why it’s so good: Despite being one of the most successful businesspersons ever, the late Steve Jobs dropped out of college. He doesn’t shy away from this in his speech—instead, he uses it to tell three compelling stories from his life that contain some excellent lessons for soon-to-be grads. 

Best quote: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Patton Oswalt commencement speech 

William & Mary, Class of 2023

Read more excerpts

Why it’s so good: If you only read the opening of actor Patton Oswald’s commencement speech, it will sound less than inspiring. He begins by outlining the many uncomfortable realities our world is facing, from climate change to deteriorating democracies around the world. But as his speech goes on, Oswalt puts into words the hope and passion that are signature traits of Generation Z, and it has an impressive impact on his audience. 

Best quote: “You do not have a choice but to be anything but extraordinary. Those are the times we’re living in right now. And it’s been amazing. It’s been truly amazing to see how your generation has rebelled against every bad habit of mine and every generation that came before me.”

Maria Shriver commencement speech

University of Michigan, Class of 2022

Why it’s so good: Though exciting, graduating from college can be intimidating as well—students may feel unconfident about what they want to do in life and who they want to be. Though she’s a seasoned journalist, Maria Shriver knows something about self-doubt and how to overcome it. She eloquently shares her advice in this graduation speech. 

Best quote: “Graduates, you are not here to do a repeat of your parents or other famous Michigan grads. You are here to live your own wildly authentic lives. And it’s your authenticity, your determination, your creativity, and your imagination that our society needs most at this uncertain time.”

Denzel Washington commencement speech

University of Pennsylvania, Class of 2011

Why it’s so good: You probably don’t think of the word “failure” when you think of Denzel Washington, but that’s just the thing—as he says in his speech, people don’t focus on the failures of someone’s life; they focus on the successes. He uses examples of his own failures to encourage grads to “fall forward” when they don’t succeed. 

Best quote: “So the question is, what are you going to do with what you have? I’m not talking about how much you have. Some of you are business majors. Some of you were theologians, nurses, sociologists. Some of you have money. Some of you have patience. Some of you have kindness. Some of you have love. Some of you have the gift of long-suffering. Whatever it is, whatever your gift is, what are you going to do with what you have?”

Elizabeth Bonker graduation speech

Rollins College, Class of 2022

Why it’s so good: Elizabeth Bonker was one of the valedictorians for her class, which meant she was expected to give a commencement speech. As a woman affected by nonspeaking autism, she relied on technology to communicate a message of perseverance and the power to choose your own path in life. 

Best quote: “The freedom to choose our own way is our fundamental human right, and it is a right worth defending, not just for us, but for every human being.”

David Foster Wallace commencement speech

Kenyon College, Class of 2005

Why it’s so good: Author David Foster Wallace was a master storyteller, and his speech is full of funny parables that conceal incredibly profound insights for the graduates listening. The speech Wallace gave was raw and honest, and as such, it has cemented itself as one of the best commencement speeches of all time. 

Best quote: “And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.”

Tom Hanks commencement speech 

Harvard University, Class of 2023

Why it’s so good: Harvard is well-known for hosting some of the best commencement speeches, and 2023 was no different. Actor Tom Hanks started his address by talking about superheroes, and used it as a launching pad to show students how to tap into their own powers and fight for truth, justice, and the American Way. 

Best quote: “Every day, every year, and for every graduating class there is a choice, the same option for all grownups to make: to be one of three types of Americans—those who embrace liberty and freedom for all , those who won’t, or those who are indifferent. In the never-ending battle you have all officially joined as of today, the difference is in how truly you believe, in how vociferously you promote, in how tightly you hold to the Truth that is self-evident—that of course we are all created equally yet differently, and of course we are all in this together. Justice and the American way are within our grasp no matter our gender, our faith, our station, our heritage, our genetic makeup, the shade of our flesh, or the continental birthplace of our ancestors.”

Mary Schmich commencement speech (sort of)

All Graduates Everywhere, 1997

Read the original essay

Why it’s so good: This speech, titled “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young,” was never delivered to a single graduating class. It originated as a hypothetical commencement speech penned by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich. It went viral over email (it was 1997, after all, so there was no social media). Later, Baz Luhrmann (yes, that Baz Luhrmann) adapted it into a spoken-word song commonly known as “Wear Sunscreen.” The song still slaps and contains a bunch of fantastic advice for young people. 

Best quote: “Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.”

Abby Wambach commencement speech

Barnard College, Class of 2018

Why it’s so good: Olympic gold-medalist, World Cup champ, and human rights activist Abby Wambach was the perfect person to give a speech to the women graduating in the 2018 class at Barnard College. She gave a rousing speech about feminism and the power the women in her audience held as they took a step into the future. 

Best quote: “As you go out into the world: Amplify each others’ voices. Demand seats for women, people of color and all marginalized people at every table where decisions are made. Call out each other’s wins and just like we do on the field: claim the success of one woman, as a collective success for all women.”

George Saunders commencement speech

Syracuse University College of Arts and Sciences, Class of 2013

Why it’s so good: Author George Saunders took the stage at the same university where he was a professor, which may explain why he was so candid in his excellent graduation speech. He speaks on regret and kindness—two emotions that are more connected than you may think. 

Best quote: “Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf—seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.”

Matthew McConaughey commencement speech

University of Houston, Class of 2018

Why it’s so good: Matthew McConaughey gives a masterclass on structuring an excellent graduation speech. He cuts to the chase, letting the audience know that he’s going to share with them 13 simple truths. The first one is “Life’s not fair.” And they only get more honest and inspiring from there. 

Best quote: “Prioritize who you are, who you want to be, and don’t spend time with anything that antagonizes your character. Don’t drink the Kool-Aid. It tastes sweet but you will get cavities tomorrow. Life is not a popularity contest. Be brave. Take the hill. But first answer that question. What’s my hill?”

Juan Manuel Santos commencement speech 

Notre Dame University, Class of 2023

Why it’s so good: Juan Manuel Santos was the president of Colombia from 2010 to 2018, and much of his time during those years was dedicated to ending the long, violent civil war in his country. For this effort, he was the sole recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016. It should come as no surprise that he delivered a moving commencement speech focused on the concept of peacemaking. 

Best quote: “To become a true peacemaker, first you must be at peace with yourself, at peace with your own conscience. … Whenever you have to choose between being at peace or proving yourself right, choose the way of peace. We have too many wars, conflicts, deaths, victims, and violence because human beings insist that only they, not their fellow humans, know the correct course of action. It is better to be at peace than to prove to anyone that you are right. Work with peace in your heart, find peace in your soul, and everything else will follow.”

More inspirational content for recent grads

Before you go, if you’re on the lookout for more resources to help you now that you’re a college grad, we’ve got some excellent content you might want to check out. Here are some of the best articles from our archives for young alumni:

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How to Write and Deliver a Memorable Graduation Speech: Tips, Examples, and Techniques

• The Speaker Lab
• March 7, 2024

Table of Contents

The goal of any graduation speech is to find words that capture the essence of years spent learning and growing. Today, we’ll guide you through that process and help you craft a memorable graduation speech . You’ll learn to weave gratitude with shared experiences, and balance humor with wisdom. We’ll even help you find quotes that strike a chord and deliver them in a way that resonates.

But that’s not all! Dive into proven strategies for public speaking, managing stage fright, and drawing inspiration from iconic commencement speeches. Discover how personal growth stories add depth to your message and explore themes that leave a lasting impact on your peers as they step forward into new beginnings.

Crafting Your Graduation Speech: A Step-by-Step Guide

When it comes to marking the end of your high school or university journey, a graduation speech can capture the essence of this pivotal moment. But how do you start such an important address?

Opening with Impact

The first words of your graduation speech are crucial. They set the stage for what’s to come and grab your audience’s attention. Think about starting strong by sharing a personal anecdote that ties into the broader experience of your class or drawing from Steve Jobs’ Stanford University commencement speech , where he began with, “Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.” This technique instantly piques interest because it promises narratives that have shaped who you are.

An impactful opening also acknowledges shared experiences. Perhaps you could reflect on how moments in classrooms turned strangers into lifelong friends. Or for university commencements, consider touching upon those late-night study sessions that tested perseverance but ultimately led to academic achievements worth celebrating today.

Building the Body of Your Graduation Speech

In crafting the body content, intertwine lessons learned throughout high school years or during university courses with aspirations for what lies ahead. For instance, share how overcoming obstacles like balancing extracurricular activities and academics taught valuable time management skills.

To add depth, incorporate quotes from luminaries like Oprah Winfrey or draw parallels between classroom learnings and real-world applications. Dive deeper by discussing milestones achieved together as a graduating class and recognizing the hard work everyone put in to make it to this monumental occasion.

Concluding with Inspiration

Your conclusion should leave fellow graduates feeling inspired while helping them celebrate high school memories one last time—or honor those unforgettable college years if addressing higher education grads.

Closing remarks could include heartfelt gratitude towards teachers’ support and parental guidance. You might even crack a joke or two. It’s these personalized touches paired with universal truths that resonate most deeply as students step forward into new chapters post-graduation.

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Delivery Techniques for Confident Speaking

Standing in front of a crowd can turn even the most composed student into a bundle of nerves. But fear not, with some smart strategies, you’ll be able to channel your inner orator and deliver your graduation speech with confidence.

Practicing Your Graduation Speech

Becoming familiar with every word of your speech is key. Rehearse it out loud until the words feel like second nature. This practice does more than just help you remember what comes next; it lets you find the natural rhythm and pace of your delivery. Consider recording yourself to catch any quirks or stumbling blocks—you might be surprised at how much this helps refine your presentation.

