“Graduation day — the high point of college. The commencement speech — the low point of graduation day.” — Columnist Robert Novak, speaking at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998
“A commencement speaker should think of himself as the body at an old-fashioned Irish wake — they need you in order to have the party, but nobody expects you to say a great deal.” — New York Gov. Mario Cuomo repeating advice he got before his speech to Holy Cross University’s Class of ’84
“Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated.” — Cartoonist Gary Trudeau in a commencement address at Wellesley College in 1986
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It doesn’t have to be that way. In fact the speakers above illustrate one aspect of the good commencement speech — humor, especially self-deprecating humor about those who send waves of graduates into the world with words such as “future” and “dreams.”
“Humor is important,” said Andrew Albanese, co-author of “Graduation Day: The Best of America’s Commencement Speeches.” “Graduates tend to remember what they laughed at.” (His own graduation speaker? “I graduated from a college in Ontario,” he said. “The speaker was some forgettable Canadian government official.”)
Peter J. Smith, in his book “Onward: 25 Years of Advice, Exhortation and Inspiration from America’s Best Commencement Speeches,” lays out the touchstones along the way to being memorable:
“What everybody — parents and graduates — wants out of the commencement speaker is brevity, wit, then a swift cut to the chase, amen, goodbye.” He allows, though, that there can be a lot of ground to cover along the way, noting that graduation speeches are “part memoir, part summation of the year that’s already gone by, part tribute to the person the speaker was at age 22, part entertainment and part sermonette. The best of them bring out the best in everyone. They instruct. They warn. They reflect. They advise. They exhort. They persuade. They reassure. And they inspire.”
Except when they don’t.
The history of commencement addresses has been fraught with forgettables. Early on, in the 1800s, speakers tended to be trustees of the institution, local clergymen, faculty members, maybe writers of inspirational poetry. At the University of Missouri in 1843, classicist Robert B. Todd gave an oration totally in Latin.
Later, faculty members and administrators weighed in.
At the University of Connecticut, for instance, President Albert Jorgensen spoke 21 times between 1936 and 1962. Politicians then entered the mix. Indiana University had a long-standing policy of a state official giving graduates “Greetings from the State.” That ended in 1987 with an address by Ann DeVore. She was the state auditor.
In the past 30 years, more efforts have been made to lure speakers attuned to the interests and attention spans of the twentysomething grads, an audience often suffering — outdoors under a full sun perhaps — in oppressively hot gowns. As Jon Stewart told William and Mary graduates in 2004, “I congratulate the students for being able to walk even a half a mile in this non-breathable fabric in the Williamsburg heat. I am sure the environment that now exists under your robes are the same conditions that primordial life began on this Earth.”
TV names
The early mining of pop culture was for speakers whose faces were familiar on television. Newsman Walter Cronkite was an early “celeb.” Comedian Bill Cosby began his annual trek across the campuses of America. More and more, colleges competed for big names — Bishop Desmond Tutu spoke at George Washington, President Clinton at Dartmouth in 1995 (and Fred Rogers seven years later). Both Bono and Czech President Vaclav Havel gave addresses at Harvard (and Sasha Baron Cohen as Ali G spoke at Class Day in 2004). At the same time, technology and corporate leaders became superstars, and institutions such as Stanford invited luminaries such as Steve Jobs.
The list of speakers began to look like the People’s Choice awards. There was Robert Redford at Northwestern, Oprah at Wellesley, and, showing how much things had changed in a little over a decade, Indiana University went from the state auditor to rocker John Mellencamp.
Lately, though, the strategy of culling People magazine for speakers — well intentioned though it may be — has proved to be a path to you-know-where.
When it was announced that Columbia University’s speaker for this year’s Class Day, an event the day before graduation, would be Matthew Fox, an alumnus and an actor on the TV show “Lost,” many students said, “Who?” while others said worse.
“He must have been like the 29th choice,” one student told the campus paper, the Columbia Daily Spectator. “This is an insult and an embarrassment to the students who have put in four years of hard work and the parents who each have put in enough money for the speaking fees of a whole slew of respectable choices.”
“We want a Class Day speaker,” another said, “that has accomplished more than being hot and lucking into a role on a show with a bunch of hot girls.”
Others compared the choice unfavorably with previous distinguished speakers, including Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner and last year’s Sen. John McCain (whose selection also was roundly protested with pins saying, “McCain does not speak for me”).
When the debate moved to the Internet, it quickly became a forum on speakers in general:
“We had Yo Yo Ma (who my grandfather innocently referred to as ‘Yo Ma Ma’). He played some music for about twenty minutes instead of boring us with ‘work hard and make lots of photocopies and you’ll eventually succeed.’ “
“My younger sister graduated in William & Mary’s tercentenary class and there was a lot of hype around who the graduation speaker would be for this milestone graduation. So who was the speaker? BILL FREAKIN’ JELLO PUDDING COSBY!”
“Stop complaining. My speaker was Kermit the Frog.”
Somebody mentioned that a better Fox than Matthew would be Michael J. That set off a round of dumping on that actor, and soon it was an online food fight, and everybody got dirtied.
(The choice of another TV personality, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, for this year’s speech at Northwestern hasn’t ruffled feathers.)
Grads want big names
Graduates — either voting as a class or through a student committee — want the big names; so do the parents. And there are benefits to the administration — which often has the final say — as well. “If you can put Jon Stewart in a cap and gown on the cover of one of your brochures,” Albanese said, “that’s a powerful recruiting tool.”
