Commencement Speaker Research Articles

The exaggerated benefits of failure.

Commencement speakers, business leaders, and the popular press tell us that failure has at least one benefit: It fuels success. Does it? Across 11 studies, including a field study of medical professionals, predictors overestimated the rate at which people course correct following failure (Studies 1-4). Predictors overestimated the likelihood that professionals who fail a professional exam (e.g., the bar exam, the medical boards) pass a retest (Studies 1a, 1b, and 2a), the likelihood that patients improve their health after a crisis (e.g., heart attack, drug overdose; Studies 2b and 6), and the probability, more generally, of learning from one's mistakes (Studies 3-5). This effect was specific to overestimating success following failure (Study 4) and erasing mention of an initial failure that had actually occurred corrected the problem (Studies 2a and 2b). The success overestimate was due, at least in part, to the belief that people attend to failure more than they do (Studies 5 and 6). Correcting this overestimate had policy implications. Citizens apprised of the sobering true rate of postfailure success increased their support for rehabilitative initiatives aimed at helping struggling populations (e.g., people with addiction, ex-convicts) learn from past mistakes (Studies 7a-7c). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Billion-Dollar Drugs with Misallocated Rewards

Billion-Dollar Drugs with Misallocated Rewards

Investigating pragma-rhetorical strategies utilized by American commencement speakers to motivate graduates for managing future opportunities and challenges

Motivating emotions is a critical factor in empowering students to manage the troubles they might face. Educational organizations pay great efforts to employ all the available means that can motivate their students for better learning from early stages until universities or institutes levels. The administrations of some universities and institutes, especially in the United States of America, do not stop there and pay more attention on motivating their students at the graduation parties on how to manage future businesses and challenges. This study explores how commencement speakers utilize success stories pragma-rhetorically to motivate the graduates to behave wisely to take future decisions. It investigates the pragmatic-rhetorical strategies in the motivational storytelling that is delivered within commencement speeches at American universities and institutes. It aims to recognize and analyze these strategies that commencement speakers employ as strategic strategies in presenting their stories to achieve their motivational purposes. More specifically, it explores how speech acts, rhetorical tropes, conversational implicatures, and rhetorical appeals are used and distributed in the storytelling discourse. To this end, the researchers selected ten commencement speeches delivered by American commencement speaker.

“I am interested in the metaphysics of being and existence”: Chigozie Obioma in conversation with Kunle Ajibade

On Sunday, 24 March 2019, P.A.G.E. Book Connoisseurs organized an evening of reading and conversation with Chigozie Obioma whose second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, was just published in Nigeria by Parresia. It was a very rewarding encounter with Obioma, who was born in Akure, Ondo State, to an Igbo family of 12 children. He read English Literature at Cyprus International University (CIU), Northern Cyprus. Because he made a first class in his set, he was chosen as the student commencement speaker on 23 June, 2011. In his speech, Obioma spoke eloquently about the necessity for courage, diligence, hard-work, and gratitude. He made a solemn promise to make good use of all he had learnt at CIU. As a story-teller, he has been steadily fulfilling that promise. He was 27 years old in 2015 when his first novel, The Fishermen, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Among other prizes, the novel has won NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, The Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction, and Nebraska Book Award for Fiction. Before then, he was in Ledig House in New York for a residency and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he completed an MFA in creative writing. He writes occasionally for The Guardian of London and New Statesman, among other publications. Chigozie Obioma is an Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. In the course of our conversation, Professor Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate in Literature, made a video call to the gathering, congratulating the author on his second novel, and his literary achievements so far. Obioma was grateful for Soyinka’s kind words. The edited transcript has been supplemented with an earlier email interview conducted on 10 March 2019.

ON SURGICAL FAILURES: Onward to objective evaluation of our less proud moments.

In recent years a spate of popular writing has focused on the merits of failure (1-6). In various forms, failure is approached from the perspectives of parents (let your children fail!), leaders (allow your employees to fail!), and self-help (let yourself fail and learn from it!). One of my favorite coffee brands states plainly on its container that “things that matter in life” include “never being afraid to fail”. Failure is chic, failure is trending! Twenty years ago, my university commencement speaker orated the experiential virtues of failure as being essential to our growth as individuals and as a society. ‘So, get out there and fail!’ he concluded with gusto. He was not a physician—he taught history.

