Highlights From 2026 Commencement Addresses

This year’s commencement season was characterized by speaker cancellations and discord over artificial intelligence, with students at a handful of universities booing their commencement speakers over their comments lauding AI.

But some speakers decided to lean into the chaos; author Daniel Pink, speaking to students at Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio, preceded his comments on AI by joking, “Under a little-known federal law, every commencement speech during the year 2026 is required to contain the phrase ‘in an age of artificial intelligence.’” Director and writer Noah Baumbach, meanwhile, opened his address at Vassar College by telling graduates dryly, “I’m here to tell you about the wonders of AI and also to express my controversial views on the conflict in the Middle East.”

The speakers this year worked to acknowledge the uncertain and at times frightening world today’s students are graduating into, while still celebrating their accomplishments. Here’s a sampling of some of the most entertaining, funny and poignant moments from the 2026 commencement addresses.

On Paying It Forward

“At their best, universities are truly supportive institutions who nurture the hopes and the aspirations of their students … One anecdote from my own past symbolizes that for me. This was back in the dinosaur era of the early 1980s. It was so dinosaur that you didn’t then write your thesis on a laptop, you tapped it out chapter by chapter on a portable manual typewriter, and you corrected the mistakes as you went by painting white stuff over them—it was called Tipp-Ex, right?—and then typing on top of it. When you’d finished all that, you gave it to a professional typist who, for a price, would turn out a beautiful, perfect version.

“Now, in 1982, my adviser, who was to all appearances a bit of a grumpy old Cambridge don, declared that my thesis was ready to be typed out. But I was broke. So, I just said I couldn’t afford it. At that, he ambled over to his desk and he wrote out a check for 200 pounds to pay for the typing. That was something like $1,500 now. Of course, I said, ‘Thank you very much,’ but I also had to say I didn’t know how I was ever going to pay it back. He just said in his slightly gruff way, ‘Just do it for someone else one day.’ Now, in today’s jargon he would have said pay it forward.

“Now, I’m certainly not saying, don’t worry, that it’s the job of advisers to bail out their penniless students. Right? If only, right? But, for obvious reasons, that moment stuck with me forever. Not just the generosity—that was part of it—but the way it summed up the university as an institution devoted, in many different ways, to paying it forward. That’s what universities are for. They’re about the old investing in the young, and they’re about society as a whole paying it forward.”

—Mary Beard, classicist, May 15 at the Georgetown University Graduate School

“Your degree is not just a credential. It’s a platform. And the question, the real question, the one that I hope stays with you long after today is this: Who else’s life can you change with the success you will achieve? Success that stops with you is incomplete. Your success isn’t yours alone to keep. The HBCU tradition is one of the most powerful models of collective advancement in American history. You weren’t just educated here. You were prepared to go back and give back. You were prepared to make sure that you would invest and deliver the returns to be the person that the next generation points to and says, ‘She was there. He came from there and look what they did.‘ That’s not a burden, Rattlers. That’s a calling … When a door opens for you, it doesn’t have to close behind you. That’s the choice I want to leave with you today. You can hoard success or you can extend it. You can protect your seat at the table or you can build a bigger table. You can treat your success as a destination or you can treat it as a beginning.”

—Thasunda Brown Duckett, president and CEO of TIAA, May 1 at Florida A&M University

Jeff Adams/Florida A&M University via Getty Images

On Following Your Heart

“I was offered a musical in Australia called The Boy From Oz … and I turned it down, because at the time I’d been in two big musicals and I was struggling to get acting auditions for plays, movies, television. So I said, ‘Even though this feels great to me, I don’t think it’s the right strategic move to do another musical right now.’ So I said, ‘No.’ Well, when I finally saw that production in Australia, my palms started to sweat. Every bone in my body wanted to be up there on that stage. I was watching one of the greatest roles I have ever seen being played by someone else, even though it had been offered to me two years before. Again, I felt the pain of not having listened to that voice inside, and, right then and there, I told myself that I would always listen to my gut from that moment on.

“So when they called about doing the show on Broadway two years later, I said ‘yes’ straight away on the phone. Then I called my agent to tell him what I’d done … Our minds, our brains, they want to plan. They have all sorts of good reasons to follow a path because it makes sense. But if we’re listening, if we open our hearts, that voice inside is trying to show us something a little more magical, a little more mysterious, surprising. Sometimes it’s loud and clear … but sometimes it’s quiet and subtle.”

—Hugh Jackman, actor, May 2 at Ball State University

“In our competitive world, it’s tempting to choose what to do next based only on what you think will look good on a résumé. My advice is simple: If something excites you, chase it. Even if it doesn’t have an obvious benefit, it’ll probably be a good story someday, and it will inevitably come back to help you … I wasn’t interested in government when I got to MSU. I wasn’t even particularly political. I took a chance with that internship in the state capital because it seemed different and interesting. It was a detour, but it ended up being the scenic route that changed my destination. Graduates, take the detour and enjoy the journey.”

—Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, May 1 at Michigan State University

On Perseverance

“ESPN hired me to be their NBA reporter covering the Midwest, and my chief assignment was to cover one of the best players in the world, Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks … I was finding my footing again, I was building good relationships with the players. They liked me. I was building good relationships with the staff. I was breaking news.

“But Milwaukee came up short that year … and right at the end of the game, I wrote a story about Giannis’s future in Milwaukee and what it was going to look like, right? And after that, we’re all in a press conference room. And these press conferences, they’re aired on national television. They’re aired everywhere. And so it’s my turn to ask a question. So, I’m asking my question, and all the cameras swivel to me. I ask, the cameras, they swivel back to Giannis, as he gets up angrily, and he walks out of the room on me on national television, right? I was mortified. I was publicly humiliated. I was trending online within minutes. And all of those same questions, they [were] coming up for me again. ‘Am I even a good person, let alone a good reporter? What do people think of me?’ ’Cause I read everywhere, everywhere what they are saying about me. ‘Am I even gonna still have a job?’ But two years later, I was handing Giannis the Larry O’Brien Trophy as he brought the first championship back to Milwaukee in 50 years, and I became the youngest-ever sideline reporter to cover the NBA finals.

“So what did I learn from that? My friends, the goal is not to avoid failure. It’s to become someone that failure cannot shrink.”

—Malika Andrews, sports journalist and host of NBA Today, May 3 at the University of Portland

“Here’s what Illinois gave me that no coastal master of fine arts ever could: the complete absence of anyone telling me I was special before I’d earned it. The Midwest doesn’t hand you confidence; it makes you build it. Growing up in Illinois and studying here, it makes you work for pats on the back—and that’s good preparation for the real world, where, trust me, no one cares until you give them a good reason to. It can be uncomfortable and deeply unglamorous. But believe me when I say, it is a gift.”

—Sean Evans, host of Hot Ones, May 16 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

On Humanity

“In an age of artificial intelligence, taste will be your killer app. Your taste will set you apart and get you ahead. Your taste will make you the best at what you do. And if you really work it, your taste could make you the only at what you do. Here’s a dirty little secret they don’t want you to know at lesser institutions like Ohio State or Harvard. People who haven’t studied design, who haven’t studied art, who haven’t devoted four years to imagining and prototyping and [creativity], they risk being left behind because large language models like ChatGPT and Claude are astonishing at generating options. Type a prompt and they will deliver dozens, even hundreds of choices. But you have to decide what’s extraordinary and what’s mundane. You have to decide what will serve your client and what will shortchange them. You have to decide what will delight your audience and what will bore it.

“Because these models have no taste, no preferences, no point of view. They have no idea what’s good or what’s bad. They don’t even care. They just predict the next letter or line of code in a sequence. You have taste. They don’t. Which means over the long haul, they need you a lot more than you need them.”

—Daniel Pink, best-selling nonfiction author, May 16 at the Columbus College of Art & Design

“You are here at Temple University to gain a whole lot of tools for your life. And I’m going to tell you something that this artist Joy Carlin told me when I was a young artist in San Francisco and I happened to be on a panel with her because I was actually a young artistic director. And someone raised their hand and said, ‘Oh, hey, Miss Carlin. I’ve been in class doing this, I’ve been learning this, I’ve been in this school, this university, studying, studying, studying this one thing that I’ve been wanting to do. Do you have any advice for me?’ And she said something that I think changed me and cracked me wide-open. She said, ‘Oh, it’s great. I love that you’ve been studying all of that towards your profession. Now, I want you to live because you need life, too. You need to have an interest in arts and sciences and travel. You need to fall in love. You need to fall out of love. You need to move somewhere. You need to do something strange. You need to try something. You need to exist and be. And most importantly, you need to be curious. Be curious. Be curious in other people, in other cultures, other ideas, people who don’t think like you do.’

“That has been my entire career. I play a lot of characters. One in particular that’s out right now—that’s not a plug for it, but you can go see Michael in the movie theaters right now. But I’m saying that to say I’m attracted to characters that I’m curious about and I feel like I’m not like them at all. For me, it’s trying to find the bridge of our humanity. In every character that I play—it could be Victor Strand. It could be Ali in Euphoria, it could be Danny in The Four Seasons, it could be Mister in The Color Purple—I am all of those men. All of those men could live inside this body. For me, that’s part of the human experience and being a human being and believing that we’re all alike.”

—Colman Domingo, actor, playwright and director, May 6 at Temple University