A trick often overlooked is practicing in different environments. If possible, stand on the actual stage where you will deliver your commencement address. Familiarity breeds comfort, making that once daunting podium seem like an old friend when graduation day arrives.

Overcoming Nervousness and Stage Fright

Nervousness is normal but doesn’t let it dictate your performance. Before stepping up to speak, take deep breaths to steady yourself—a calm body encourages a calm mind. An effective method for easing anxiety is visualization. Imagine delivering each line perfectly and receiving an enthusiastic response from listeners—envisioning success can make it so.

Maintaining Eye Contact

The power of eye contact cannot be overstated. It connects speaker and listener on a personal level that amplifies engagement significantly. Scan across different sections of the audience periodically without lingering too long on any one individual.

Incorporate these techniques diligently when preparing for the big day. In doing so, they become part of muscle memory and help build confidence. With confidence and plenty of practice on your side, your graduation speech is sure to conclude to applause leaving you to celebrate yet another milestone achieved.

Analyzing Renowned Graduation Speeches for Inspiration

When crafting a commencement speech, it’s often helpful to look at the giants whose words have echoed through auditoriums and across campuses. Steve Jobs’ Stanford University Commencement Speech is a classic example of weaving life lessons into an address that connects deeply with graduates. Similarly, Oprah Winfrey’s Harvard University Commencement Address showed how stumbling blocks can become stepping stones if we learn from them.

Steve Jobs’ Storytelling Mastery

Jobs had a knack for turning personal anecdotes into universal truths. In his Stanford address, he shared three stories from his own life without sounding self-indulgent. These stories worked because each one carried a broader message relevant to every graduate: finding what you love, dealing with loss, and facing death head-on. Jobs famously urged students to “stay hungry, stay foolish,” encouraging them not just to pursue success but remain curious about life despite challenges. This advice is especially poignant for today’s graduating class.

Like Jobs, you too can craft narratives around moments that speak volumes about perseverance and passion.

Oprah’s Unflinching Honesty

Much like her television persona suggests, Oprah did not shy away from discussing her setbacks in front of Harvard’s graduating class. Instead, she confidently laid bare the challenges faced by anyone who dares greatly because failure is part of achieving greatness. As she reminded students, “It doesn’t matter how far you might rise… At some point you are bound to stumble.”

In doing so she forged an instant connection with listeners grappling with their fears about what the future holds post-graduation. It was a powerful reminder that even icons like Oprah are not immune to trials but emerge stronger through them.

The power behind these speeches lies not just in their content but also in their delivery. These speakers mastered the art of speaking confidently before crowds, maintaining eye contact, and conveying authenticity—techniques any speaker should aspire to replicate on graduation day.

Themes and Messages That Resonate with Graduates

Facing a sea of caps and gowns, the right words can turn a graduation ceremony from mundane to memorable. When crafting your commencement speech, focusing on themes like overcoming obstacles and perseverance connects deeply with graduates who have hurdled high school or college challenges.

Overcoming Obstacles

Talking about stumbling blocks is not just relatable; it’s inspirational. Think Steve Jobs at Stanford University or Oprah Winfrey at Harvard—both shared personal tales of setbacks turned into comebacks. Beyond simply telling their stories, they showed how those hurdles were stepping stones to success.

Weave your narrative around the potholes you’ve navigated during your high school years. This doesn’t mean airing every bit of dirty laundry, just highlighting that one significant moment where everything seemed against you yet failed to defeat you.

The Power of Perseverance

Perseverance is more than sticking to something—it’s pushing forward when every fiber wants to quit. It resonates because everyone, including your fellow graduates, has felt that urge to give up but chose to persevere instead.

Incorporate this theme by using vivid examples that mirror collective experiences—the all-nighters before exams or balancing sports stars ambitions with academics—to illustrate perseverance isn’t just an idea but lived reality for many students.

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Life Lessons Shared During Graduation Speeches

In addition to sharing content that fellow graduates will find relatable and inspirational, you should also consider sharing life lessons with your audience. Whether young or old, everyone has a unique perspective on life and sharing your wisdom can steer graduates toward a fulfilling path.

The Power of Kindness

Making a positive impact doesn’t require grand gestures; sometimes it’s found in small acts of kindness or an innovative idea that simplifies lives. This message sticks because everyone wants their work to mean something—to know they’ve left footprints on society’s vast canvas.

True Grit and Tenacity

Embracing failure and resilience is another powerful theme echoed by commencement speakers across podiums. Let’s face it; not all endeavors lead straight to success. But as Oprah Winfrey once said during her Harvard University commencement address, “It doesn’t matter how far you might rise… At some point, you are bound to stumble.” Her words remind us: How we pick ourselves up matters more than how we fall.

Making a Positive Impact

A graduating class stands poised on tomorrow’s threshold ready to mold history—and speeches should fuel this transformative fire within them. Memorable graduation speeches show individuals that ovation-worthy achievements are possible if you believe your actions count.

As you prepare your graduation speech, consider including one of these life lessons or one of your own. Don’t be afraid to share your hard-won insights to your fellow graduates—you just might inspire them to make history.

Celebrating Achievements and Acknowledging Contributions

Graduation is not just a ceremony. It’s a tribute to the academic achievements and extracurricular activities that have shaped students into who they are. The acknowledgment of teacher support and parental guidance also plays a pivotal role in these speeches, as they’re the scaffolding upon which student successes are built.

Academic Achievements, Extracurricular Activities

Acknowledging academic prowess goes beyond GPA scores or honor societies; it’s about highlighting unique intellectual journeys. Similarly, shining a light on extracurricular triumphs—be it sports stars setting records or artists winning competitions—adds depth to your speech. Remembering these moments isn’t merely recounting victories but celebrating the relentless spirit of your fellow graduates.

Diving deeper into personal anecdotes helps you connect with peers by reminding them of their growth through challenges faced together—from late-night study sessions to championship games. It’s these stories that make graduation memories stick with classmates long after commencement ends.

Teacher Support, Parental Guidance

The unsung heroes behind every graduate deserve their moment in your address too. Teachers’ dedication can turn classrooms into launch pads for dreams, while parents’ unwavering belief often fuels aspirations during tumultuous times like the pandemic.

In weaving tales of mentorship from teachers or wisdom imparted by parents, you remind everyone that success is rarely a solo act—it’s supported by many hands and hearts along the way. Celebrate this collective effort because each person has contributed uniquely to shaping graduating classes across America, including yours.

Common Issues in Writing and Delivering Graduation Speeches

Staring at a blank page as the clock ticks down to graduation day can rattle even the most seasoned speech writers. Overcoming writer’s block is about finding your message stick—the core idea that you want to leave with your peers. Remember, this isn’t just any talk; it’s one that marks a significant transition for both you and your audience.

Overcoming Writer’s Block

Finding yourself stumped on how to write a speech ? Don’t sweat it. Start by jotting down memories from school years or powerful life lessons that resonate. Think of Steve Jobs’ Stanford University commencement speech where he shared personal stories, which became an inspirational backbone for many other speeches.

If inspiration doesn’t strike immediately, step away from the computer. Take a walk and reflect on high school experiences or browse through commencement speeches archives—like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s address at the University of Pennsylvania. They might spark ideas you hadn’t considered yet.

Navigating Technical Troubles

A great speech can stumble over technical hiccups. To avoid glitches, check all equipment beforehand—a simple but crucial task often overlooked due to nerves or excitement about graduating class celebrations.

Prior rehearsals will also let you handle these issues like a pro should they pop up during delivery. Make sure any videos or slides complement rather than overshadow what you’re saying. After all, graduates aren’t there for bells and whistles—they’re there for meaningful words.

Handling Stage Fright

Your knees may shake thinking delivering in front of proud parents and peers—it’s no small feat, after all. Before you step on stage, visual your success until it feels more real and attainable.

And don’t forget to watch your body language. During your speech, maintain eye contact—not stare-downs—to connect genuinely with fellow students. And if anxiety creeps up despite practice sessions? Take deep breaths to steady yourself and keep going. You’ve handled high school—you can handle this.

FAQs on Writing and Delivering a Graduation Speech

What do i say in my graduation speech.

Share heartfelt stories, acknowledge support from others, and inspire your classmates to chase their dreams boldly.

How do you write a 3 minute graduation speech?

Keep it tight: hit the high notes with gratitude, shared memories, a dash of humor, and wrap up with punchy inspiration.

How do I start a graduation speech?

Kick off with thanks. Give props to family and mentors. Set the stage for reflecting on past adventures together.

What is the most important message of a graduation speech?

The core should spark hope—urge peers to leap into tomorrow equipped with lessons learned during these formative years.

Master your moment with a graduation speech that turns heads and warms hearts. Remember the power of gratitude and connect with your audience through stories, those shared adventures that bind you to your classmates. Don’t be afraid to add a few jokes and quotes to your speech either, as well as personal growth stories to inspire.

When you hit the stage, stand tall, make eye contact, and speak from your heart—the podium’s yours. If butterflies invade, breathe deep and know everyone’s rooting for you. Writer’s block didn’t stop you and neither will this.

Your graduation speech is not just words—it’s a battle cry for your graduating class as you prepare to conquer what lies ahead!

• Last Updated: March 5, 2024

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• Speeches by President Bacow

Commencement Remarks to the Class of 2022

To everyone who is assembled here today to celebrate the Class of 2022, welcome!

Congratulations, moms and dads, spouses and children, family and friends—cheerleaders and champions all.

