As a rule, commencement speeches are either predictably packed with fake truisms and moldering quotes from the likes of Socrates and Oliver Wendell Holmes, or they’re deadly boring pep rallies for Mom and Dad. Occasionally, a speech will break the mold and will be memorable enough to last a graduate’s lifetime. Here are excerpts and examples of such atypical commencement speeches.
1) In 2005, Apple co-founder and college dropout Steven Jobs talked to Stanford University seniors about thinking different. In fact, he wore his usual jeans and sandals under his graduation robes. In his speech, he told three stories about his own life. In the first story, he spoke about why he dropped out of Reed College after one month and how one Reed College class on calligraphy later influenced the creation of the first Macintosh computer. His second story was about being fired from the company he had founded by his own board of directors, and how this devastating loss led him in a new creative direction, resulting in the startup of Pixar, the highly successful cutting-edge animation company. His final story was about dealing with his own mortality after a pancreatic cancer diagnosis. After surgery, he survived the cancer and, at the same time, learned about the value of life.
He closed his speech with a quote from “The Whole Earth Catalog”: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
2) Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Russell Baker gave a 15-minute short and sweet speech packed with humorous on-target bits of advice at Connecticut College. The speech was titled “10 Ways to Avoid Mucking Up the World any Worse than it Already is.” The “advice included: “sleep in the nude”, “fear the automobile”, “don’t take your gun to town”, and “whatever you do, don’t go forth.
3) English Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s commencement speech at Harrow School was even shorter than Russell Baker’s speech. (Years earlier, Churchill almost flunked out of this school.) His speech was only three words long. He walked up to the podium and said “Never give up.” He paused and said “Never give up” again. Then he paused even longer and said “Never give up.” And he sat down.
4) In 2004, English comic Sasha Baron Cohen’s hip hop gangster character “Ali G” delivered the commencement speech at Harvard University in his unique cockney (from the fictional town of Staines) slang. His opening lines: “Booyakasha. Professor G in da house. Aiiii! Big shout out de Harvard massiv. I is done a capital “H”, cuz Harvard is a place, innit? You see, I aiin’t no ignoranus.”
Note that his Harvard commencement speech is a bonus feature on the DVD version of HBO’s “Da Ali G Show.”
5) At another Harvard commencement, this one in 1977, writer George Plimpton advised seniors to “stop now. Tell them you won’t go. Go back to your rooms. Unpack!”
Plimpton was a 1948 Harvard grad.
6) Another famous commencement speech was one that never happened. In 1997, an Internet hoax claimed that satirist Kurt Vonnegut delivered a speech at MIT, its opening line: “Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 1997, wear sunscreen.
Hundred of thousands of people were fooled, including Vonnegut’s wife Jill Krementz.
In actuality, the alleged speech was lifted from a Chicago Tribune humor column by writer Mary Schmich.
7) Columnist Ellen Goodman at Smith College’s 1993 graduation day said, “This afternoon, I solemnly promise you that these have not been the best years of your life. The truth is that people who look back at college as the peak experience have had the dreariest of adulthoods. I don’t wish that on any of you.”
SOURCES:
“Four Best Commencement Speeches”, Hemant Adhikar, The Stanford Daily, URL: (http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2006/5/16/fourBestCommencementSpeeches)
http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/0700116.html
“Ali G Offends, Entertains on a Hot Class Day”, Simon Vozick-Levinson, Harvard Crimson, URL: (http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=502894)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everybody’s_Free_(To_Wear_Sunscreen)
http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID;=4164&SnID;=2
Thoughts for All Ages”, Fred Rogers, PBS, URL: (http://pbskids.org/rogers/all_ages/thoughts5.htm)
http://www.humanity.org/voices/commencements/
http://www.hbo.com/alig/harvard.html
http://www.wm.edu/news/?id=3650
