The difference between a good high school commencement address and a bad one is very simple: The good one is shorter. There’s an additional requirement, however, if your own child is one of the graduates and sitting among friends in the audience. In that case, a good commencement address is both short and in no way — and I mean noooooooo way — embarrassing to your child.
My moment of coping with these twin obligations came on a sweltering Saturday this June when my daughter Grace graduated from St. Stephen’s & St. Agnes School in Alexandria, Virginia. I was flattered to be asked to give the commencement speech, but I wasn’t fooled. The school has a tradition of choosing an old graduate to speak. I qualified. When possible, the school picks a graduate who also has a kid in the new graduating class. I qualified again. No one else did. I was the speaker by default.
All this made Grace very anxious. In the week leading up to graduation day, she asked repeatedly if I’d begun working on my speech. Her friends inquired as well. Even parents of her friends asked how the speech was coming. I said I planned to write it the night before, which was true. The speech had to be short — less than 10 minutes — so I figured it wouldn’t take too long to write. This made Grace all the more nervous.
Actually I began writing the speech in my mind days ahead. And it wasn’t going very well until I consulted my friend Brit Hume, who had spoken at his daughter Virginia’s graduation in 1983 and more recently to graduates of a Catholic girls’ school in Middleburg, Virginia. Brit was adamant about one thing. Forget the school officials. Forget the teachers. Forget the parents. Amuse the kids. Be funny.
Sage advice. The trouble was, I’m not an innately hilarious guy. When I tell a joke at home, my son Freddy usually responds by saying something like: “Wow, that’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. That should be written down. It belongs in the Comics Hall of Fame.” Just in case I miss the point, Freddy adds, “I was being sarcastic, Dad.”
As I was noodling about the speech, it popped into my mind to make fun of one of the strengths of St. Stephen’s & St. Agnes: its relentless training of students in the art of writing papers. The school is great at this. One reason is that it requires more writing of papers than any other school on the entire planet. The students complain and their parents moan about being called on for help too often. But the kids do learn how to write.
My advice was for them to relax. St. Stephen’s & St. Agnes is hard. College is easy. St. Stephen’s & St. Agnes is far more competitive and academically rigorous than when I was a student there. Now they read Ovid in the ninth grade. I’d never heard of Ovid until I reached college. When they get to college, I told the kids, they’ll have the luxury of scouting around for courses that require no papers. Not only that, they can take courses that meet only on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, creating a three-day week. They can avoid courses that require reading Moby Dick. They’ll get longer vacations.
They laughed a bit. Fortunately, I had funnier stuff, notably what Brit calls the four big lies of academic life: (1) I’ll get up early and study. (2) I’ll study over the weekend. (3) I’ll do the term paper over vacation. (4) We’ll study together. I mentioned these slowly and the kids laughed at each one.
Thanks to my habit of saving nuggets from other folks’ commencement speeches over the years, I had still more material. “More than any other time in history,” one speaker said, “mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” That was Woody Allen.
My favorite graduation address was given by Tom Boswell, the great sportswriter for the Washington Post and a 1967 grad of St. Stephen’s & St. Agnes. I discovered it in an alumni publication. His counsel was: Aim lower, work less, don’t be ambitious, don’t worry — be happy, live for today. The point of this counterintuitive advice was that you don’t have to be a humorless grind to have a successful life.
When I finished speaking, I wasn’t sure how I’d done. I was dripping in sweat, partly from the heat, partly from apprehension. I had to wait until graduation was over to consult my audience of one, Grace. She didn’t seem embarrassed and I soon found out why. The girls had laughed politely during the speech, but the boys — well, they had guffawed. More than that, I couldn’t have asked for.
FRED BARNES