And a special congratulations to all of you who are joining us online. I met with four seniors last week—all international students—and we talked about travel restrictions that kept some of their families from attending in person today. So, to all of you watching this around the world, a special welcome. In fact, let’s all wave to them.

The motto of this University is Veritas. So let me begin by telling you something true.

The view from up here is amazing.  I can’t believe it has been three years since we have been able to gather like this.

Being here—being together again at long last—is moving beyond words. But, to our graduates, you did not get here alone.  No one accomplishes anything on their own.  Please rise, face your family and friends and all those who have helped you reach this special moment, and give them your thanks.

Excellent work. Now that you are settled in your seats, I can share another truth with you.

Something very inconvenient happens when you combine a nation’s worth of graduations with a global supply chain shortage.

There are not enough folding chairs to go around.

I am not kidding—half of you almost had to sit on blankets today.

I won’t tell you which half.

Fortunately, the people who make Harvard run—our amazing staff—are creative, resilient, and resourceful. So now you know about the Great Seat Scramble of 2022.

I am telling you this because it is likely the last time you almost didn’t get a seat. Soon you will have a degree in hand from an institution whose name is known no matter where you go in the world, whose name is synonymous with excellence, ambition, and achievement—and maybe some other modifiers on which we needn’t dwell today.

With your degree in hand, you may often find yourself invited to sit and stay awhile, invited to share your thoughts and ideas, invited to participate, to contribute, to lead. You may end up sitting on a board or occupying a seat of power. Who knows? You may even be standing up here someday, welcoming another class of Harvard graduates to their Commencement.

And what are you to make of that—of the fact that people will make room for you , find a seat for you ?

You could take it for granted. You could assume that you deserved it all along.

But what a waste that would be.

Today, I want to challenge you—members of the Harvard Class of 2022—to save a seat for others, to make room for others, to ensure that the opportunities afforded by your education do not enrich your life alone. You will have more chances than most to make a difference in the world, more opportunities to give others a chance at a better life. Take advantage of these opportunities when they arise. Whatever you do with your Harvard education, please be known at least as much for your humility, kindness, and concern for others as for your professional accomplishments. Recognize the role that good fortune and circumstance have played in your life, and please work to extend opportunity to others just as it has been extended to you.

That is how you will sustain the pride and joy you feel today. And that’s the truth.

Congratulations, members of the Class of 2022. You have accomplished great things; you’re going to accomplish even more. Good luck to each and every one of you—and Godspeed.

Now, we will hear from three students selected to deliver this year’s orations.

.

, , .

, , .

The Long History Behind Your Favorite Celebrity Commencement Speech

E very year as summer edges ever closer and temperatures ever warmer, important people—ranging from the president to actors and from comedians to foreign dignitaries—flock to American colleges to give grads their two cents about life, work and everything else. The commencement speech has become its own advice-filled genre, spawning hit books and viral videos . But when did we become so inundated with by these seasonal advice-givers?

There’s no clear indication of which university started the trend of tapping celebrities to speak at graduations, but over the past three or four decades their numbers have grown from a few fun speakers amid a torrent of university officials to the flood of businesspeople, actors, writers and humorists who headline today’s ceremonies.

Notable politicians have been part of graduation ceremonies since the very earliest ones: Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop attended Harvard’s first commencement in 1642, when there were just nine “commencers .” But early commencement ceremonies were less about outside speakers than about hearing from the students themselves: those graduating would give orations in Hebrew, Greek and Latin as well as “disputations,” formal academic debates on philosophic questions. (The tradition of having a speech in Latin continues at some universities, though these days a translation is usually provided—plus, sometimes, instructions about when to laugh.)

Anthony Grafton, professor of intellectual history at Princeton University, says the commencement speech is “a very old custom and it goes with the idea that oratory was one of the central things that students were learning, and one of the central skills of the university.” Other speakers would also be academics, Grafton adds, who would demonstrate the level of disputation possible at different ranks of academic achievement.

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Despite what sounds like a fairly dry program, these commencement exercises were a big hit. Samuel Eliot Morison’s 1935 text The Founding of Harvard College described the activities of early commencements: “the commencers now having proved their proficiency in the three learned tongues, and the audience being suitably impressed and exceedingly fatigued, the assembly adjourns at eleven o’clock for dinner,” Open to the public, it was also an occasion for revelry. Albert Matthews, who studied Harvard commencements from 1642-1916, likewise noted that “for nearly two centuries it was the great gala day of the colony, the province, the state” and that “not merely the alumni but the populace” would flock to attend.

Over time, however, oratory began to lose its place as a central skill students were expected to acquire at college. Accordingly, their students’ displays of knowledge became a smaller part of the commencement exercises. To fill the gap, in came the guest speakers.

Even so, those early commencement speakers tended to be from the university in question or statesmen of some sort, not cultural figures. Sticking with Harvard, for example, 19th century commencement speakers did occasionally break the mold —Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf and “man of letters,” was the 1890 speaker—but tended to be prominent figures from fairly staid and proper backgrounds, often British aristocrats. Over time, artists and businessmen began to creep in among the academics. At first it was a trickle (Carl Sandburg in 1940; Thornton Wilder in 1951). By the 2000s, the school featured speakers with more celebrity backgrounds, like J.K. Rowling and Bill Gates, about as often as world leaders and academics.

MORE: 10 Timeless Pieces of Advice from Commencement Addresses

One reason why it may seem like there are more commencement speeches than ever is numbers: some individuals are sought after every year, and it has become a new normal for presidents to give multiple speeches each year. In NPR’s archive of 354 of the best commencement speeches, almost half were delivered after 2010, and only a handful before 1960.

And sure, recent speeches are easier to find and more likely to be relevant to our lives today—but that imbalance also reflects something deeper: changes in which jobs are considered important, whose advice is considered valuable, where we find counsel and who we most admire.

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The 21 greatest graduation speeches of the last 60 years

By german lopez on may 11, 2016.

Graduation speeches are the last opportunity for a high school or college to educate its students. It's unsurprising, then, that these institutions often pull in some of the world's most powerful people to leave an equally powerful impression on their students. Here are the best of those speeches and some of the sections that resonate the most.

David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College, 2005

Jamie Sullivan

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?' This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches: the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bulshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish.”

Steve Jobs at Stanford University, 2005

Stanford University

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Ellen Degeneres at Tulane University, 2009

Tulane University

“I know that a lot of you are concerned about your future, but there’s no need to worry. The economy is booming, the job market is wide open, the planet is just fine. It’s gonna be great. You’ve already survived a hurricane. What else can happen to you? And as I mentioned before, some of the most devastating things that happen to you will teach you the most. And now you know the right questions to ask for your first job interview — like, ‘Is it above sea level?’ So to conclude my conclusion that I’ve previously concluded in the common cement speech, I guess what I’m trying to say is life is like one big Mardi Gras. But instead of showing your boobs, show people your brain. And if they like what they see, you’ll have more beads than you know what to do with. And you’ll be drunk most of the time.”

Conan O'Brien at Dartmouth College, 2011

“Way back in the 1940s there was a very, very funny man named Jack Benny. He was a giant star and easily one of the greatest comedians of his generation. And a much younger man named Johnny Carson wanted very much to be Jack Benny. In some ways he was, but in many ways he wasn’t. He emulated Jack Benny, but his own quirks and mannerisms, along with a changing medium, pulled him in a different direction. And yet his failure to completely become his hero made him the funniest person of his generation. David Letterman wanted to be Johnny Carson, and was not, and as a result my generation of comedians wanted to be David Letterman. And none of us are — my peers and I have all missed that mark in a thousand different ways. But the point is this: it is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It’s not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can be a catalyst for profound reinvention.”

Carol Bartz at University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2012

University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Accept failure and learn from it. Failure is part of life, it’s part of every career, and you have to know how to take advantage of it. The single greatest strength that this country has via Silicon Valley is that failure is seen as a sign of experience. Failure is part of work, it’s part of life. People are willing to take risks on the way to innovation. One of my fondest sayings is fail, fast, forward. Recognize you’ve failed, try to do it fast, learn from it, build on it, and move forward. Embrace failure, have it be part of your persona. You’re going to have long careers, as I’ve already told you, you’re going to have many failures — personal, business, professional. I’ve had my share. But just use this as a building block to your next success.”

President John F. Kennedy at American University, 1963

“Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process — a way of solving problems. With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor — it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.”

David McCullough Jr. at Wellesley High School, 2012

Wellesley High School

“Like accolades ought to be, the fulfilled life is a consequence — a gratifying byproduct. It’s what happens when you’re thinking about more important things. Climb the mountain not to plant your flag but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air, and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you. Go to Paris to be in Paris, not to cross it off your list and congratulate yourself for being worldly. Exercise free will and creative independent thought not for the satisfactions they will bring you but for the good they will do others — the rest of the 6.8 billion and those who will follow them. And then you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special, because everyone is.”

Stephen Colbert at Northwestern University, 2011

Joshua Sherman

“You have been told to follow your dreams, but what if it’s a stupid dream? For instance, Stephen Colbert of 25 years ago lived at 2015 North Ridge with two men and three women in what I now know was a brothel. He dreamed of living alone — well, alone with his beard in a large, barren loft apartment, lots of blonde wood, wearing a kimono, with a futon on the floor and a Samovar of tea constantly bubbling in the background, doing Shakespeare in the street for homeless people. Today, I am a beardless, suburban dad who lives in a house, wears no iron khakis, and makes Anthony Weiner jokes for a living. And I love it, because thankfully dreams can change. If we’d all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses. So whatever your dream is right now, if you don’t achieve it, you haven’t failed, and you’re not some loser. But just as importantly — and this is the part I may not get right and you may not listen to — if you do get your dream, you are not a winner.”

