Every May and June, something strange and wonderful happens across America. The most powerful people in the country, including presidents, CEOs, Nobel laureates, and Oscar winners, travel to college campuses, put on funny hats, and spend twenty minutes dispensing life advice to people they've never met. The graduates, for their part, sit in folding chairs in the heat hoping for magic to unfold.
It is, by any measure, an odd ritual. And yet the commencement address has endured for nearly four centuries, outlasting countless other academic traditions. It has launched foreign policy initiatives, gone viral on YouTube, sparked protests, and occasionally said something worth remembering.
How did we get here? The story begins, like so much of American higher education, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1600s.
Latin, Disputations, and the Original Point
The first Harvard commencement took place in 1642, six years after the college's founding. It looked nothing like what we'd recognize today. There was no keynote speaker, no celebrity guest, no viral clip to follow. Instead, nine graduating students demonstrated their mastery of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew through a series of formal debates called disputations, which were academic arguments conducted in learned tongues before an audience of clergy, magistrates, and curious colonists.¹
The point was proof. A college degree in colonial America meant demonstrating, publicly, that you had acquired genuine knowledge. The graduation ceremony was essentially a public exam. Students spoke; distinguished guests listened and judged.
For nearly two centuries, this model held. Commencement was the graduates' day to perform. Outside speakers existed but were secondary, with honorees, dignitaries, or clergy offering brief remarks. The ceremony belonged to the students.
What made these early commencements culturally significant, beyond the academic gatekeeping, was their social function. According to historian Albert Matthews, who studied Harvard commencements from 1642 to 1916, it was "the great gala day of the colony, the province, the state." It was not merely an alumni affair but a public celebration that drew townsfolk from across the region. It was one of the few occasions when the entire community gathered around the life of the mind.
The Slow Shift: From Students to Speakers
The transformation from student-centered ceremony to outside-speaker-centered event happened gradually across the nineteenth century, driven by two converging forces: the democratization of higher education and the declining prestige of classical oratory.
As colleges proliferated, spurred by the Morrill Act of 1862 which established land-grant institutions across the country, graduation ceremonies became more elaborate and more public-facing. Universities wanted prestige. Prestige meant famous guests. Famous guests meant speeches.
At the same time, Latin and Greek were losing their grip on the curriculum. The educated graduate was no longer expected to declaim in dead languages. As the graduates' performance became less impressive, the outside speaker's address became more important.
By the late nineteenth century, the modern template was essentially in place: an invited dignitary, usually a politician or prominent public figure, delivering a formal address to graduates and their families. According to a database maintained by the American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara, the first sitting president to give a commencement speech was Theodore Roosevelt, who took the occasion seriously enough to address America's role in the world.² The speech was expected to be substantive — a serious engagement with the challenges of the age — rather than the warm, personal, advice-heavy talks we associate with commencements today.
Two Presidents, No War Yet
Before Marshall, two presidents used the same stage to preview arguments they hadn't yet made in office.
Calvin Coolidge delivered Georgetown's 1924 commencement address seven months before winning reelection. He told the graduates that the market for trained intelligence will never be overstocked, an economic argument dressed as encouragement. It fit his broader theme: education as an investment the country could never overproduce, offered by a president who spent the rest of his term shrinking the federal government everywhere else.
Franklin Roosevelt took the same kind of stage eight years later with the opposite instinct. Still a candidate, not yet president, he told the 1932 graduating class at Oglethorpe University that the country needed bold persistent experimentation. Historians studying the speech now read it as an early sketch of the New Deal, not a throwaway line to graduates who had no idea they were hearing a preview of the next decade.
The Pivotal Moment: Cambridge, 1947
If the commencement address has a single defining moment — the speech against which all others are measured — it is George Marshall's address at Harvard on June 5, 1947.
Marshall was there to receive an honorary degree. He was Secretary of State, a five-star general, the man President Roosevelt had called "the organizer of victory" in World War II. His invitation to speak at the afternoon meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association was a secondary slot. Dean Acheson, Marshall's own Undersecretary of State, had advised against using a commencement as the vehicle for what Marshall had in mind, calling such speeches "a ritual to be endured without hearing."³ Marshall did not dismiss the idea.
Standing at a podium in Harvard Yard, reading from notes he had drafted largely himself after growing "restless" with staff submissions, Marshall spent less than twelve minutes describing the devastation of postwar Europe and proposing that the United States commit to its reconstruction. The speech was flat in delivery, technical in content, and unremarkable to most of the audience who heard it live, including, by his own later admission, Harvard President James B. Conant. Press officers at both Harvard and the State Department had deliberately downplayed the occasion, briefing reporters that Marshall's address was "just another commencement speech of no import."
They could not have been more wrong.
British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin heard excerpts on the BBC that evening. "It was like a lifeline to sinking men," he said. "The generosity of it was beyond our belief." Within 48 hours, the diplomatic machinery of Western Europe had begun to move. Within a year, Congress had authorized what became the European Recovery Program — soon known, simply, as the Marshall Plan, delivering nearly $13 billion in aid to a shattered continent.⁴
No other commencement speech in American history has produced such a geopolitical outcome.
