In Our View: Borrowed Grad Advice

Graduation ceremonies lend themselves to innumerable cliches. It is the turning of a page, the start of a new chapter, the first day of the rest of your lives … anybody who has sat through a commencement address has heard them. Graduates, after all, have a tremendous opportunity to never stop learning and make a difference and get out of their comfort zone while paying it forward.

In other words, delivering a commencement address and being tasked with saying something original and profound can be difficult. So allow us to start by simply offering congratulations to all those who are graduating this year. The reason our culture holds commencement ceremonies ranging from colleges to high schools to elementary schools is that something noteworthy has been accomplished. Graduates have completed one of life’s passages, be it small or extraordinary, and they have been prepared for the next challenge.

So, as we acknowledge that preparation, we offer words of wisdom delivered over the years from people more wise than ourselves. Because two of life’s most important lessons are to never stop learning from others and never believe that you have all the answers.

For example, in 2012, a high school English teacher in Massachusetts told graduates: “You are not special. You are not exceptional. Contrary to what your U-9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh-grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you, you’re nothing special. … Think about this: Even if you’re one in a million, on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nearly 7,000 people just like you. … You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another — which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement.”

That differs from the typical commencement address, but it is a message worth heeding. Speaker David McCullough Jr. even managed to get a book deal out of it, which might or might not make him special. And as we pour through the treasure trove of wisdom that is the internet, we find no shortage of meaningful messages for this year’s graduates.

As Ellen DeGeneres told Tulane University graduates in 2009: “Follow your passion, stay true to yourself, never follow someone else’s path unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path, then by all means you should follow that.” Or as comedian Stephen Colbert said at Northwestern University in 2011: “And we didn’t have cellphones. If you made plans to meet someone in a snow storm, and they didn’t show up, you just had to assume they were devoured by wolves and go on with your life.” Or as President George W. Bush said at Southern Methodist University in 2015: “To those of you who received honors, awards, and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States.”

So, we say well done to all of this year’s graduates and to the people who have guided them to this point in their lives. And we wish them well on all their future endeavors and adventures — even if that sounds like a cliche.