Sheryl Sandberg at Harvard Business School, 2012

Harvard Business School

“I sat down with Eric Schmidt, who had just become the CEO [of Google], and I showed him the spreadsheet and I said, this job meets none of my criteria. He put his hand on my sheet and he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t be an idiot.’ Excellent career advice. And then he said, ‘Get on a rocketship. When companies are growing quickly and having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves. And when companies aren’t growing quickly or their missions don’t matter as much, that’s when stagnation and politics come in. If you’re offered a seat on a rocketship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.’”

Michael Lewis at Princeton University, 2012

Princeton University

“In a general sort of way you’ve been appointed leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense right now its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interest to anything. All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may deserve the extra cookie. But you will be happier, and you will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don't.”

Jon Stewart at the College of William & Mary, 2004

College of William & Mary

“Lets talk about the real world for a moment. ... I don’t really know to put this, so I’ll be blunt: we broke it. Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry. I don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately, but it just kinda got away from us. Somewhere between the gold rush of easy internet profits and an arrogant sense of endless empire, we heard kind of a pinging noise, and then the damn thing just died on us. So I apologize. But here’s the good news: you fix this thing, you’re the next greatest generation, people.”

Oprah Winfrey at Spelman College, 2012

Spelman College

“You must have some kind of vision for your life, even if you don’t know the plan. You have to have a direction in which you choose to go. I never was the kind of woman who liked to get in a car and just go for a ride. I had a boyfriend that would say, ‘Let’s just go for a ride.’ I want to know where are we going. Do we have a destination? Is there a plan? Are we just riding? What I’ve learned is that’s a great metaphor for life. You want to be in the driver’s seat of your own life, because if you’re not, life will drive you.”

Neil Gaiman at the University of the Arts, 2012

Lennie Alzate

“The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right. The things I’ve done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures that people would gather together and discuss until the end of time. They always had that in common. Looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. And while I was doing them, I had no idea. I still don’t. And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going to work? And sometimes the things I did really didn’t work. There are stories of mine that have never been reprinted. Some of them never even left the house. But I learned as much from them as I did from the things that worked.”

George Saunders at Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences, 2013

Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences

“Seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines energetically for the rest of your life. And do all the other things of course, the ambitious things: travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in a wild jungle river — after first testing it for monkey poop. But as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — your soul, if you will — is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Teresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.”

Nora Ephron at Wellesley College, 1996

Wellesley College

“So what are you going to do? This is the season when a clutch of successful women who have it all get up and give speeches to women like you and say, ‘To be perfectly honest, you can’t have it all.’ Well, maybe young women don’t wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case any of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it’s going to be like, but surprises are good for you. And don't be frightened. You can always change your mind. I know. I've had four careers and three husbands. And this is something else I want to tell you, one of the hundreds of things I didn’t know when I was sitting here so many years ago: you are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever.”

Aaron Sorkin at Syracuse University, 2012

Syracuse University

“Decisions are made by those who show up. Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world. Don't ever forget that you’re a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day: civility, respect, kindness, character. You’re too good for schadenfreude, you’re too good for gossip and snark, you’re too good for intolerance — and since you're walking into the middle of a presidential election, it’s worth mentioning that you’re too good to think people who disagree with you are your enemy. … Don’t ever forget that a small group of thoughtful people can change the world. It’s the only thing that ever has.”

Barbara Kingsolver at DePauw University, 1994

DePauw University

“It’s not up to you to save the world. That’s the job of every living person who likes the idea of a future. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and give you one little piece of advice, and that is, like the idea of a future. Believe you have it in you to make the world look better rather than worse seven generations from now. Figure out what that could look like. And then if you’re lucky, you’ll find a way to live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.”

Jane Lynch at Smith College, 2012

Smith College

“My counsel to you, women of Smith College: let life surprise you. Don’t have a plan. Plans are for wusses. If my life went according to my plan, I would never ever have the life I have today. Now, you are obviously good planners, or you wouldn’t be here. So stop it! Stop it now! Don’t deprive yourself of the exciting journey your life can be when you relinquish the need to have goals and a blueprint.”

Bill Gates at Harvard University, 2007

Harvard University

“In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue — a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don’t have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them. Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on big inequities. I feel sure it will be one of the great experiences of your lives.”

Eugene Mirman at Lexington High School, 2009

Eugene Mirman

“What’s the worst grade you’ve ever gotten? A D? An F? When I was in eighth grade in Diamond Middle School on a homework assignment — this is true — I once got a -8. Sadly very true. I did my assignment worse than not doing it. But did I let getting a grade lower than the lowest possible grade stop me? No. I was put into resource room in special education, and I turned my F into a D. So you see sometimes you can fail, then barely pass, and then become a comedian.”

Michelle Obama at Spelman College, 2011

“Some of you may have grown up like me, in neighborhoods where few had the chance to go to college, where being teased for doing well in school was a fact of life, where well-meaning but misguided folks questioned whether a girl with my background could get into a school like Princeton. Sometimes I’d save them the trouble and raised the questions myself, in my own head, lying awake at night, doubting whether I had what it took to succeed. And the truth is that there will always be folks out there who make assumptions about others. There will always be folks who try to raise themselves up by cutting other people down. That happens to everyone, including me, throughout their lives. But when that happens to you all, here’s what I want you to do: I want you to just stop a minute, take a deep breath — because it’s going to need to be deep — and I want you to think about all those women who came before you.”

• The formula for a good life after college
• Girls have gotten better grades than boys for 100 years
• The job market for 2014 grads: still awful
• Editor Eleanor Barkhorn
• Designer: Uy Tieu
• Developer Yuri Victor
• Special Thanks Chao Li

These Great Commencement Speeches Will Change How You Look at Success and Failure

Our greatest actors, writers, musicians, and leaders give really great advice—but it's not just for college graduates.

It's easy to dismiss the lessons delivered in a college commencement speech as reserved for bright, privileged kids with a degree at a fancy school who have their whole lives ahead of them. Anyone still grinding through college or living in the real world probably doesn't exactly feel like the target audience for these inspiring words. And that's not wrong!

But the point of these speeches isn't to give those bright-eyed youngsters lessons for that given moment in time. No one needs advice on how to relax after a lifetime of school and tests and teachers. This advice is for graduates to store away somewhere and remember once real life beats their ass. Because that'll happen. This is advice for the hard times to come. This is advice for the people still struggling away to kick off careers, to make dreams come true, etc., etc.

Barack Obama

School: Howard University

Class: 2016

Most inspiring quote: "So don't try to shut folks out, don't try to shut them down, no matter how much you might disagree with them. There's been a trend around the country of trying to get colleges to disinvite speakers with a different point of view, or disrupt a politician's rally. Don't do that—no matter how ridiculous or offensive you might find the things that come out of their mouths. Because as my grandmother used to tell me, every time a fool speaks, they are just advertising their own ignorance. Let them talk. If you don't, you just make them a victim, and then they can avoid accountability."

Ellen DeGeneres

School:  Tulane University

Class:  2009

Most inspiring quote:  "It was so important for me to lose everything because I found what the most important thing is. The most important thing is to be true to yourself."

School:  Los Angeles Trade Technical College

Class:  2015

Most inspiring quote:  "When you're the absolute best, you get hated on the most."

School:  Smith College

Class:  2012

Most inspiring quote:  "Life is just one, big improvisation." 

Amy Poehler

School:  Harvard University

Class:  2011

Most inspiring quote:  "Try putting your iPhones down every once in awhile and look at people's faces."

Elizabeth Warren

School:  Suffolk University

Class:  2016

Most inspiring quote:  "Knowing who you are will help you when it's time to fight. Fight for the job you want, fight for the people who mean the most to you and fight for the kind of world you want to live in. It will help when people say that's impossible or you can't do that. Look, if you take the unexpected opportunities when they come up, if you know yourself, and if you fight for what you believe in, I can promise that you will live a life that is rich with meaning."

David Byrne

School:  Columbia University

Class:  2013

Most inspiring quote:  "I believe that there is a way to have a very, very satisfying, enriching and creative life in the arts, but it depends on what criteria you use to look at that. But I would say that if you're being creative, with happiness, satisfaction, all that—you're succeeding."

Stephen Colbert

School:  Northwestern University

Most inspiring quote:  "If everybody followed their first dreams in life, the world would be ruled by cowboys and princesses."

Oprah Winfrey

Most inspiring quote:  "It doesn't matter how far you might rise. At some point you are bound to stumble because if you're constantly doing what we do, raising the bar. If you're constantly pushing yourself higher, higher the law of averages not to mention the Myth of Icarus predicts that you will at some point fall. And when you do I want you to know this, remember this: there is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction."

Jon Stewart

School:  The College of William and Mary

Class:  2004

Most inspiring quote:  "So how do you know what is the right path to choose to get the result that you desire? And the honest answer is this: You won't."

George Saunders

School:  Syracuse University

Most inspiring quote:  "What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded… Sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly."

Meryl Streep

School:  Barnard College

Class:  2010

Most inspiring quote:  "This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There's only change, and resistance to it and then more change."

Neil Gaiman

School:  University of the Arts

Most inspiring quote:  "Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do what only you can do best. Make good art."

Conan O'Brien

School:  Dartmouth College

Most inspiring quote:  "I did a lot of silly, unconventional, spontaneous, and seemingly irrational things, and guess what? With the exception of the blue leather suit, it was the most satisfying and fascinating year of my professional life."