Artists' Statement

Artists' Statement Nanibah Nani Chacón (bio), Ruby Chacón (bio), and Alma Elizabeth López (bio) Resistencia United is a collaborative project funded and supported by Latino Center of Arts and Culture, Brown Issues, Burbank High School students, and artists Ruby Chacón, Nanibah Chacón, and Alma López. Through a participatory process with Burbank and Brown Issues, we led the team to shape their ideas through questions that led to brainstorms and photoshoots where they used their own bodies to enact a concept that we later used to design the mural. We questioned social justice, identity, and how narratives shape us. We talked about the master narratives that penetrate our lives, and the counter-narratives that resist the marginalized spaces forced upon us. Last, we unpacked the third narrative that does not exist within the binary descriptions of the master and counter-narratives. Much of the third space exists much like the Nepantla (the in-between spaces) as described by the scholar Gloria Anzaldúa. It is in those spaces that we created our personal and collective narratives that cannot be labeled or boxed in and rather are the more fluid elements of identity. Through our own stories of survival, celebrations, and slices of life, we created this mural. In doing so we have recreated our own spaces of belonging as a resistance to the propaganda that continues within our media outlets, and even now, in the most powerful position in the US—by the president. As a unit, we are strengthened, and as the mural reveals, in the fire we rise up as one, Resistencia United. [End Page 258] [End Page 259] Nanibah Nani Chacón nanibah "nani" chacón is a painter, muralist, educator, art activist, and organizer. She was raised in Chinle, Arizona, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her cultural heritage and experience being Dine and Chicana often informs her work as an artist and activist. Nani has had a prolific career as an artist, spanning close to twenty years and covering graffiti, illustration, fine art painting, art installation, murals, and public works. In 2002 she received her BA in education; she has since taught from kindergarten to college prep, both formally and informally, as an artist and mentor. As an artist Nani has won numerous recognition awards and has exhibited her work nationwide and internationally. Her recent endeavors focus on large-scale murals and public works pieces. Ruby Chacón ruby chacón is a muralist originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, and currently resides in Sacramento, California. She started her professional career twenty years ago after obtaining her BFA from the University of Utah, while also raising her son and nieces. Her work is driven by educational equity due to segregation that her family and community experienced pre-civil rights (and still does today); to change the school-to-prison pipeline track that impacted her own generation. As the only one to graduate from high school and college in her immediate family, this experience inspired the pathway she chose to create spaces of belonging for marginalized communities. Chacón founded an arts and activist nonprofit, Mestizo Institute of Culture and Arts (MICA) in 2003, where she collaborated and worked with Mestizo Arts and Activism in 2008–13. Through research and community engagement she also co-created murals (as a lead artist) all over Utah, Wyoming, and Sacramento and abroad in Morocco and Thailand. She has participated in exhibits all over the US and abroad; participated on panels; been invited as a guest, keynote, and commencement speaker; and has been published in books and magazines. This breadth of work has earned her many awards and acknowledgments. Currently Ruby Chacón is finishing a mural with American River College students that reflects the current political climate, visually breaking down walls and creating educational pathways. Additionally, she is attending CSUS to obtain her teaching credential with the goal of creating murals within schools, and becoming a socially just educator through the arts. Alma Elizabeth López alma elizabeth lópez was born and raised in Zamora, Michoacán, México, and immigrated to California with her family when she was nine years old. She received her...

The discursive construction of high achievers’ identities in American culture

AbstractIt is a study of the discursive construction of high achievers’ identities in American culture. A corpus of 100 commencement speeches delivered during 2016 and 2017 graduation ceremonies in American universities has been used to analyse how commencement speakers, as a rule highly successful individuals, construct their identities through discourse. Besides celebrating academic achievements, one of the communicative purposes of the commencement speech is giving the graduates advice for the future. It has been investigated how the speakers legitimize their qualifications as a role model and the source of life wisdom. Due to the specificity of the discourse to be investigated, based on the foundations of American ethos of hard work and drive for success, Critical Discourse Analysis (van Dijk 2002, 2009; Wodak 2002; Wodak et al. 2009) has been chosen as a methodological approach which can most adequately help analyze the discursive formation of identity. As the discourse to be analyzed is agentive discourse, culture-specific both in its form and content, I have decided to combine Critical Discourse Analysis with cultural studies (Hall 1990, 1996a, 1996b; Barker and Galasiński 2001).

