From nationwide women’s marches to March for Our Lives, 2018 has given us no shortage of galvanizing speeches.
But there’s a big difference between delivering an impassioned rallying cry to a sea of demonstrators and giving the final send-off to a crowd of college graduates. The protest speech is informal and impromptu (or at least feels that way), riding on the groundswell of public discontent in the moment; the commencement speech is planned far in advance, the speaker generally paid a considerable sum to be there, dispensing wisdom while wearing the requisite cap and gown.
It’s an honor to be chosen as a commencement speaker, but it’s also a tough assignment, and in an age when many colleges treat students like precious customers, the audience can be a tough crowd. Consider the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s commencement speaker this year, CNN’s chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper. “More like Fake Tapper,” Cameron Smith-Freedman, a 21-year-old biology major, complained to the Gazette. Not exactly a glowing Yelp review, but the criticism spoke directly to Tapper’s message, encouraging young people to be independent thinkers, not afraid to diverge from popular opinion. And popular opinion is that almost everyone likes Jake Tapper — liberals and conservatives, alike.
But let’s be real: Most graduates just want to get their diploma and get on with it, right? Do they really want to listen to an hour-long address about their purpose in life? Maybe, but it all depends on the messenger and the message. For any commencement speaker, the pressure is on to be both funny and inspirational, or “funspirational.” To this day, comedian Amy Poehler’s 2011 address to Harvard grads is seen as something of a paradigm for the genre, along with author David Foster Wallace’s advice to the 2005 class of Kenyon College in Ohio. (Look both speeches up online — you won’t be sorry.)
Here in the Valley, this year’s commencement speakers were a journalist (Tapper), a human rights activist (Loretta Ross at Hampshire College, where she also teaches) a politician (Democratic leader of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi at Mount Holyoke College), and a poet (former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove at Smith College), all famous in their fields and beyond.
Dove lived up to her reputation as a master wordsmith, while poking fun at the image of the all-knowing commencement speaker and the very genre of the commencement speech itself. “What is the mystery of life?” she asked, before offering some possibilities and pondering the secret of happiness, then stopping herself short: “But here I am beginning to do what I intended to avoid — to pontificate with self-evident certitudes, to pitch my voice to be heard in a crowd … ”
She rattled off “big and beautiful words” like truth, honor, happiness, success, love, life, death, and spoke of the expectation one felt to invoke them at a ceremony. And while such words might sound fine from behind the podium, “they sound rather pompous when spoken face to face,” said the poet, who was wary of resting on “sentimental abstractions, larger than life, teetering on the horizon like the wind-beaten letters of the Hollywood sign.”
A sense of heightened self-awareness and self-consciousness permeated several of the speeches, and distrusting false sentiments and fake news emerged as something of a theme, along with references to our nation’s uncertain future. At the UMass ceremony, Tapper spoke of people “siloing themselves off and only listening to the politicians or the news media” with whom they agree, saying, “I urge you to resist the temptation to subject yourself only to that which reaffirms what you already know.”
And at Mount Holyoke, Pelosi, the first woman to become Speaker of the House (2007-2011), offered a welcome alternative to the white noise described by Dove in her speech.
Sharing her own story of how she went “from the kitchen to the Congress; from homemaker to House Speaker,” Pelosi encouraged graduates to prioritize their goals in life — both personal and professional — and to make lists of all that they want to accomplish.
“Know your power, and use it, and make a list,” Pelosi told the 600-plus women graduates, hailing from 39 states and 36 nations, “because we need you to be ready.”