All across America, commencement speakers this spring are pondering what to write and how to address graduation audiences. Students have finished their high school careers. College students have completed their courses of study and are ready to enter the workforce.
But what will commencement speakers say to them? What advice can be given in an America deeply divided and turning away from science, climate change, and a belief in meritocracy and hard work?
We are facing some of the most profound shifts in international relations since World War II.
The current Trump administration has alienated our global friends and derided our neighbors to the north and south. We have lost the trust of world leaders. We are seeing the end of American exceptionalism. It looks like we are identical to so many other countries which have historically risen only to fail and fall.
American values of democracy, equality and the rule of law are being ignored. Instead, we have vengeance and the brutal shrinkage of federal agencies and the willful destruction of thousands of careers. For almost 250 years, we have maintained a careful balance among legislative, executive and judicial powers, which was the constitutional compromise created by the genius of our Founding Fathers. Now that balance is in jeopardy.
Commencement speeches have universally been about hope, about graduates going forward to make America a better place, but with so much uncertainty what will graduation speakers say? What jobs and careers can graduates look forward to? What has happened to the American dream, which my students at Fort Lewis College define as the belief in “hard work and faith in the world around you.”
We have a U.S. vice president who is a graduate of Yale Law School, but who seeks to deny others university educations.
What has happened to the America that prospered because of citizens who innovated and became entrepreneurs based on their solid educational backgrounds? The current presidential administration wallows in negativity, racism, incompetence and failure to acknowledge mistakes.
We have been divided before. The Civil War tore the nation asunder, yet Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address of March 4, 1861, as Southern states rushed to secede, implored, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break the bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Now more than ever we need leaders who represent knowledge, integrity, experience, continuity and “the better angels of our nature.” The future of our grand democratic experiment is at stake.
I am forever heartened by a graduation speech from June 25, 1943, given by Marion Konishi, Citizen Number 63-12-D, who was a Japanese-American prisoner behind barbed wire at the Amache Internment Camp, now a National Historic Site in southeastern Colorado. Her speech is on the website (bit.ly/4iTm4sq) for Special Collections at Colorado College’s Tutt Library.
As class valedictorian for Amache High School, she was told by the principal to speak on the topic “what does America mean to you?” A brave 18-year-old, she concluded, “Can we, the graduating class of Amache Senior High School, still believe that America means freedom, equality, security and justice? Do I believe this? Do my classmates believe this? Yes, with all our hearts, because in that faith, in that hope, is my future, our future and the world’s future.” I tear up when I read those words, but she was right then, and she is right now.
Andrew Gulliford is an award-winning author and editor and a professor of history at Fort Lewis College. He can be reached at gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.