Toni Morrison

School:  Wellesley College

Most inspiring quote:  "Of course, you're general, but you're also specific. A citizen and a person, and the person you are is like nobody else on the planet. Nobody has the exact memory that you have. What is now known is not all what you are capable of knowing. You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human without wealth. What it feels like to be human without domination over others, without reckless arrogance, without fear of others unlike you, without rotating, rehearsing and reinventing the hatreds you learned in the sandbox. And although you don't have complete control over the narrative—no author does, I can tell you—you could nevertheless create it."

Class:  2007

Most inspiring quote:  "Don't let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives."

David Foster Wallace

School:  Kenyon College

Class:  2005

Most inspiring quote:  "The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: 'This is water.'"

Denzel Washington

School:  University of Pennsylvania

Most inspiring quote:  "Fall forward. This is what I mean: Reggie Jackson struck out 2,600 times in his career, the most in the history of baseball. But you don't hear about the strikeouts. People remember the home runs. Fall forward. Thomas Edison conducted 1,000 failed experiments. Did you know that? I didn't know that because the 1,001st was the light bulb. Fall forward. Every failed experiment is one step closer to success."

Zadie Smith

School:  The New School

Class:  2014

Most inspiring quote:  "Walk down these crowded streets with a smile on your face. Be thankful you get to walk so close to other humans. It's a privilege. Don't let your fellow humans be alien to you, and as you get older and perhaps a little less open than you are now, don't assume that exclusive always and everywhere means better. It may only mean lonelier. There will always be folks hard selling you the life of the few: the private schools, private plans, private islands, private life. They are trying to convince you that hell is other people. Don't believe it. We are far more frequently each other's shelter and correction, the antidote to solipsism, and so many windows on this world."

School:  Stanford University

Class: 2005

Most inspiring quote:  "Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose."

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Soft Skills

8 minute read

20 Inspiring Takeaways From Top Graduation Speeches

Kat Boogaard

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Be the change you wish to see in the world.

Are you rolling your eyes yet? There are plenty of beloved quotes, ancient proverbs, and tired clichés that find their way into graduation speeches.

But, some speeches that happen at that prestigious podium on the graduation stage? They’re actually downright enlightening and moving.

So, we’ve pulled together some of the best graduation speeches from recent years—that won’t result in any groans or eye rolls.

Whether you’re a recent graduate or are more established in your career, we all have something to learn from these inspiring, encouraging, and sometimes even hilarious messages.

Want to learn more?

Take your soft skills to the next level with our comprehensive (and free) ebook!

1. Amy Poehler, Harvard University

All I can tell you today is what I have learned. What I have discovered as a person in this world. And that is this: you can't do it alone. As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration. Other people and other people's ideas are often better than your own.

Read the full transcript here

2. Madeleine Albright, Wellesley College

None of us have full title to the truth. Wisdom comes from the ability to believe in ideas while maintaining respect for the rights and beliefs of others. As critics point out, this quality can sometimes lead to intellectual mush. At its best, however, it can generate triumphs that encompass both mind and spirit.

3. Steve Jobs, Stanford University

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

4. Stephen Colbert, Wake Forest University

Of course, any standards worth having will be a challenge to meet. And most of the time, you will fall short. But what is nice about having your own set of standards is that from now on, you fill out your own report card. So do yourself a favor: Be an easy grader. Score yourself on a curve. Give yourself extra credit. You have the power. You are your own professor now.

5. Arianna Huffington, Smith College

The founding fathers wrote about the pursuit of happiness, and if you go back to the original documents—as I'm sure all of you have done—happiness did not mean the pursuit of more ways to be entertained. It was the happiness that comes from feeling good by doing good.

6. Barack Obama, University of Michigan

But we cannot expect to solve our problems if all we do is tear each other down. You can disagree with a certain policy without demonizing the person who espouses it. You can question someone’s views and their judgment without questioning their motives or their patriotism.

7. Oprah Winfrey, Howard University

Your calling isn't something that somebody can tell you about. It's what you feel. It's a part of your life force. It is the thing that gives you juice. The thing that are you supposed to do. And nobody can tell you what that is. You know it inside yourself.

8. Peter Dinklage, Bennington College

R aise the rest of your life to meet you. Don’t search for defining moments because they will never come. Well, the birth of your children, OK, of course, forget about it, that’s just six months. My life is forever changed, that’s most defining moment ever. But I’m talking about in the rest of your life and most importantly in your work. The moments that define you have already happened. And they will already happen again. And it passes so quickly.

Peter's Bennington College alumni page

9. Meryl Streep, Barnard College

Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending or acting is a very valuable life skill and we all do it. All the time, we don’t want to be caught doing it but nevertheless it’s part of the adaptations of our species, we change who we are to fit the exigencies of our time, and not just strategically, or to our own advantage, sometimes sympathetically, without our even knowing it for the betterment of the whole group.

10. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Rice University

So many people can’t wait till school ends, can’t wait until the summer holidays. What are you in a hurry to do, to stop learning? This is the only time in your life when your job was to learn. That was your job. That’s what was expected of you. Now you’re being cast forth and I’m hoping, I’m expecting that you’re not saying to yourself ‘I’m done learning.

11. Marissa Mayer, Illinois Institute of Technology

Finding something you are passionate about gives you a sense of purpose and is a big part of happiness. To find it though, you need to be honest with yourself, observant, and make the most of the situation. Which brings me to my next piece of advice on finding things. Find the smartest people you can and surround yourself with them.

12. Sanjay Gupta, University of Michigan

We do not think of our lives in a linear way. If I ask you to tell me about your days as a University student, it’s unlikely you would start at the beginning and describe every moment all the way to the end. We remember series of moments, memorable moments; and together these moments make up the meshwork of our lives.

13. Sheryl Sandberg, Barnard College

So my hope for all of you here, for every single one of you, is that you’re going to walk across the stage and get your diploma. You’re going to go out tonight or maybe all summer and celebrate. You deserve it. And then you’re going to lean way into your career. You’re going to find something you love doing, and you’re going to do it with gusto. You’re going to pick your field and you’re going to ride it all the way to the top.

14. Will Ferrell, University of Southern California

To those of you graduates sitting out there who have a pretty good idea of what you’d like to do with your life, congratulations. For many of you who maybe don’t have it all figured out, it’s okay. That’s the same chair that I sat in. Enjoy the process of your search without succumbing to the pressure of the result. Trust your gut, keep throwing darts at the dartboard. Don’t listen to the critics and you will figure it out.

15. Abigail Washburn, Colorado College

An open heart and curious mind creates miracles. I believe we discover our true calling not because we intellectually know what it is (even if we think we do) but because we are curious enough & open enough to be found by our true calling.

16. Ben Bernanke, Princeton University

Nobody likes to fail but failure is an essential part of life and of learning. If your uniform isn't dirty, you haven't been in the game.

17. Diana Nyad, Middlebury College

But I’m asking you, what are you going to do with this one wild and precious life of yours?

18. Aaron Sorkin, Syracuse University

To get where you’re going, you have to be good, and to be good where you’re going, you have to be damned good. Every once in awhile, you’ll succeed. Most of the time you’ll fail, and most of the time the circumstances will be well beyond your control.

19. Barbara Bush, Wellesley College

For several years, you've had impressed upon you the importance to your career of dedication and hard work. And, of course, that's true. But as important as your obligations as a doctor, a lawyer, a business leader will be, you are a human being first. And those human connections—with spouses, with children, with friends—are the most important investments you will ever make. At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, winning one more verdict, or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend, or a parent.

20. Conan O’Brien, Dartmouth College

Your path at 22 will not necessarily be your path at 32 or 42. One’s dream is constantly evolving, rising and falling, changing course.

Wrapping it up

You’ve just had a front-row seat to some of the best nuggets of wisdom from these graduation speeches. And now, it’s time to give you a well-deserved round of applause because you have reached the finish line of an amazing chapter—not the end of the journey.

Now, a challenging world is waiting. But don’t panic. You’ll be able to roll with the punches if you don’t stop doing one thing: learning. These inspiring speeches have proved that you don’t only need knowledge but also ‘people’ skills to surf everyday waves.

So, what’s next? At GoSkills, we’ve got a bunch of soft skills courses waiting for your to dive into, so you can keep your learning party going after your graduation. After all, every end is just a brand-new beginning!

Need to brush up on your soft skills?

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Kat is a writer specializing in career, self-development, and productivity topics. When she escapes her computer, she enjoys reading, hiking, golfing, and dishing out tips for prospective freelancers on her website.

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Top 10 Commencement Speeches of All Time

April 2, 2021 - Dom Barnard

In need of some inspiration or motivation? We’ve compiled five of the best commencement speeches on overcoming doubt, fear, failure, hardship, and tackling the working world with confidence.

Our greatest writers, philanthropists, and business leaders tell great stories and give very good advice, which is relevant no matter what stage you are in life, so read on.

1. Chadwick Boseman – Howard University (2018)

Howard University alumnus Chadwick Boseman provides words of inspiration to the Class of 2018 during Howard University’s 150th Commencement Ceremony on Saturday, May 12 in Washington, D.C.

Chadwick Boseman was an American actor and playwright, who achieved international fame for playing superhero Black Panther in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He appeared in four MCU films, including an eponymous 2018 film that earned him an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance. As the first black actor to headline an MCU film, he was also named in the 2018 Time 100.

In 2016, Boseman was diagnosed with colon cancer. Boseman kept his condition private, continuing to act while also extensively supporting cancer charities until his death in 2020 from the illness.

2. J.K. Rowling – Harvard University (2008)

J.K.Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, gave this incredible commencement speech about never fearing failure and learning to embrace it in order to achieve success.

