We live near a big university where Commencement season in the Spring is a time of great excitement and activity. Then, in a few days, it is all over - the hired robes returned, the textbooks thankfully disposed of - leaving thousands of parents feeling relieved, and many young graduates feeling slightly lost.
A commencement ceremony, like a marriage, is always a bittersweet event. The formalities are over in a moment, everyone goes home, and ordinary life resumes in a different key for the new graduates. Their lives will never be the same.
I skipped my own graduation ceremony because I was so eager to get on with real life. Now at last I felt I could do anything, be anything. But nothing works out quite the way you expect. Experience showed that I was unfit for anything except to become a professor. This inevitably meant more years of study, more graduations, and the acquisition of a pipe and a tweed jacket.
It was easy for my generation, let’s admit it. There were many career paths available that stretched far into the future. You could make a life plan that would, in theory, almost guarantee a smooth passage through career and marriage to retirement and the nursing home and that final graduation. Sometimes the plans worked out, especially the last part.
My best friend in high school had a detailed life plan by the age of fifteen. He had it all worked out: a degree in economics, a safe government job, a little house in the suburbs, a nice wife (he was very insistent on the “nice”), two children, and early retirement at sixty to a resort on the coast. I’ve long since lost touch with him, but I hope he made it. If he did, it would be a miracle. Life rarely rolls so smoothly along the tracks we have laid down for it.
In 2026, it is not so easy even to conceive that kind of orderly life plan, let alone to follow it. Not only are the familiar worlds of business, professions, and public institutions being turned upside down, but the very idea of knowledge, expertise, and rational thought is under attack, as are the universities themselves. The Know Nothing Party of the 1850s has come back to haunt us. and declared war on intelligence. Graduation always brings uncertainty, but now uncertainty has been raised to a political dogma. Facts are not facts, science is not science, history is not history, law is not law, and world order is world chaos. This is not what I learned in school, or you, probably.
If I were a commencement speaker, I would advise all new graduates to forget about long-term plans right now and go to graduate school. This will extend the period during which they don’t have to think about the future for two or three years, or even more, by which time history may have stopped sliding backward and started moving forward again.
Better still, I would advise them to spend a few years traveling to exotic places, learning all those things that are not taught, even in the most advanced graduate curriculum. It’s a terrible old cliché, but commencement is where education really begins.
