Here’s a short list of this year’s more engaging graduation speeches:
Atul Gawande at Harvard Medical School. Describes current trends in medicine and the need for medical providers to work in teams, as “pit crews” not “cowboys.” His insight into how teams approach complex problems, like the rising cost of health care in the United States, has wide implications for other fields. “You who graduate today will join these systems as they are born, propel them, work on the policies that accelerate them, and create the innovations they need. Making systems work in health care -- shifting from corralling cowboys to producing pit crews -- is the great task of your and my generation of clinicians and scientists.”
Jonathan Franzen at Kenyon College. Kenyon College keeps its tradition of commencement addresses from literary notables (think David Foster Wallace’s famous 2005 speech). Franzen warns about the danger of social media technologies to change human relationships and their potential to promote narcissistic, detached individualism.
Michelle Obama at Spelman College. The First Lady points to the significance of an institution for a person’s way of life. “Ladies, [Spelman College] is now your story. That legacy is now your inheritance. And I’ve chosen that word -- inheritance -- very carefully, because it’s not an entitlement that you can take for granted…not a gift with which you can do whatever you please.”
See also David Brooks’ recent column, “It’s Not About You.” It’s not a commencement address, but he does some interesting social commentary on this year’s speeches: “If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find your self. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture. But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front.”
