Platitudinous, forgettable, formulaic — that is the traditional flavor of an American commencement address. My own college commencement speaker, an education reformer of some renown, told a winding story from his life to illustrate the value of perseverance and creative problem-solving, of going one’s own way while also being a team player.
But today’s speeches tend more toward #Resistance-tinged, lukewarm activism. Nevermind that the captive audience is very obviously assembled for another purpose than to witness some personage sneer at elected officials. In some cases, the speaker is teeing up a run for office of his or her own; in others, he or she is just hungry to be back in the headlines. (This is not the first article to draw further attention to these efforts.) The new formula is in fact no less formulaic than the old one.
Hillary Clinton, speaking at Yale, joked about Russian interference in the election she still can’t quite believe she lost, saying she’d brought a Russian hat for the Class Day tradition of donning goofy headgear. She dragged the graduates down from there, reminding them of her undeserved disappointments: “You will make mistakes in life, you will even fail. It happens to all of us, no matter how qualified or capable we are. Take it from me.”
Professor Anita Hill was the perfect choice, politically, for Wesleyan University’s speaker this year: She was chosen to replace a speaker who’d been accused of sexual misconduct. But it’s also worth noting Wesleyan was the inspiration for the 1990s film PCU: a satirical romp set on a campus where political correctness and the looming threat of harassment allegations have all but outlawed, and therefore amplified, the healthy mischief of college life. Amid #MeToo, Hill’s hearings—suitably, “sheroism” was the theme of her remarks—gained fresh attention as her trial in the public eye took on a new currency. So has its profound public influence seemed new again: In the aftermath of Hill’s accusations, the concept of “sexual harassment” created a new field of litigation and policy. It also helped forge a new culture of sexual paranoia on campuses. Meanwhile Nella Gray Barkley created a PR nightmare for Sweet Briar when she tried to address that paranoia. Barkley, who graduated from Sweet Briar a more than half a century ago, suggested that women who attest they’ve been sexual harrassed are probably at least somewhat to blame for what they’re charging took place. Well then.
Former mayor of New York City and prospective independent challenger in 2020 Michael Bloomberg, on the other hand, went political but played it safer. His digs at Donald Trump gave needed texture to the speech he levelled at Rice University grads. And Vice President Mike Pence, finding a friendly audience at the conservative Hillsdale College, made a plug for Trump’s re-election effort the only real meat of his: “I just know, at the bottom of my heart, right after we get done making this nation great again, your generation will make America greater than ever before.” They’re hardly the first—from sitting presidents to pundits and pontificators who just can’t help themselves—to drag the stuff of the polls to the baccalaureate podium.
But the fact that the new formula for commencement speeches includes at least a dash of partisan rancor stings more than usual this year, perhaps, because there may have never been a better time to pull an Oprah or a John Kasich—and not breathe a word of politics in a college commencement address, that is—than the second spring of the Trump presidency.
