The Ceremony....and the Silence

On university commencement speeches, truth-seeking & moral character

Each spring, the leading universities in the US gather their graduating students and families together and invite a speaker to commemorate the conferring of their degrees. The commencement ritual is familiar. The speeches are often forgettable. The choice of speaker is not.

Commencement at elite universities is not merely ceremony. It is a form of prioritization. It reveals, with unusual clarity, what an institution believes is worth honoring—and, by extension, how new graduates should direct their ambitions and future careers.

The selected speakers represent a commentary on power and prestige; the schools, guardians of elite credentials and pathways to the most desirable and lucrative occupations, are implicitly telling their graduates: “look at this person, listen to them, emulate their path”.

Over the last decade, the choices of commencement speakers at top universities reveal a clear pattern. Four schools illustrate the pattern well: Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Caltech. Collectively these four are the most selective, by admissions rates, in the country. They are also disproportionately influential in commerce, media and wider society.

Three of the four commencement speakers this year are technologists. Stanford’s commencement speaker is Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and a Stanford alum. MIT has invited Lisa Su, CEO of semiconductor company AMD and a MIT alum. Caltech has invited scientist and alum Kip Thorne, who is an astrophysicist and Nobel laureate. Harvard’s commencement speaker is Conan O’Brien, a former talk-show host, comedian, and Harvard alum.

This speaker line-up is broadly consistent with the last 10 years: roughly a third of speakers at these four schools over the last decade have been technologists; CEOs of leading companies or researchers. Across the same period a quarter of the speakers have been well known entertainment figures, and another quarter were professors, educators, or philanthropists, often drawn from STEM-related fields. Politicians and international leaders round out the three largest categories, while a smaller number were artists, athletes, writers, and social justice figures.

Look closer and technologists are becoming more prominent. Over the last five years, nearly half the speakers at Stanford, MIT, and Caltech have come from leading technology companies or applied research. Harvard remains the outlier, favoring cultural figures. There is a clear shift away from politicians, artists, writers, and traditional social justice voices.

There are two ways of looking at this shift. One way to interpret it is that these elite schools are emphasizing themes of innovation and the importance of technological progress. The other is more materialistic: as wealth and capital have become increasingly concentrated within a small pool of dominant technology companies, elite universities are responding, like moths drawn to a dazzling flame, to strengthen links to powerful technology platforms and court wealthy donors. Neither is mutually exclusive.

A generation or two ago, the commencement speakers were primarily traditional establishment figures: leading politicians, senior diplomats, and pedigreed corporate executives. This reflected an era of greater confidence in Western institutions, the post-war order, and traditional corporate interests. The older more traditional commencement speakers effectively emphasized preserving power and institutional stability within a democratic and capitalist system that, while imperfect, had fought and won two world wars, and which had enjoyed decades of sustained economic growth. The focus was internal progress and incremental change.

But over the last generation politics has become more polarized and public institutions diminished. Wealth has become increasingly concentrated. The prosperous middle class has shrunk. The shift toward spotlighting technology elites imbued with Silicon Valley’s latent optimism and visions of technology-induced change is therefore predictable, even if in many cases technology has often exacerbated the very problems it claims to solve.

Technologists can speak to many useful things. Developing new digital tools can aid human purposes. Artificial intelligence, and the systems that control it, is a vital interest of the nation. Innovation is an essential component in modern society. But there is a certain moral silence within and across these commencement addresses to the nation’s future leaders. Something essential is not being said.

The modern world is shaped by those who build systems and those who resist them. One group designs the architecture of commerce and state power. The other reveals its limits.

No commencement address has illuminated this tension more poignantly than one delivered 48 years ago. Listening that day was the Harvard Class of 1978, and the speaker was the Russian dissident and writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His address, known as “A World Split Apart”, was a forceful commentary on both Western society and the grave dangers posed by communism. Much of what he said remains crucial for understanding the world, and the challenges facing the US in particular, today. 

After spending eight years in a Soviet prison camp for criticizing Joseph Stalin, Solzhenitsyn went on to write a number of novels exploring the dimensions of human life under tyranny, as well as The Gulag Archipelago, his monumental treatise documenting the horrors of Soviet communism.

Solzhenitsyn, who lived in exile in the US for nearly two decades, spoke to the Harvard class in terms that might shock students today. While he spoke of the evil of socialism, and the danger posed by the ruling Communist regime in China, he delivered a devastating critique of Western weakness: a society unmoored from spiritual and moral roots, obsessed with material comfort and hamstrung by a legalistic culture; a facile anthropocentric humanism that worships progress while ignoring the deeper realities of human suffering and ideological aggression; a largely unaccountable media, prone to parroting fashionable opinions; a debilitating uniformity in intellectual and political circles that all but prevents independently-minded people from participating in public life. 

He spoke more broadly of the decline in civic courage, especially within the “ruling and intellectual elites”, and noted the tendency of public leaders to bully the weak while being “tongue-tied and paralyzed” when dealing with powerful threatening regimes. And he castigated leading figures for their shortsightedness in believing that moral criteria were merely one factor among many in political decision-making.

The condition of the world today suggests Solzhenitsyn’s critique remains powerfully relevant. The abuse of freedom. The loss of will. The diminishment of civic courage. The essential threat posed by totalitarian regimes. The necessity of moral leadership. These are central truths, not abstractions. These are the realities demanding the attention of the nation’s future leaders.

Who is speaking to graduates of elite universities about the importance of seeing themselves not merely as innovators and entrepreneurs within a self-referential technocratic sphere, but as defenders of truth and freedom against those who would imprison or murder people who think differently? Where are the voices urging moral renewal and courage in the face of resurgent totalitarianism?

The world has been, and remains, dangerously split. Totalitarianism persists. Human suffering endures. The West’s internal vulnerabilities have grown.

A commencement address that appropriately honors both Solzhenitsyn’s prophetic vision and the collective intellectual heritage of the most renowned US universities would urge graduates not just to build better technology, but to remember the central civilizational truths that their ancestors were forced to learn, and to cultivate the moral clarity and spine required to defend human dignity and strengthen the nation.

Perhaps one of the speakers this year at Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Caltech will call graduates not merely to innovate inside existing systems, but to defend human freedom and extoll civic courage. Perhaps one will read out a few dozen names among the tens of thousands of artists, civic activists, women’s rights advocates, lawyers, writers, and journalists imprisoned by totalitarian regimes today. Perhaps.

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart”