#Commencement Speech

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Governor Franklin Roosevelt was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at Fordham University's 84th annual commencement, June 12, 1929. Governor Roosevelt displayed his academic cap, saying that he had saved it for 25 years for this occasion.

Photo: Associated Press

[lenbryant]

Filmmaker Ken Burns urges Brandeis grads to choose democracy and not the cultish authoritarianism that’s threatening us in November.

[fandomtransmandom]

Congratulations to ✨Doctor✨ Hader!!!

"The best thing to do is love the process. Love the process of making a thing. ...I think if I was at your age and knew, 'Okay, I gotta love the process,' I think I would stop worrying so much and know that it takes a bit."

And...

"Don't worry about shit you can't control."❤️

Note: Bill's portion starts around 1hr5min.

[venomousgirl17]

I have never been consistently livid over something all day but congrats Harrison Butker, you’ve managed to keep me in a state of rage today.

There is nothing wrong with women who choose to be stay at home moms or being proud of your wife for being one. What doesn’t make a lick of sense to me as to why he took it upon himself to claim all these women who just spent four years working to earn degrees have been deceived and their only true purpose in life is being wives and mothers.

It makes me think of the line from Little Women (2019)

“I just feel like women... they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they've got ambition, and they've got talent, as well as just beauty.

And I'm so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I'm so sick of it.”

I think this is why I’m so angry. I’m so tired that in 2024, there is still a large population that seems to view women through this myopic lens. Why can’t they do both? Why can’t they choose not to have kids or not get married? Why is this presented as some sort of moral failing if a woman isn’t content being a “homemaker” as Butker calls it.

Why they invited a kicker of all people to speak at a graduation is beyond me. What academic achievement has he done to be chosen for this honor?

I just hate this man was given a platform to continue these toxic ideas about what a woman is supposed to do with her life.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

KEN BURNS' COMMENCEMENT SPEECH AT BRANDEIS

TCINLA

MAY 29, 2024

Something worthwhile to read and consider at this fraught time.

I am deeply honored and privileged that you have asked me here to say a few words at such a momentous occasion that you might find what I have to say worthy of your attention on so important a day in all of your lives. Thank you for this honor.

Listen, I am in the business of history. It is not always a happy subject on college campuses these days, particularly when forces seem determined to eliminate or water down difficult parts of our past, particularly when the subject may seem to sum an anachronistic and irrelevant pursuit, and particularly with the ferocious urgency this moment seems to exert on us. It is my job, however, to remind people of the power our past also exerts, to help us better understand what's going on now with compelling story, memory, and anecdote. It is my job to try to discern patterns and themes from history to enable us to interpret our dizzying and sometimes dismaying present.

For nearly 50 years now, I have diligently practiced and rigorously tried to maintain a conscious neutrality in my work, avoiding advocacy if I could, trying to speak to all of my fellow citizens. Over those many decades I've come to understand a significant fact, that we are not condemned to repeat, as the saying goes, what we don't remember. That is a beautiful, even poetic phrase, but not true. Nor are there cycles of history as the academic community periodically promotes. The Old Testament, Ecclesiastes to be specific, got it right, I think. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun. What those lines suggest is that human nature never changes or almost never changes. We continually superimpose that complex and contradictory human nature over the seemingly random chaos of events, all of our inherent strengths and weaknesses, our greed and generosity, our puritanism and our prurience, our virtue, and our venality parade before our eyes, generation after generation after generation. This often gives us the impression that history repeats itself. It does not. "No event has ever happened twice, it just rhymes," Mark Twain is supposed to have said. I have spent all of my professional life on the lookout for those rhymes, drawn inexorably to that power of history. I am interested in listening to the many varied voices of a true, honest, complicated past that is unafraid of controversy and tragedy, but equally drawn to those stories and moments that suggest an abiding faith in the human spirit, and particularly the unique role this remarkable and sometimes also dysfunctional republic seems to play in the positive progress of mankind.

During the course of my work, I have become acquainted with hundreds if not thousands of those voices. They have inspired, haunted, and followed me over the years. Some of them may be helpful to you as you try to imagine and make sense of the trajectory of your lives today.

Listen, listen. In January of 1838, shortly before his 29th birthday, a tall, thin lawyer prone to bouts of debilitating depression addressed the young men's lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. "At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?" He asked his audience, "Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the earth and crush us at a blow?" Then he answered his own question. "Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide." It is a stunning, remarkable statement, one that has animated my own understanding of the American experience since I first read it more than 40 years ago. That young man was of course Abraham Lincoln, and he would go on to preside over the closest this country has ever come to near national suicide, our civil war, and yet embedded in his extraordinary, disturbing, and prescient words is also a fundamental optimism that implicitly acknowledges the geographical forcefield two mighty oceans east and west and two relatively benign neighbors north and south have provided for us since the British burned the White House in the War of 1812 and inspired Francis Scott Key.

Lincoln's words that day suggest what is so great and so good about the people who happen to inhabit this lucky and exquisite country of ours. That's the world you now inherit: our work ethic and our restlessness, our innovation and our improvisation, our communities and our institutions of higher learning, our suspicion of power. The fact that we seem resolutely dedicated to parsing the meaning between individual and collective freedom; What I want versus what we need. That we are all so dedicated to understanding what Thomas Jefferson really meant when he wrote that mysterious phrase, "The pursuit of happiness". Hint, it happens right here in the lifelong learning and perpetual improvement this university is committed to.

But the isolation of those two oceans has also helped to incubate habits and patterns less beneficial to us: our devotion to money and guns and conspiracies, our certainty about everything, our stubborn insistence on our own exceptionalism blinding us to that which needs repair, especially with regard to race and ethnicity. Our preoccupation with always making the other wrong at an individual as well as a global level. I am reminded of what the journalist I.F. Stone once said to a young acolyte who was profoundly disappointed in his mentor's admiration for Thomas Jefferson. "It's because history is tragedy," Stone admonished him, "Not melodrama." It's the perfect response. In melodrama all villains are perfectly villainous and all heroes are perfectly virtuous, but life is not like that. You know that in your guts and nor is our history like that. The novelist, Richard Powers recently wrote that, "The best arguments in the world," — and ladies and gentlemen, that's all we do is argue — "the best arguments in the world," he said, "Won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story." I've been struggling for most of my life to do that, to try to tell good, complex, sometimes contradictory stories, appreciating nuance and subtlety and undertow, sharing the confusion and consternation of unreconciled opposites.

But it's clear as individuals and as a nation we are dialectically preoccupied. Everything is either right or wrong, red state or blue state, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, Palestinian or Israeli, my way or the highway. Everywhere we are trapped by these old, tired, binary reactions, assumptions, and certainties. For filmmakers and faculty, students and citizens, that preoccupation is imprisoning. Still, we know and we hear and we express only arguments, and by so doing, we forget the inconvenient complexities of history and of human nature. That, for example, three great religions, their believers, all children of Abraham, each professing at the heart of their teaching, a respect for all human life, each with a central connection to and legitimate claim to the same holy ground, violate their own dictates of conduct and make this perpetually contested land a shameful graveyard. God does not distinguish between the dead. "Could you?"

[Audience applauding]

"Could you?" A very wise person I know with years of experience with the Middle East recently challenged me, "Could you hold the idea that there could be two wrongs and two rights?"

Listen, listen. In a filmed interview I conducted with the writer James Baldwin, more than 40 years ago, he said, "No one was ever born who agreed to be a slave, who accepted it. That is, slavery is a condition imposed from without. Of course, the moment I say that," Baldwin continued, "I realize that multitudes and multitudes of people for various reasons of their own enslave themselves every hour of every day to this or that doctrine, this or that delusion of safety, this or that lie. Anti-Semites, for example," he went on, "are slaves to a delusion. People who hate Negroes are slaves. People who love money are slaves. We are living in a universe really of willing slaves, which makes the concept of liberty and the concept of freedom so dangerous," he finished. Baldwin is making a profoundly psychological and even spiritual statement, not just a political or racial or social one. He knew, just as Lincoln knew, that the enemy is often us. We continue to shackle ourselves with chains we mistakenly think is freedom.