The Long Middle: Gravity and Platitude
Between Marshall's speech in 1947 and the YouTube era, the commencement address settled into a comfortable pattern. Presidents, civic leaders, and prominent academics gave them. John F. Kennedy used a 1963 American University commencement to announce a nuclear test ban treaty. The speech had been drafted outside the normal channels, by speechwriter Ted Sorensen and a small circle of advisors, without input from the CIA, the State Department, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kennedy used the stage to reject what he called a "Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war," and within weeks Washington and Moscow had opened a direct hotline and signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It was one of the few post-Marshall moments when a graduation speech carried real policy weight.
The themes that emerged were remarkably consistent. Analysts who have studied hundreds of speeches across decades find the same ideas resurfacing: the importance of service, the value of failure, the need to engage with the world's problems, the promise of the graduating generation. These are not bad themes. They are, however, themes that lend themselves to repetition without illumination.
What the record shows, more than anything, is absence. The speeches that historians and critics return to from this era are remarkably few. The form produced little that demanded attention beyond the moment it was delivered, which is itself a kind of verdict. It would take a new technology to change that.
YouTube Changes Everything
Steve Jobs took the stage at Stanford on June 12, 2005. He was not, by conventional standards, an obvious choice for a commencement speaker. He had no college degree. He had never given a commencement address before. He was also, though the audience did not know it, managing a recent cancer diagnosis.
The speech he gave that day included three stories from his life, structured with the clarity of a product launch. It has been viewed more than 40 million times on YouTube and is likely the most-watched commencement address in history.⁵
Jobs' speech did not introduce new ideas. "Stay hungry, stay foolish" is not a novel philosophy. But what it offered was authenticity — a successful person speaking honestly about failure, illness, and mortality in a format that had rarely made room for such things. And YouTube's rise meant that the audience was no longer the 23,000 people in Stanford Stadium. It was the world.
David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water," delivered at Kenyon College the same year, worked differently but achieved something similar. It was dense, philosophical, and explicitly anti-inspirational — a meditation on the difficulty of maintaining conscious awareness in everyday life. It became one of the most widely read and shared commencement speeches ever given, in part because it so deliberately refused to be what commencement speeches usually are.
Together, Jobs and Wallace signaled what the form was becoming: not a duty performed only for graduates in folding chairs, but a piece of public content capable of reaching anyone, anywhere, at any time. In NPR's archive of more than 350 of the best commencement speeches ever given, nearly half were delivered after 2010.⁶
The Era of Controversy
As commencement addresses became more culturally visible, they also became more contested. The speaker invitation became a statement, about who the university valued, what ideas it endorsed, which voices it considered legitimate.
Controversy over commencement speakers is not new. It predates YouTube by decades. But something changed around 2014. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which tracks speaker disinvitations on college campuses, documented a sharp increase in the practice beginning that year.⁷ Condoleezza Rice withdrew from Rutgers under pressure. Christine Lagarde withdrew from Smith. Ayaan Hirsi Ali withdrew from Brandeis. Dozens of other invitations were rescinded or rejected before they became public.
The pattern of speaker disinvitations accelerated through the late 2010s and into the 2020s. By 2023 and 2024, commencement season had become a reliable flashpoint for debates about free speech, campus politics, and the proper role of universities in American public life. Some graduation ceremonies were disrupted by student protests. Others were moved, postponed, or restructured.
What this controversy revealed was how much weight the commencement address had come to carry, not as a vehicle for ideas (few people remember what any given speaker said) but as a symbolic act. The invitation itself was the message. Who spoke at your graduation said something about who you were.
What Endures
Strip away the controversies, the viral clips, the celebrity cameos, and the endless advice about following your passion, and something more durable remains.
The commencement address, at its best, is one of the few occasions in contemporary American life when a large group of people voluntarily gathers to hear someone speak at length about something that matters. It is not a debate. It is not a performance. It is not a transaction. It is, in the oldest sense of the word, an address, with one person speaking directly to another, or in this case, to thousands of others, about the world they are about to enter.
The early graduates who declaimed in Latin were doing something similar, albeit in a different idiom: demonstrating that they had thought seriously about serious things, and that they were prepared to engage with the world on those terms. The form has changed almost beyond recognition. The underlying impulse to mark a transition with words that mean something has not.
George Marshall understood this instinctively. He didn't come to Harvard in 1947 to inspire anyone. He came because he had something urgent to say, and a room full of educated people who would understand it. The commencement was the vehicle; Europe's reconstruction was the point.
Most commencement speeches don't carry that kind of freight. They don't need to. What they carry instead is something more modest and perhaps more lasting: the particular moment of a particular class, the anxieties and hopes of a specific year, the shape of the questions a culture is asking about itself.
That's not nothing. Across nearly four centuries of American higher education, the commencement address has served as an unofficial archive of what we thought mattered, and who we trusted to tell us so. Read enough of them, and you don't just learn about graduation speeches. You learn about America.
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Notes
¹ Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Harvard University Press, 1935).
² American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara.
³ John T. Bethell, "The Ultimate Commencement Address," Harvard Magazine, May–June 1997.
⁴ Harvard Gazette, "70 Years Ago, a Harvard Commencement Speech Outlined the Marshall Plan," May 2017.
⁵ YouTube view count as of 2024. Steve Jobs, Stanford University Commencement Address, June 12, 2005.
⁶ NPR Ed, "The Best Commencement Speeches, Ever" database, apps.npr.org/commencement.
⁷ Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Disinvitation Database, thefire.org.