Student Union
- By Pete Musto
Best Graduation Speeches Speak To The Heart
Every year hundreds of college students complete their study programs, and their friends and family come to support that a special ceremony. Probably the most important part of the ceremony is a speech given by a well-known or important person to mark the event. But what makes any one of these speeches better than another?
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Graduation ceremonies are the emotional end of four very hard-working years for most students.
They will sit among hundreds of young, hopeful graduates, wearing long robes and square-shaped hats with a tassel that keeps getting in the way. Family and friends will sit behind, many of them emotional, too.
It’s graduation time. And most graduations are punctuated by a speech that hopefully sends graduates forth on the road of life.
Toastmasters International trains people in public speaking in about 145 countries. Dilip Abayasekara, a former president of Toastmasters International, says speeches have been an important part of graduation ceremonies in the United States and other countries for about 100 years or more.
Colleges and universities carefully choose who will speak at their ceremony. Schools often choose people who are well-known and successful, in fields like entertainment or business. They plan the ceremony to be one final lesson to the students, he says.
“Perhaps the public at large will get a glimpse into the forces that shaped this person,” Abayasekara said. “And they will also get a glimpse into what kind of message this person wants to leave in the hearts of the next generation of leaders.”
How to make a speech memorable
Some famous commencement speakers in 2016 were film director Steven Spielberg, who directed E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Men in Black, and Transformers, and businessman Peter Theil, who founded the online money-transfer service, PayPal.
Most speeches offer advice such as believing in oneself or never giving up when life becomes difficult. But what makes a commencement speech truly great and memorable?
John Gabrieli is a professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies memory. Gabrieli says memories are created from moments when a person experiences a strong emotional reaction, like graduation.
Gabrieli says he has seen many commencement speeches, but admits he cannot remember any of them well. Most commencement speeches are too similar, often just celebrating the students and thanking the people who have supported them. This does not make for strong memories, he says.
“What we remember, besides emotion, is what is unexpected,” he said. “So a commencement speaker has a challenge, if it’s going to be memorable, to say something unexpected.”
Gabrieli notes that truly memorable speakers make challenging statements or change the way the speech is typically given.
For example, former First Lady Michelle Obama reminded graduates of the City College of New York in 2016 that every days she “wake[s] up in a house that was built by slaves.” She was referring to the White House.
Former VOA Director Geoffrey Cowan adds that a commencement speech can fail if they are too lofty. Cowan, a professor of communications at the University of Southern California, says speakers often forget that public speaking should build a connection with the audience.
“The worst thing to do is to talk down to the audience,” Cowan says, “and there’s often a tendency to do that, or to talk in a mechanical way.”
Another commencement-speech fail is when a speaker loses her or his place and the speech becomes incoherent.
What people can learn from a great speech
Cowan says the best commencement speeches center on a single idea, like a personal story from the speaker’s life. Apple founder Steve Jobs told Stanford University graduates in 2005 about how he left college without completing a degree program. Jobs also spoke about dying of cancer and how that changed his worldview.
Cowan adds that the best speeches challenge students. In 2008, writer J.K. Rowling asked graduates at Harvard University not to fear failure but learn from it. And in 2005, writer David Foster Wallace asked graduates at Kenyon College to try and understand and value other people’s points of view.
If a commencement speech is truly great and memorable, it will not only serve to inform and inspire the graduates, says Cristina Negrut, who operates a website called Graduate Wisdom. Since 2006, her website has collected the best commencement speeches and advice on how to write them.
Before the internet, many of these speeches could easily disappear with the graduate’s memories, she says.
“Now, with social media, the speaker … ends up giving the speech not just to the university and the audience they have in the stadium,” she says, “but to the world.”
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Lily Meskers faced an unexpected choice in the lead-up to the first major election she can vote in.
The 19-year-old University of Montana sprinter was among college athletes in the state who received an inquiry from Montana Together asking if she was interested in a name, image and likeness deal to support Sen. Jon Tester, a three-term Democrat seeking re-election. The group, which is not affiliated with the Tester campaign, offered from $400 to $2,400 to athletes willing to produce video endorsements.
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Professional athletes such as LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick and Stephen Curry have taken high-profile stances on hot-button topics and political campaigns in recent years, but college athletes are far less outspoken — even if money is available, according to experts in the NIL field. Being outwardly political can reflect on their school or endanger potential endorsement deals from brands that don't want controversy. It can certainly establish a public image for an athlete — for better or for worse — or lead to tensions with teammates and coaches who might not feel the same way.
There are examples of political activism by college athletes: A Texas Tech kicker revealed his support for former President Donald Trump on a shirt under his uniform at a game last week and a handful of Nebraska athletes a few days ago teamed up in a campaign ad against an abortion measure on the Tuesday's ballot.
Still, such steps are considered rare.
"It can be viewed as risky and there may be people telling them just don't even take that chance because they haven't made it yet," said Lauren Walsh, who started a sports branding agency 15 years ago. She said there is often too much to lose for themselves, their handlers and in some cases, their families.
"And these individuals still have to figure out what they're going to do with the rest of their lives, even those that do end up getting drafted," she added.
College coaches are not always as reticent. Auburn men's basketball coach Bruce Pearl has used social media to make it clear he does not support Kamala Harris, Trump's Democratic opponent in next week's presidential election. Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy once caused a stir with a star player for wearing a shirt promoting a far-right news outlet.