Another voice, Mercy Otis Warren, a philosopher and historian during our revolution put it this way, "The study of the human character at once opens a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul. We there find a noble principle implanted in the nature of people, but when the checks of conscience are thrown aside, humanity is obscured." I have had the privilege for nearly half a century of making films about the US, but I have also made films about us. That is to say the two letter, lowercase, plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of "us" and also "we" and "our" and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the US. And if I have learned anything over those years, it's that there's only us. There is no them. And whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life that there's a them, run away. Othering is the simplistic binary way to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way to your own self imprisonment, which brings me to a moment I've dreaded and forces me to suspend my longstanding attempt at neutrality.

There is no real choice this November. There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route. When, as Mercy Otis Warren would say, "The checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed." The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems. When in fact with him, you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, "a bigger delusion", James Baldwin would say, the author and finisher of our national existence, our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesies. Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer.

[Audience applauding]

Listen, listen. 33 years ago, the world lost a towering literary figure. The novelist and storyteller, not arguer, Isaac Bashevis Singer. For decades he wrote about God and myth and punishment, fate and sexuality, family and history. He wrote in Yiddish a marvelously expressive language, sad and happy all at the same time. Sometimes maddeningly all knowing, yet resigned to God's seemingly capricious will. It is also a language without a country, a dying language in a world more interested in the extermination or isolation of its long suffering speakers. Singer, writing in the pages of the Jewish Daily Forward help to keep Yiddish alive. Now our own wonderfully mongrel American language is punctuated with dozens of Yiddish words and phrases, parables and wise sayings, and so many of those words are perfect onomatopoeias of disgust and despair, hubris and humor. If you've ever met a schmuck, you know what I'm talking about. [audience laughs] Toward the end of his long and prolific life, Singer expressed wonder at why so many of his books written in this obscure and some said useless language would be so widely translated, something like 56 countries all around the world. "Why," he would wonder with his characteristic playfulness, "Why would the Japanese care about his simple stories of life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe 1,000 years ago?" "Unless," Singer paused, twinkle in his eye, "Unless the story spoke of the kinship of the soul." I think what Singer was talking about was that indefinable something that connects all of us together, that which we all share as part of organic life on this planet, the kinship of the soul. I love that.

Okay, let me speak directly to the graduating class. Watch out, here comes the advice. Listen. Be curious, not cool. Insecurity makes liars of us all. Remember, none of us get out of here alive. The inevitable vicissitudes of life, no matter how well gated our communities, will visit us all. Grief is a part of life, and if you explore its painful precincts, it will make you stronger. Do good things, help others. Leadership is humility and generosity squared. Remember the opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty. The kinship of the soul begins with your own at times withering self-examination. Try to change that unchangeable human nature of Ecclesiastes, but start with you. "Nothing so needs reforming," Mark Twain once chided us, "As other people's habits." [audience laughs]

Don't confuse success with excellence. Do not descend too deeply into specialism. Educate all of your parts, you will be healthier. Do not get stuck in one place. "Travel is fatal to prejudice," Twain also said. Be in nature, which is always perfect and where nothing is binary. Its sheer majesty may remind you of your own atomic insignificance, as one observer put it, but in the inscrutable and paradoxical ways of wild places, you will feel larger, inspirited, just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self regard.

At some point, make babies, one of the greatest things that will happen to you, I mean it, one of the greatest things that will happen to you is that you will have to worry, I mean really worry, about someone other than yourself. It is liberating and exhilarating, I promise. Ask your parents.

[Audience laughs]

Choose honor over hypocrisy, virtue over vulgarity, discipline over dissipation, character over cleverness, sacrifice over self-indulgence. Do not lose your enthusiasm, in its Greek etymology the word enthusiasm means simply, "god in us". Serve your country. Insist that we fight the right wars. Denounce oppression everywhere.

[Audience applauding]

Convince your government, as Lincoln understood that the real threat always and still comes from within this favored land. Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts.

[Audience cheering]

They have nothing to do with the actual defense of our country; They just make our country worth defending.

[Audience applauding]

Remember what Louis Brandeis said, "The most important political office is that of the private citizen." Vote. You indelibly... [audience applauding] Please, vote. You indelibly underscore your citizenship, and most important, our kinship with each other when you do. Good luck and godspeed.