She told the students about her  rejections  and the dark period she went through, “I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless” before going on to become a best-selling author (Rowling recently released her rejection letters from her recent Robert Galbraith series).

“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.”

3. Steve Jobs – Stanford University (2005)

Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple Computer and acquirer of  Pixar Animation Studios , urges graduates to pursue their dreams, not settle down and live each day as if it is their last. Much like J.K. Rowling, Steve highlights the opportunities in life’s setbacks during this commencement address.

He talks about how he used to cope with important life choices, by remembering that he’ll be dead soon and that his decisions don’t really matter in the long run.

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

4. Barack Obama – Class of 2020 (2020)

President Obama shares a message of optimism with the Class of 2020 as a part of “Dear Class of 2020,” a virtual commencement to celebrate graduates, their families, and their communities.

As uncertain as these times may be, President Obama calls on the Class of 2020 to seize the opportunity to create a new normal, one that is fairer, gives everyone opportunity, treats everyone equally, and builds bridges between people instead of dividing them.

5. Oprah Winfrey – Stanford University (2008)

Oprah Winfrey , global media leader and philanthropist, spoke to the Class of 2008 at Stanford’s 117th Commencement.

In this inspirational speech, she talks about trusting your gut and following it fearlessly throughout life, “If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. That’s the lesson. And that lesson alone will save you, my friends, a lot of grief.” She also highlights an important point about not sacrificing satisfaction and happiness for money.

“And how do you know when you’re doing something right? How do you know that? It feels so… When you’re supposed to do something or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know. The trick is to learn to check your ego at the door and start checking your gut instead.”

6. Jeff Bezos – Princeton University (2010)

Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO gave the  Baccalaureate address  to Princeton University’s Class of 2010. Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering, so this commencement speech was particularly poignant and meaningful.

Bezos highlights the importance of being kind in life, mentioning his belief in its importance over intellectual ability. One’s character, he suggested, is reflected not in the gifts they are endowed with at birth but rather by the choices they make over the course of a lifetime.

“There’s a difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.”

7. Bill Gates – Harvard University (2007)

Bill Gates, business magnate and co-founder of Microsoft, addresses the Harvard Alumni Association in Tecentenary Theater at Harvard University’s 2007 Commencement.

In classic Gates style, he starts with some humor, stating that he was a  bad influence  on students, in particular Steve Ballmer, to drop out of college and join him.

He dropped out of Harvard in the mid-1970’s and went on to co-found Microsoft with Paul Allen. He subsequently has committed huge amounts of money to Philanthropy causes, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This commencement speech is definitely worth watching from start to finish.

“Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree. I want to thank Harvard for this honor. I’ll be changing my job next year and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.”

8. Beyoncé – Class Of 2020 (2020)

“Your blackness is beautiful. Your compassion, your understanding, your fight for people who may be different from you is beautiful. I hope you continue to go into the world and show them that you will never stop being yourself. That it’s your time now, make them see you.”

9. Elon Musk – Caltech (2012)

“If you go back say, 300 years, the things we take for granted today, you’d be burned at stake for. Being able to fly. That’s crazy. Being able to see over long distances, being able to communicate, having effectively with the Internet as a group mind of sorts, and having access to all the world’s information instantly from almost anywhere on the earth. This stuff that really would be magic – that would be considered magic in times past.”

10. Natalie Portman – Harvard University (2015)

Academy Award-winning actress Natalie Portman ’03 addresses graduating seniors at Harvard’s Senior Class Day ceremony on May 27, 2015 at Tercentenary Theatre.

USC valedictorian speaks out after school canceled her commencement speech

"I also wanted to impart a message of responsibility," Asna Tabassum said.

The University of Southern California's campus has been in the spotlight after school administrators canceled a student valedictorian's commencement speech due to safety concerns over her pro-Palestinian views.

Asna Tabassum, a first-generation South Asian-American Muslim, was scheduled to give a speech on May 10. School administrators, however, decided to cancel her speech citing safety concerns.

"The intensity of feelings, fueled by both social media and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, has grown to include many voices outside of USC and has escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement," Andrew T. Guzman, the school's provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, said in a letter to students on Monday.

"This decision is not only necessary to maintain the safety of our campus and students, but is consistent with the fundamental legal obligation – including the expectations of federal regulators – that universities act to protect students and keep our campus community safe," he added.

Tabassum has openly criticized the decision and several Muslim rights groups have also called out the school. Pro-Israel associations, however, have commended the school for its decision.

The college senior spoke about the situation with ABC News Live's Phil Lipof on Wednesday.

ABC NEWS LIVE: I want to start with this statement that the college provost said, in part, that "The intensity of the feelings around allowing you to speak escalated to the point of creating substantial risk relating to security and disruption at the commencement, pointing out harassment and violence seen on other campuses."

But I know you had a meeting with them. I'm wondering, did they tell you anything specific, a specific threat that was made against you, or have you had any specific threats made against you?

ASNA TABASSUM: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I will have to say no. Nothing specific was offered to me, no specific details regarding security threats or safety concerns were offered to me.

MORE: USC cancels valedictorian's speech amid Palestinian support, student says school 'caving to fear and rewarding hatred'

ABC NEWS LIVE: A lot of people talk about the criticism of you and your classmates, some of them feel like this goes back to a link. You've talked about this post on social media to a site there.

Another person created this [site], we should point out you did not create it, you posted it to a site [that] some believe contains anti-Semitic views, really some violent anti-Semitic views, including calling for the abolishment of the State of Israel.

So do you think that's part of it? And do you believe the State of Israel should be abolished?

TABASSUM: So when it comes to abolishing the State of Israel, I do want to point out the rest of the link, and so the very next sentence talks about the peaceful coexistence of Arabs and Jews.

And I think it points to what I've been saying since the beginning of this issue, which is that I'm committed to human equality and to human rights. And so this link, I encourage people to look at it in its entirety rather than looking at one specific example.

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For example, it's discussing both the one-state and the two-state solution and it's discussing the history of the region. And I think that there's important information for people to understand on their own and come to their own conclusions about.

When it comes to abolishing the state of Israel. I will say I want to abolish apartheid.

ABC NEWS LIVE: If there is one-state and two-state in there, you could see a two-state solution. I think the abolishment of Israel is what bothered a lot of people. But you would advocate for a two-state solution, so Israel would still exist, and then there would be a Palestinian state? Is that what I'm hearing?

TABASSUM: So no, I'm not necessarily committing to a one-state or a two-state solution. I'm simply saying that this information on the website offered information from multiple perspectives, and so my endorsing of any one single perspective is unfounded.

ABC NEWS LIVE: OK. So USC has said this is not meant to infringe upon your free speech. Do you feel like it's doing just that?

TABASSUM: So in its most technical terms, the ability to give a speech at commencement is a privilege, right?

It's not necessarily free speech, but what I will say that I expressed my views and I express my views online, and the hatred that was leveled at me because of myself expressing these views I think ultimately was part of the reason why USC caved in.

And so whether free speech in its most technical terms is being debated here is maybe up for debate. But I will say speech is an issue and speech is being stifled.

MORE: The Israel-Hamas war is a hot-button issue. How K-12 schools are addressing it.

ABC NEWS LIVE: What were you going to speak about? There's a lot of talk about what you posted, that link, and what your beliefs may be. Were you going to talk about that at graduation, or were you going to give a different kind of speech?

TABASSUM: So, the valedictorian honor is ultimately a unifying honor, right? It's emblematic of USC's unifying values. And I think I take that to heart.

I wanted my speech to be in the genre of a valedictory speech, and so that being said, I wanted to impart a message of hope. I also wanted to impart a message of responsibility.

We are given a wonderful set of higher education. We have been given the knowledge of learning how to learn. And so I wanted to encourage my peers to learn about the world and come to their own conclusions and then act to change the world in the ways that they see fit.

And so ultimately, taking in my role as valedictorian, I wanted to be a unifying voice for all students, and that was preemptively taken away from me.

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Did USC set ‘very bad precedent’ by canceling valedictorian speech over safety threats?

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Five months ago, USC cited safety as a rationale for banning economics professor John Strauss, who is Jewish, from campus after student activists said they felt threatened when he approached them at a protest and said “Hamas are murderers. ... I hope they all are killed.”

“Our north star is protecting the safety of our community,” a USC spokesperson said at the time.

Now the university is again citing safety concerns for canceling a Muslim valedictorian’s speech at its May commencement ceremony.

More than six months after the Hamas attack on Israel that started a war, campus administrators nationwide are struggling to uphold principles of free expression amid mounting pressure from donors, legislators and activists who claim an ever-expanding amount of speech — or potential speech — subjects students not only to physical danger but also to psychological harm.

Free speech advocates note that the decision regarding Asna Tabassum, a USC senior who is graduating with a major in biomedical engineering, was not caused by anything she said or planned to say. Instead, the university said, online discussion had taken on an “alarming tenor” as activists objected to her minor — resistance to genocide — and a link to a pro-Palestinian website Tabassum had shared on her Instagram profile .

“This sets a very bad precedent,” said Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy with the nonprofit civil rights group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “Moving forward, are they going to cancel every speech that could have anything to do with Israel-Palestine because they’re worried about ‘safety concerns’?”

Free speech experts fear that USC, in canceling its valedictorian’s speech, is paving the way for a censorious commencement season, offering others a playbook on how to silence potentially controversial speakers in the weeks to come.

“A university, except in the most exceptional cases, should not be giving in to threats of violence in order to suppress speakers,” said Keith Whittington, a political scientist at Princeton University and author of “Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech.”