Blake Lawrence, co-founder of the NIL platform Opendorse, noted that this is the first presidential election in the NIL era, which began in July 2021. He said athletes are flocking to opportunities to help increase voter turnout in the 18-to-24 age demographic, adding that one of his company's partners has had 86 athletes post social media messages encouraging turnout through the first half of the week.
He said athletes are shying away from endorsing specific candidates or causes that are considered partisan.
"Student-athletes are, for the most part, still developing their confidence in endorsing any type of product or service," he said. "So if they are hesitant to put their weight behind supporting a local restaurant or an e-commerce product, then they are certainly going to be hesitant to use their social channels in a political way."
Giving athletes a voice
Many college athletes have opted to focus on drumming up turnout in a non-partisan manner or simply using their platforms to take stands that are not directly political in nature. Some of those efforts can be found in battleground states.
A progressive group called NextGen America said it had signed players in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Virginia to encourage voting among young people. Another organization, The Team, said it prepped 27 college athletes in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona and Michigan to lead volunteer voter participation opportunities for students. The organization also said it got more than 625 coaches to sign a nonpartisan pledge to get their athletes registered to vote.
The Team's executive director is Joe Kennedy, a former coach who coordinated championship visits and other sporting events at the White House during President Barack Obama's administration. In early October, it hosted a Zoom event during which panelists such as NCAA President Charlie Baker and WNBA players Nneka Ogwumike and Natasha Cloud gave college athletes advice about using their platforms on campus.
In its early days, The Team seized upon momentum from the record turnout seen in the 2020 election. The NCAA that year said Division I athletes could have Election Day off from practice and play to vote. Lisa Kay Solomon, founder of the All Vote No Play campaign, said even if the athletes don't immediately take stands on controversial issues, it's important for them to learn how.
"It is a lot to ask our young people to feel capable and confident on skills they've never had a chance to practice," Solomon said. "We have to model what it means to practice taking risks, practice standing up for yourself, practice pausing to think about what are the values that you care about — not what social media is feeding into your brain, but what do you care about and how do you express that? And how do you do it in a way that honors the kind of future that you want to be a part of?"
Shut up and play?
Two years ago, Tennessee-Martin quarterback Dresser Winn said he would support a candidate in a local district attorney general race in what experts said was very likely the first political NIL deal by a college athlete.
There have been very few since.
The public criticism and fallout for athletes who speak out on politics or social issue can be sharp. Kaepernick, the Super Bowl-winning quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, hasn't played in an NFL game since January 2017, not long after he began kneeling during the national anthem at games.
Meskers, the Montana sprinter, said political endorsements through NIL deals could create problems for athletes and their schools.
"I just think that NIL is going to run into a lot of trouble and a lot of struggles if they continue to let athletes do political endorsements," she said. "I just think it's messy. But I stand by NIL as a whole. I think it's really hard as a student athlete to create a financial income and support yourself."
Walsh said it's easier for wealthy and veteran stars like James and Ogwumike to take stands. James, the Los Angeles Lakers star, started More Than a Vote — an organization with a mission to "educate, energize and protect Black voters" — in 2020. He has passed the leadership to Ogwumike, who just finished her 13th year in the WNBA and also is the president of the Women's National Basketball Players Association. More than a Vote is focused on women's rights and reproductive freedom this year.
"They have very established brands," Walsh said. "They know who they are and they know what their political stance is. They know that they have a really strong following that -- there's always going to be haters, but they're also always going to have that strong following of people who listen to everything that they have to say."
Andra Gillespie, an associate professor at Emory University who teaches African American politics, also said it is rare that a college athlete would make a significant impact with a political stand simply because they tend to have a more regional platform than national. Even celebrities like Taylor Swift and Eminem are better at increasing turnout than championing candidates.
"They are certainly very beneficial in helping to drive up turnout among their fans," Gillespie said. "The data is less conclusive about whether or not they're persuasive – are they the ones who are going to persuade you to vote for a particular candidate?"
Athletes as influencers
Still, campaigns know young voters are critical this election cycle, and athletes offer an effective and familiar voice to reach them.
Political and social topics are not often broached, but this week six Nebraska athletes — five softball players and a volleyball player — appeared in an ad paid for by the group Protect Women and Children involving two initiatives about abortion laws on Tuesday's ballot.
The female athletes backed Initiative 434, which would amend the state constitution to prohibit abortions after the first trimester, with exceptions. Star softball player Jordy Bahl said on social media that the athletes were not paid.
A University of Montana spokesperson said two athletes initially agreed to take part in the NIL deal backing Tester. The school said one withdrew and the other declined to be interviewed.
For Meskers, deciding against the offer boiled down to Tester twice voting against proposals to bar federal funds from going to schools that allow transgender athletes to play women's sports, a prominent GOP campaign topic. Tester's campaign said the proposals were amendments to government spending packages, and he didn't want to play a role in derailing them as government shutdowns loomed.
"As a former public school teacher and school board member, Jon Tester believes these decisions should be made at the local level," a Tester spokesperson said. "He has never voted to allow men to compete against women."
Meskers said she believes using influence as college athletes is good and she is in favor of NIL. She just doesn't think the two should mix specifically for supporting candidates.
"I think especially as student athletes, we do have such a big voice and we do have a platform to use," she said. "So I think if you're encouraging people to do their civic duties and get up and go (vote), I think that's a great thing."