[Audience applauding]

[somehowwow]

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

From David Foster Wallace‘s 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College. An original audio recording and transcript of the soul-slapping speech is available via this link:

https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

[molly-bloom]

2024 Commencement Address by Roger Federer at Dartmouth

[tayfabe75]

"Not being invited to the parties and sleepovers in my hometown made me feel hopelessly lonely, but because I felt alone, I would sit in my room and write the songs that would get me a ticket somewhere else. Having label executives in Nashville tell me that only 35-year-old housewives listen to country music and there was no place for a 13-year-old on their roster made me cry in the car on the way home. But then I'd post my songs on my Myspace and yes, Myspace, and would message with other teenagers like me who loved country music, but just didn't have anyone singing from their perspective. Having journalists write in-depth, oftentimes critical, pieces about who they perceive me to be made me feel like I was living in some weird simulation, but it also made me look inward to learn about who I actually am. Having the world treat my love life like a spectator sport in which I lose every single game was not a great way to date in my teens and twenties, but it taught me to protect my private life fiercely. Being publicly humiliated over and over again at a young age was excruciatingly painful but it forced me to devalue the ridiculous notion of minute by minute, ever fluctuating social relevance and likability. Getting canceled on the internet and nearly losing my career gave me an excellent knowledge of all the types of wine."

May 18, 2022: During her commencement speech for NYU, Taylor mentions finding solace in other teenage country fans on Myspace when she was just starting out, and shares how those spectating her love life taught her to guard her private life fiercely. (source 1, 2)

[eretzyisrael]

Outraged critics are demanding CUNY’s billions of dollars in taxpayer funding be stripped away after a law grad delivered a “hate-filled and dangerous’’ commencement address ripping NYPD “fascists” and Israel.

In her vitriolic May 12 graduation speech at the public City University of New York’s law school, newly minted grad Fatima Mousa Mohammed called for a “revolution” to take on the legal system’s “white supremacy’’ while blasting city cops and the US military and claiming Israel carries out “indiscriminate” murder.

“This hate-filled and dangerous speech has been brought to you by @CUNY and paid for by New York taxpayers,” tweeted Simcha Eichenstein, a Democratic state assemblyman representing Brooklyn. “Keep this in mind next time our elected leaders highlight their commitment to fighting antisemitism.”

Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-NY) said, “Imagine being so crazed by hatred for Israel as a Jewish State that you make it the subject of your commencement speech at a law school graduation.

“Anti-Israel derangement syndrome at work.”

[jeanpatrice]

Jerry Seinfeld Commencement Speech | Duke 2024 (Motivational Video) #jer...

Discover inspirational advice on this Jerry Seinfeld commencement speech at Duke in 2024. In this motivational video, comedy legend Jerry Seinfeld delivers a witty and insightful address to the graduating class of Duke University in 2024. Learn valuable life lessons and career advice from one of the most successful comedians of all time. Discover Seinfeld's unique perspective on success, perseverance, love, and finding humor in everyday challenges. Hear his personal anecdotes and wisdom that can inspire and guide you in your own journey.

[demontruth]

'Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world. But I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.’ Harrison Butker

I was purposely avoiding the topic of the Kansas Chiefs kickers speech to the graduating class at Benedictine College. It seem to be everywhere, well the more I heard I more pissed I became. Especially anyone of weight defending this morons ideals. Bullshit like oh its his beliefs, or I don't understand what the big deal is. Both of brought to you by Whoopi Goldberg and Bill Maher. So I've decided to break it down for everyone who's completely lost as to why what Harrison Butker said is a fucking problem!!