“It’s a corruption and compromise of the university’s very basic commitments.”

The use of safety concerns to shut down campus speech did not start after Oct. 7. But, Morey said, universities have increasingly canceled events as they have seen an uptick in protests of Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip.

Last month, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas halted a public lecture from a visiting Israeli professor 15 minutes after he started speaking when pro-Palestinian protesters burst into the room.

Asaf Pe’er, an expert on theoretical high-energy astrophysics, was not speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His lecture was on black holes.

Rather than stop the disruption, citing the protesters’ 1st Amendment rights, UNLV police escorted Pe’er off campus “to ensure his safety.”

Other cancellations in the name of safety have taken place across the country, from Indiana University shutting down an art exhibit by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby to the University of Vermont canceling an in-person appearance by a pro-Palestinian poet .

Experts who track campus speech say university leaders have predominantly targeted speakers expressing support for the Palestinian cause.

“It’s definitely the pro-Palestinian speech that we are seeing very broadly being subjected to institutional punishments,” Morey said. “That’s not to say that there aren’t cases where pro-Israel or Zionist speakers are being punished.”

Part of the reason pro-Palestinian activists are targeted in greater numbers is that more students have embraced the Palestinian cause in recent years.

Some protests have crossed the line into unprotected expression, Morey said. But there is also growing pressure on university officials from donors and legislators worried about antisemitism to crack down on pro-Palestinian speech.

“It’s a pressure cooker for administrators,” Morey said. “In these cases, we want to make sure that their lodestar are student and faculty rights, rather than who is exerting the most pressure.”

When USC announced that Tabassum would be the valedictorian, two groups — Trojans for Israel, a campus student group, and EndJewHatred, a national movement dedicated to fighting antisemitism — spoke publicly against her.

In an Instagram post , Trojans for Israel said Tabassum “propagates antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric,” but did not cite anything she had written or said publicly. Instead, the post points to a link she had shared on her social media page that leads to a website describing Zionism as a “racist settler-colonial ideology.”

In an interview with The Times , Tabassum said she had not spoken to administrators about her speech, in which she said she had planned to convey hope and emphasize that “we must continue to use our education as a privilege to inform ourselves and ultimately make a change in the world.”

“The university has betrayed me,” she said.

USC administrators contested the idea that Tabassum’s inability to speak is a free speech issue.

“There is no free-speech entitlement to speak at a commencement,” Provost Andrew T. Guzman said in a campuswide letter . “The issue here is how best to maintain campus security and safety, period.”

The 1st Amendment guarantees only that the government refrains from abridging freedom of speech. But experts on campus discourse asserted that as an institution of higher learning, USC has a responsibility to defend freedom of ideas.

USC communications professor Christina Dunbar-Hester, chapter president of the USC American Assn. of University Professors, said in a statement that it was disingenuous to frame Tabassum’s speech as a security issue without specifying a threat.

Guzman, she noted, did not offer any details, saying only that the discussion had “escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement.”

And that, Dunbar-Hester said, raises the question of whether USC faced a specific credible threat or was just trying to find a way to get around controversy.

“Here, we have capitulated to a ‘heckler’s veto’ before the fact,” she said. “Why is the burden of a potential threat placed on the shoulders of the valedictorian rather than those who would disrupt her?”

Dunbar-Hester said USC’s action — coming days before conservative legislators in Washington grilled the president of Columbia University — plays into the hands of “anti-intellectual reactionaries” who cynically sought to “demonize campus communities that express solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle.”

Howard Rodman, a professor of the writing division at the USC School of Cinematic Art and former president of the USC-AAUP chapter, said administrators decided to cancel Tabassum’s speech without buy-in from the faculty.

“I have spoken to many people who feel that this is a disastrous decision, and no one who feels that it was a correct decision,” he said.

Among USC faculty, Rodman said, there was no widespread agreement on free speech.

“There are people who say, ‘We’re 1st Amendment absolutists,’ who believe that the remedy for speech you don’t like is more speech,” he said. “There are people who believe that the structural question of who owns the megaphone supersedes that. ... ‘Why should the people who own the apparatus of the transmission of ideas have the sole access to it?”

Rodman blamed officials, donors and legislators for the assault on campus free speech.

“The traditional values of the university are under assault by donors who wish to determine policy,” Rodman said. “They’re under assault by a government that places restrictions on what you can do once you have received government money.”

Students have also played a key role in setting up a climate of censorship, experts say.

About a decade ago, Morey said, 1st Amendment attorneys at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression began to notice a shift: Students, who had long advocated for their own free speech rights, were increasingly asking administrators to regulate words and ideas.

In 2014, students at Wellesley College started a petition calling for the removal of an outdoor statue of a man in his underwear, claiming that it was a source of “triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault.” The following year, students at Yale University demanded that Nicholas Christakis step down from his position as faculty-in-residence at Silliman College, after a viral moment in which he tried to converse with students who took offense at an email his wife, Erika Christakis, wrote to students questioning administrators’ guidelines on Halloween costumes.

Commencement ceremonies have long been a magnet for protests, with a rich tradition of students and faculty heckling speakers, turning their backs on them or forcing them to withdraw.

For more than a quarter of a century, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has kept a campus deplatforming database that has tracked such disputes, starting with media mogul and Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner’s withdrawal from a 1998 commencement at Macalester College after students protested the team’s use of an Indian mascot.

By 2016, disinvitations were so common that President Obama, speaking at a Rutgers commencement, chided students for pressuring former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to drop out as commencement speaker two years before due to her role in the Iraq war.

“I don’t think that’s how democracy works best, when we’re not even willing to listen to each other,” Obama said .

The focus on safety intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic as students became involved in Black Lives Matter protests, Morey said.

At USC, administrators made business professor Greg Patton “take a short-term pause” from teaching a communications course in August 2020 after Black students complained that a Chinese-language example he used during class sounded like a racial slur and caused them mental harm.

In a letter to MBA students, a dean wrote that such language was “simply unacceptable” for faculty to use because it could “marginalize and harm you and hurt your feelings of psychological safety.”

In November, administrators told Strauss he could not teach undergraduates that semester after he declared: “Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are killed.”

Strauss swiftly found himself the subject of dueling petitions: One called for USC to fire him and create a “safe learning environment free from hate speech or discriminatory behavior”; another urged officials to allow him back on campus, arguing that “Jewish people should not have to hide for their safety.”

In early December, USC administrators announced they had lifted all of the restrictions on Strauss.

Over the last few years, commencement disputes over controversial speakers calmed down as universities exercised more caution over who they invited. “They tried to avoid controversy, not by canceling speakers, but by avoiding inviting speakers in the first place,” Morey said.

The focus of controversy may now be turning to students.

Last year, a law student speaking at the City University of New York’s law school commencement caused a national furor when she called for a “revolution” to take on the legal system’s “white supremacy,’’ CUNY’s collaboration with the “fascist NYPD” and Israel’s “project of settler colonialism.”

After the New York Post ran a front-page story about the student, Fatima Mousa Mohammed — headlined “Stark Raving Grad” — CUNY’s Board of Trustees and chancellor announced that 2024’s commencement would not feature student speakers.

Figuring out what is a legitimate security threat on campuses has become increasingly fraught as activists and administrators blur the line between physical and psychological safety.

“Part of what has happened on university campuses for quite some time has been a claim about a kind of emotional and psychological safety,” Princeton’s Whittington said. “That’s primarily a conceptual argument — one that doesn’t seem to require any evidence in order to assert. Universities then can be extremely sweeping in who they might decide to censor or suppress or punish, in reaction to those kinds of complaints.”

Canceling speech while upholding safety in a vague way, without outlining a concrete threat or distinguishing between physical or psychological harm, would only encourage more complaints, Whittington said.

“Universities have an important obligation to explain that these kinds of concerns about emotional psychological safety are just not something that they can be responsive to at all,” Whittington said. “And in the case of genuine threats to physical safety, there ought to be a very high bar before the university is willing to take the step of shutting down a speaker.”

The irony of what happened to Tabassum is it has given her a much bigger platform.

In the last 48 hours, she has conducted a whirl of media interviews, appearing on CNN’s “NewsNight” and in a front-page story in The Times.

“When you silence us,” she said, “you make us louder.”

More to Read

USC students protest the ‘silencing’ of valedictorian with cancellation of speech

Letters to the Editor: Canceled valedictorian speech is another self-inflicted black eye for USC

April 18, 2024

‘Let her speak!’ USC campus reels after valedictorian’s speech is canceled

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Nightly news, usc cancels commencement speech by class valedictorian.

The University of Southern California, citing security concerns related to the Israel-Hamas war, canceled the commencement speech by class valedictorian Asna Tabassum, following complaints of "anti-semetic" content on one of her social media pages. Tabassum claimed USC "is succumbing to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice." NBC News' Liz Kreutz reports. April 16, 2024

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Citing safety, USC makes rare cancellation of speech by valedictorian who supported Palestinians

The University of Southern California has canceled a commencement speech by its 2024 valedictorian, a Muslim student who has expressed support for Palestinians, citing substantial security risks for the event that draws 65,000 people to campus.

