May 15, 2026
I attended commencement this year, and therefore had a long time to think about commencement speeches. Sitting there, with all of us walking in procession in our medieval robes, with the faculty marshall carrying his scepter, with the school marshalls carrying their flags, with the ritualized pronouncements, I was struck by how powerfully the event itself communicates the idea that we are taking place in a tradition that traces its lineage back for centuries.
What puzzled me is that these ideas are almost never stated outright in commencement speeches, even though the form of the ceremony seems to call out for them.
My husband suggested that if the form a commencement address should take was so obvious then I should try it myself, so here is my attempt at what I think graduates should hear.
[Intellectual acknowledgement, since speeches can’t have citations:] The frame is highly influenced by Stewart Brand’s recent book on maintenance, although I have no idea whether he would consider this an appropriate application of the very interesting ideas he developed there.
Because I have small children, I have been thinking a lot about what it would mean for them to have a good life as an adult. It turns out that “happy” is not exactly what I am hoping for, although I imagine that “happy” would be a side effect.
This is probably an idea you have heard before. Happiness is somehow superficial, what you want is fulfillment, and fulfillment somehow comes from your relationships with other people. But fulfillment is a slippery idea. How are you supposed to achieve it? Are there concrete steps you can take? This was a huge puzzle for me until recently, when I started thinking about maintenance.
Now, maintenance is not something that you probably want to think about.
Maintenance is dishes, cleaning, grocery shopping, changing the air filters, clearing clogged drains.
Maintenance means a lot of hard work just to stay in place.
But if we look more carefully, we see that maintenance is not merely what keeps everything from decaying. It is also one of the engines of progress. When you maintain something, you come to understand it. You learn where it is fragile, what makes it work, and what could make it better. And very often, the people best equipped to improve a system are the people who have spent years helping to sustain it.
Civilization advances not only through moments of invention, but through generations of people preserving what worked, repairing what failed, and slowly improving the systems they inherited.
Take roads. For thousands of years, human beings have been building, repairing, extending, and improving the networks that connect us. What began as paths became roads; roads became the famously dangerous highways of old; those highways became the vast transportation systems on which we can drive in relative safety at sixty miles an hour.
The fact that packages can arrive at your door in a day is possible not because one generation built a perfect system, but because generation after generation continued maintaining and improving the systems they inherited.
Political systems are not so different.
Take the founding of this country. It seems seems like a counter-example, a sudden rupture with the past. But the founders themselves understood that they were building on generations of accumulated political thought, legal traditions, and historical experience. And they also understood that creating a new government was only the beginning. The harder task was establishing institutions and norms strong enough to survive across generations. As Benjamin Franklin reportedly said after the Constitutional Convention upon being asked what kind of government they had decided on: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Washington was perhaps our greatest president because he took seriously the problem of “keeping it.” As you all know, in stepping down when he could have been president for life, he helped establish the norm that political power in this country would be temporary and peacefully transferred.
That norm has been tested over the centuries. It was broken and repaired. And like all important institutions, it survives only because generations of people continue to believe it is worth maintaining.
Intellectual traditions also require maintenance.
For centuries, universities have passed from one generation to the next not merely knowledge, but habits of mind: how to ask questions, how to test ideas against evidence, how to build on previous discoveries, and sometimes how to overturn them entirely.
The robes we are wearing today mark us as participants in that long chain of transmission: generation after generation of students learning from their teachers, extending what they learned, and then passing those intellectual habits on to the people who come after them.
The continual teaching and relearning of those habits is itself the maintenance of the tradition.
Today, you are being entrusted with helping to sustain that chain.
Over the course of your lives, many of your most important contributions will come not from creating entirely new things, but from sustaining, improving, and passing on the things that previous generations entrusted to you.
You will maintain families. You will maintain friendships and communities. Some of you will maintain businesses, hospitals, schools, governments, laboratories, power grids, roads, or traditions of knowledge.
And you will teach others what you have learned, helping to sustain the long tradition of inquiry that we celebrate today.
The generations before you have given you innumerable gifts, and your debt to them can never be repaid. It can only be paid forward.
The world is in your hands.
Maintain it well.