But there are only so many A-listers, and some want to be paid. Cost was an issue in the selection of a speaker for the commencement at Rice University in 2005.
Seniors put together a wish list of names: Lance Armstrong, Bill Gates, Jon Stewart. Instead, they got Michelle Hebl, a psychology professor at the Houston campus. Mark Scheid, assistant to the university’s president, said at the time that, “with a typical commencement speaker’s fee of between $25,000 and $35,000, you could hire an assistant professor for a year. And what education takes place in a speech like this? It is more of a showpiece.”
“Some schools seem to think the show is worth the dough. A 2006 study by The Chronicle of Higher Education found that Katie Couric was getting $115,000 to speak at the University of Oklahoma, the bill covered by private donations. The Chronicle found that well-known names draw an average of $50,000, though many are willing to speak for free or as part of getting an honorary degree. Bill Clinton, for instance, who normally charges a speaking fee in the $100,000 range, didn’t charge for engagements at Cooper Union and Tulane.
Although commencement speaking is a high-risk endeavor, there has been at least one instance in which a graduation speaker’s words completely won over at least one member of the audience. In 1999 at Princeton, Thomas Wickham Schmidt, 22, a graduate in classics, gave the salutatory speech. He ended by saying “Will you marry me, Anastacia Rohrman?”
Rohrman, also 22 and graduating in mechanical and aerospace engineering, said yes.
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Commencement speakers, a 20-year cycle
At Northwestern University, the journey from Murray H. Finley (the name as published has been corrected here and in a subsequent reference in this text)to Julia Louis-Dreyfus isn’t unlike other schools’ choices in their commencement speakers from intellectuals to celebrities. Here are the school’s speakers from 1988 to today:
1988 Murray H. Findey, labor union official
1989 Ann Firor Scott, Duke University professor of history
1990 Kenneth Seeskin, NU professor of philosophy
1991 Ingvar Carlsson, prime minister of Sweden
1992 Richard Gephardt, congressman
1993 Georgie Anne Geyer, columnist
1994 Charles R. Johnson, writer
1995 Robert Eisner, NU professor of economics
1996 Robert Redford, actor
1997 Bill Cosby, comedian
1998 Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court justice
1999 Walter E. Massey, president of Morehouse College
2000 Robert Pinsky, poet
2001 Scott Turow, author
2002 Kofi Annan, United Nations secretary-general
2003 Wendy Chamberlain, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan
2004 Tom Brokaw, anchorman
2005 John McCain, senator
2006 Barack Obama, senator
2007 Julia Louis-Dreyfus, actress
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Former poet laureate Pinsky advises brevity
The commencement speaker at Lake Forest College on Saturday will be Robert Pinsky, America’s poet laureate from 1997 to 2000. Winner of many awards for his poetry and translations of others, Pinsky also played himself in an episode of “The Simpsons.”
Because he was traveling, he requested to be interviewed by e-mail. In his answers, he skipped some questions altogether, answered others with just a few words. He may be practicing brevity for his speech, which, if the following is any indication, will allow graduates to get to their parties early.
Q. The commencement speech can be a daunting task — a lot to do in a brief time. How have you prepared for yours?
A. I can only hope that the art of poetry has prepared me to be brief and interesting.
Q. Did you read any of the books of advice on how to give such a speech?
A. No. How could an authority get a book-length work out of what can be said in two words? Be Brief!
Q. Will you draw from your previous speeches, or will this be specifically tailored to Lake Forest College?
A. Quite likely some of the ideas might resemble whatever I said at Stanford [he was the commencement speaker in 1999 and delivered a decidedly not-brief 4,792-worder], but I hope that most of what I say will be fresh.
Q. Does your talk have a title?
A. “The Year 1857 and the Liberal Arts.”
Q. Speakers often open with a humorous remark. Will you?
A. Exactly because the humorous opening is so conventional, I tend to begin with something serious — maybe even solemn or grim.
Q. Do you remember your graduation speaker?
A. Adlai Stevenson.
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Bill Cosby, grad speaker extraordinaire
The undisputed King of Commencements is Dr. William Cosby. May and June are for him what Christmas is to Santa or what Thanksgiving is to the cranberry industry.
The association between commencement and Cosby is so close that, in 2006, The Onion ran the parody headline: “Bill Cosby Announces Dates for US College Commencement Tour.”
Here are some of his stops along the way.
1992: University of Maryland
1993: The College of William & Mary
1996: Boston College
1996: University of Connecticut
1997: Northwestern University
1997: University of Pennsylvania
1997: New York University
1997: University of California, Berkeley.
1998: Columbia University Teachers College
1998: Old Dominion University
1998: University of North Carolina at Pembroke
1999: Colgate University
2000: Tufts University
2000: Franklin & Marshall College
2001: Goucher College
2001: University of Cincinnati
2001: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
2001: Ohio State University
2001: Fordham University
(An erroneous item as published at this point has been deleted from this list.)
2002: Drew University
2002: University of Pittsburg
2002: The Juilliard School
2002: Springfield College
2002: Cooper Union
2002: Haverford College
2002: Temple University
2002: Rice University
2003: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2003: Hampton University
2003: Bradley University
2003: Paine College
2004: Wilkes University
2004: Morehouse College
2004: Johns Hopkins University
2004: Berklee College of Music
2006: Spellman College
2006: Dillard University
2007: University of Connecticut
2007: High Point University
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cleroux@tribune.com
Words to live by?
What do you recall about the speeches — and the speakers — at your graduation? Write to ctc-tempo@tribune.com