FILE - This Tuesday, March 12, 2019 file photo shows the iconic Tommy Trojan statue at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. University of Southern California officials have canceled a commencement speech by its 2024 valedictorian, a pro-Palestinian Muslim, citing “substantial risks relating to security and disruption” of the event that draws 65,000 people to campus. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon, File)

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The name for the University of Southern California is displayed at a campus entrance in Los Angeles Tuesday, April 16, 2024.University of Southern California officials have canceled a commencement speech by its 2024 valedictorian, a pro-Palestinian Muslim, citing “substantial risks relating to security and disruption” of the event that draws 65,000 people to campus. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

The emblem for the University of Southern California is mounted at a campus entrance in Los Angeles Tuesday, April 16, 2024. University of Southern California officials have canceled a commencement speech by its 2024 valedictorian, a pro-Palestinian Muslim, citing “substantial risks relating to security and disruption” of the event that draws 65,000 people to campus. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

The iconic Tommy Trojan statue stands posed at the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles Tuesday, April 16, 2024. University of Southern California officials have canceled a commencement speech by its 2024 valedictorian, a pro-Palestinian Muslim, citing “substantial risks relating to security and disruption” of the event that draws 65,000 people to campus. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

A poster hangs at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering reading “While you study They starve End USC study aboard in Israel” at the USC campus in Los Angeles, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. University of Southern California officials have canceled a commencement speech by its 2024 valedictorian, a pro-Palestinian Muslim, citing “substantial risks relating to security and disruption” of the event that draws 65,000 people to campus. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

The iconic Tommy Trojan statue stands posed at the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. University of Southern California officials have canceled a commencement speech by its 2024 valedictorian, a pro-Palestinian Muslim, citing “substantial risks relating to security and disruption” of the event that draws 65,000 people to campus. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

A person suffering homelessness walks past students outside the University of Southern California campus entrance in Los Angeles on Tuesday, April 16, 2024. University of Southern California officials have canceled a commencement speech by its 2024 valedictorian, a pro-Palestinian Muslim, citing “substantial risks relating to security and disruption” of the event that draws 65,000 people to campus. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

A poetry stage is prepared for the upcoming The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, a free public festival held annually at the University of Southern California campus, in Los Angeles, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. University of Southern California officials have canceled a commencement speech by its 2024 valedictorian, a pro-Palestinian Muslim, citing “substantial risks relating to security and disruption” of the event that draws 65,000 people to campus. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The University of Southern California canceled a commencement speech by its 2024 valedictorian who has publicly supported Palestinians, citing security concerns, a rare decision that was praised by several pro-Israel groups and lambasted by free speech advocates and the country’s largest Muslim civil rights organization.

Andrew T. Guzman, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs for the private university in Los Angeles, said in a statement Monday that debate over the selection of valedictorian Asna Tabassum to give the May 10 commencement speech took on an “alarming tenor.” Her speaking would have presented “substantial” security risks for the event, which draws 65,000 people to campus, he said.

While Guzman did not specify whether there had been threats, he said that “we cannot ignore the fact that similar risks have led to harassment and even violence at other campuses.”

“The intensity of feelings, fueled by both social media and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, has grown to include many voices outside of USC and has escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement,” Guzman wrote.

The Israel-Hamas war has presented a challenge for colleges under pressure to preserve free speech and open debate, and campuses are expected to be further tested as commencement speeches get underway in the coming weeks.

Universities should resist cancelling events that could be perceived as censorship, especially one as high-profile as a commencement speech, said Zach Greenberg, a first amendment attorney with the national Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression or FIRE. But, if they do, schools must be transparent and specify security concerns “not only as a matter of integrity” but also to warn the public for their own safety, he said.

He expressed concern about other schools buckling to pressure and eroding free speech.

“This is kind of an opening salvo of commencement season,” he said. “It seems to be a pretty clear example of a university canceling an event and censoring a student because of opposition to student views, especially on social media regarding the Gaza conflict.”

Tabassum, who is graduating with a major in biomedical engineering and a minor in resistance to genocide, said she was blindsided by the decision, in a statement provided Tuesday by the Greater Los Angeles Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. University officials told her Monday that there were resources to take appropriate safety measures but they were concerned about their image, she said.

“Anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian voices have subjected me to a campaign of racist hatred because of my uncompromising belief in human rights for all,” she said, adding that she was not aware of any specific threats against her or the university.

“I am both shocked by this decision and profoundly disappointed that the university is succumbing to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice,” she said. “I am not surprised by those who attempt to propagate hatred. I am surprised that my own university — my home for four years — has abandoned me.”

Guzman said the decision was solely about safety and came after consulting the “expert campus safety team.” USC’s associate senior vice president of safety and risk assurance, Erroll G. Southers, is an expert in school violence prevention and a former FBI agent who is also president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, the civilian board that oversees the city’s police department.

“To be clear: this decision has nothing to do with freedom of speech,” Guzman’s statement read. “There is no free-speech entitlement to speak at a commencement. The issue here is how best to maintain campus security and safety, period.”

At the USC campus on Tuesday, some students expressed disappointment.

One, Isabella Griggs, said “there was no inkling” of Tabassum causing any harm with her words.

“And she’s talking about issues that are important to not only our university and to students, but to the world,” Griggs said.

Another student, Mohammed Zain Shafi Khan, said Tabassum “embodies what it means to be a valedictorian for USC, and to take that away from her — at least the honor that comes attached to it — is extremely disappointing because this is her moment to enjoy.”

The university announced its decision the same day pro-Palestinian demonstrators blocked roadways in Illinois, California, New York and the Pacific Northwest, temporarily shutting down travel into some of the nation’s most heavily used airports, onto the Golden Gate and Brooklyn bridges and on a busy West Coast highway to demand an immediate cease-fire.

Campuses have been a hotbed of protest over the war , which began following Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people. Israel’s responding assault on Gaza has killed as many as 33,800 Palestinians , according to the Gaza health ministry.

The organization EndJewHatred issued a statement Monday night praising USC’s decision.

“Ms. Tabassum’s speech as valedictorian was anticipated to be harmful to Jewish students and even potentially agitate anti-Jewish activists,” the organization said.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the cancellation.

“USC cannot hide its cowardly decision behind a disingenuous concern for ‘security,’” the organization’s executive director, Hussam Ayloush, said in a statement.

Tabassum, describing herself as a first-generation South Asian American Muslim, said her speech aimed to inspire hope in troubled times.

“By canceling my speech, USC is only caving to fear and rewarding hatred,” she said.

“As your class Valedictorian, I implore my USC classmates to think outside the box — to work towards a world where cries for equality and human dignity are not manipulated to be expressions of hatred,” she said. “I challenge us to respond to ideological discomfort with dialogue and learning, not bigotry and censorship. And I urge us to see past our deepest fears and recognize the need to support justice for all people, including the Palestinian people.”

Watson reported from San Diego. Associated Press journalists Christopher Weber and Eugene Garcia in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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USC says it is canceling its valedictorian speech because of safety concerns

Ayana Archie

This March 12, 2019, file photo shows the University Village area of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Reed Saxon/AP hide caption

This March 12, 2019, file photo shows the University Village area of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

The University of Southern California will no longer have its valedictorian speak at its commencement ceremony because of safety concerns, the school said Monday .

Asna Tabassum was selected as this year's valedictorian. But student groups called for the decision to be reconsidered due to Tabassum's social media content on the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Tabassum's Instagram page links to a slideshow that says "learn about what's happening in Palestine, and how to help," and criticizes Zionism as "a racist settler-colonial ideology that advocates for a jewish ethnostate built on palestinian land." The slideshow calls for a "one-state solution" that "would mean palestinian liberation, and the complete abolishment of the state of israel."

Tabassum's social media activity has drawn criticism, with student groups, such as the organization Trojans for Israel , calling the content "antisemitic bigotry." Other social media users, however, denounced USC's decision and said Tabassum should be able to speak freely.

USC Provost Andrew Guzman, who picks the valedictorian, said the matter "has grown to include many voices outside" the campus community, and poses a security threat to next month's event, which is anticipated to have 65,000 guests.

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"After careful consideration, we have decided that our student valedictorian will not deliver a speech at commencement," Guzman said. "While this is disappointing, tradition must give way to safety."

Tabassum, who is South Asian-American and Muslim, said in a statement that as a result of the backlash, she has faced "a campaign of racist hatred because of my uncompromising belief in human rights for all."

Tabassum said she questions safety concerns being the university's reason for canceling her speech. She said she was denied a request for the school's threat assessment. Additionally, during a meeting with university leaders, she said she was told the school would not be increasing its security presence, despite having the resources to do so, because that's not what USC wants to "present as an image."

"I am not surprised by those who attempt to propagate hatred," said Tabassum, who studies biomedical engineering and resistance to genocide. "I am surprised that my own university—my home for four years—has abandoned me."

"USC supports free speech and dissent, so long as it doesn't disturb university activities," Guzman said.

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He added that USC's 300-employee Department of Public Safety will be "fully deployed" at commencement, along with officers from the Los Angeles Police Department.

Guzman said that the school is "resolute in our commitment to maintain and prioritize the existing safety and well-being of our USC community during the coming weeks."

Guzman picked this year's valedictorian from a pool of about 100 eligible applicants and examined several factors, excluding social media presence, he said.

This story has been updated to include examples of Tabassum's online statements about the situation in the Middle East.

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California university cancels Muslim valedictorian's speech, citing safety concerns

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'CAVING TO FEAR'

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Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles, Julia Harte in New York and Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Christopher Cushing

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Kanishka Singh is a breaking news reporter for Reuters in Washington DC, who primarily covers US politics and national affairs in his current role. His past breaking news coverage has spanned across a range of topics like the Black Lives Matter movement; the US elections; the 2021 Capitol riots and their follow up probes; the Brexit deal; US-China trade tensions; the NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan; the COVID-19 pandemic; and a 2019 Supreme Court verdict on a religious dispute site in his native India.

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