Why This Commencement Address Matters

Ah yes. It’s June. And ’tis the season for graduation commencement addresses. Having listened to two in my schooling career (high school and medical school) and giving a college commencement address of my own, I am sad to say I remember little of any of them. Clearly most graduation speeches are of trivial lasting importance in the lives of their audience. And why is that? Because the quality of the speeches range from bland and forgettable, to arrogant and chastising, to simply pointless and irrelevant. Furthermore, it often seems that the fame of the commencement speaker is inversely proportional to the relevant wisdom that such a speaker will impart. Thus, commencement speeches simply make a long ceremony…uh…longer.

This was not so for Leon Wieseltier’s 2013 commencement address at Brandeis University. Mr. Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, writer, philosopher and son of Holocaust survivors grappled with the modern world’s shrinking appreciation of the eternal which has been replaced by a progressively thoughtless obsession with the ephemeral. The dehumanizing consequences of  jettisoning that which endures in favor of that which perishes is the subject of his message. It is a brief treatise on the crisis of the “educated individual”. And I can’t think of a more appropriate, relevant and pressing message for new graduates to hear on the threshold of their careers and vocations. His address was titled, “Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture: A Defense of the Humanities”. The following are selected excerpts from Mr. Wieseltier’s speech followed by some of my reflections.