First let's take his actual words. Mostly the moment the dipshit said BUT. But he would venture to guess... let me stop him right there. Everything he said after this to the women sitting and listening suddenly diminished everything they had worked for in their college careers. It devalued them brought them back to being nothing more the 2nd class citizens. The issue with this is it's not just this morons beliefs! These conservative Christian beliefs are shaved by far too many on the right. These kind of men are reason Roe v Wade was overturned. It's men like these that are actively right now all over our country still trying to make sure abortion is illegal in every state. They also want to go after pretty much any form of contraception especially The Pill make that illegal also. See its not just Harrison Butker beliefs, he's the tip of iceberg! When he stand there like arrogant little prick he is telling women, young women in no uncertain terms that a career is ok but your true place is being some man's wife and popping out his babies is far more important is basically a way of diminishing women as fully human. Because conservative Christian men goal is to take complete control away from women as autonomous human beings. Their no better than the Taliban truthfully! That's why what Harrison Butker said is a fucking problem people! It's not just about one guys dumbass beliefs it about an ideology that's invaded all parts of our society. It's most scary its been spreading in our government for far too long! The right has been poisoned by it. Now it's in our Supreme Court, it's already been in the White House once.

The fundamental problem is people are not paying attention. People are not connecting the dots, Harrison Butker isn't a one off... he's a main issue problem.

[seanastinhopeunquenchable]

Sean Astin is delivering the commencement speech for all 3 graduation ceremonies at UCLA on June 14!

[mspi]

Denzel Washington did that. He had a 1..2 GPA in college. He wasn't ashamed to bring it up in his commencement speech.

Sorry you've gotta fast forward a bit.

[tetsuyasogo]

March 26, 2015: Commencement Speech at Wasada University Dept. of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering.

2015-03-30 | PRESS RELEASE

NTN'S SOGO DELIVERS COMMENCEMENT AT WASEDA UNIVERSITY

TOKYO, JAPAN – In front of a crowd of graduates, parents and faculty, Tetsuya Sogo, CEO of NTN Americas Region, delivered the commencement address to the 2015 graduating class of Waseda University’s Department of Industrial & Management Systems Engineering on March 26, 2015, in Tokyo, Japan.

“It is an honor to be asked to deliver the commencement address at your alma mater,” said Mr. Sogo, a 1982 graduate of Waseda. “I believe it is important to provide insights to new professionals that can help them see how the education they just received will be the foundation of a successful career.”

Mr. Sogo focused his remarks on his experience in a global marketplace, and how the education he gained from the School of Creative Science & Engineering still helps him today. His main message, though, was that their education does not end with their graduation, they just need to change how they learn.

“Students learn theory in the classroom. Now it is time for them to go out into the world and learn through action,” Sogo said of the speech. “Action will serve them well not only with their practical knowledge of how things work, but also gaining the respect of their peers. The sooner they can learn this, the sooner they can establish themselves as growth minded leaders.”

Sogo has proven his support for this ideal through two initiatives. First, he has been establishing a Learning Organization culture at NTN in the Americas. Training and education reimbursement are available to inspire growth in all employees. Additionally, he has provided internship opportunities in all departments to help students in their education transformation.

2015年3月26日：

早稲田大学卒業式 - 祝辞 -

（創造理工学部 経営システム工学科）

＜式次第＞　

15:30 - 17:30 (63号館2階01教室)

一、開会の辞

一、学科主任挨拶

一、学士学位授与

一、修士学位授与

　　　　 経営システム工学専攻

　 経営デザイン専攻

一、経営システム工学科

優秀学生賞授与

一、日本経営工学会

優秀学生賞授与

一、経営システム工学専攻

優秀学生賞授与

一、経営デザイン専攻

優秀学生賞授与

一、来賓祝辞（十河）

一、乾杯

一、校歌斉唱

一、閉会の辞

[andrasthehun]

Career Advice 2024

July 19, 2024 At Reser Stadium, Oregon State University, in Corvallis, OR, ex-OSU football player Steve Jackson delivered a commencement speech that was more than just advice. It was a call to action, a call to travel and discover oneself. The stadium was hushed as the students absorbed Jackson’s powerful message, drawn from his own transformative experiences.  His speech resonated deeply with…

[dwuerch-blog]

Would We Be So Bold?

Would We Be So Bold?I saw this brave young man’s story and had to pay it forward. Five days after he graduated from Campbell County High School in Kentucky, Micah Price finally received his diploma. It had been withheld because he went off script in his commencement speech last Friday. He encouraged his classmates to find Christ. Price’s defiance of school rules has been the subject of a…