Compassion: Lessons from the Humanities

Every commencement speaker strives to inspire the graduates and leave them with one or two ideas that they might carry with them throughout their careers. In reflecting on the many possibilities I might address in my comments to you, I kept returning to the essential characteristics of a wonderful

Teens at Risk: Audiologists Respond

Teens at Risk: Audiologists Respond

Berea College Commencement Address

Berea College Commencement Address Henry Louis Gates Jr. (bio) Part One: Introduction Everyone fortunate enough to participate in a ritual such as this, in an arena such as this, arrived here with a tremendous amount of love and support. Let’s give it up to the people who made it possible for you to get this marvelous education, the parents of the Class of 2007! Let me make it clear that no one remembers their commencement speaker, not even me! So I promise to be brief. Thank you, Mr. President, for this honor. I am proud to be here on the campus of this great college, dedicated to the principle that “God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth.” I am proud to stand here with the other honorees Jean E. Fairfax and bell hooks. I am proud to follow in the footsteps of the previous honorees you have invited to speak to graduating classes, including Bishop Desmond Tutu in 2005, and John Egerton, the civil rights historian, in 1996. And I am proud to walk along the same paths where so many great Berea students once walked before us: Carter Woodson (1903), the dean of Howard University and publisher of the Journal of Negro History; Julia Britton Hooks (1873), the “Angel of Beale Street,” the first black teacher to teach white students in Kentucky, and James Bond. Not that James Bond: James Bond of the class of 1892, a professor at Fisk University, a trustee here, and the grandfather of Julian Bond. Berea College has come a long distance since the day it was founded, in 1855, in a one-room schoolhouse. This beautiful campus has grown, and the number of buildings has risen, but in a sense, this is still a one-room schoolhouse because at the heart of everything you do here lies the idea that you are engaged in a deeply cooperative enterprise. The first interracial and coeducational college in the South, you have been a model to the rest of America for over a century and a half. Cooperation is evident in everything that Berea does, from its liberal arts teaching, to the various kinds of service performed by students, to the simple fact that once you are a part of the Berea [End Page 21] community, you are not expected to pay tuition. (I am deeply impressed by that fact, and as soon as I return to Cambridge, I assure you that I will be ordering application forms for my children.) Part Two: My Story As your founders knew, and as I hope you know, it is impossible to overemphasize the transformative power of a great education. I went off to Yale in September of 1969. I was one of 96 black students to enter Yale that month. We were part of the affirmative action crossover generation. Now, why do I call us that? Well, if you could look at the class of 1966 of Yale, Yale graduated six black men in that class, and three years later there were 96 black people entering Yale. What? Was there a genetic blip in the race, and all of a sudden there were 90 smart black people in 1969 who hadn’t existed in 1966? Of course not! We got in because of affirmative action. Previously, Yale and every other historically white institution had a strict racist quota on the number of black people allowed to matriculate at those schools, and that’s what affirmative action did. It dismantled those racist quotas. But affirmative action was more; it had an economic component. If you look at the biographies of those six black boys who graduated from Yale in 1966, one’s father was a doctor; one’s father was a lawyer; one’s was a dentist; one’s was an undertaker, and one’s was a numbers runner. You see, that put you in the black middle class of the time. My daddy, ladies and gentlemen, will be 94 years old, God-willing, on June 8th. My daddy worked two jobs for 37 years to put me and my brother through college. My brother is the chief of oral surgery at Bronx Lebanon...

Campus Tragedy Prompts Closer Look at Mental Health of College Students

THE PATTERN HAS BECOME AS CONsistent as the perennial rhythm of mortarboards and commencement speakers. As spring arrives, so do the phone calls. Richard Kadison, MD, chief of mental health services at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Mass, fields about 20 to 30 calls every spring and summer from parents of incoming students concerned that a son or daughter will need help from the university to maintain psychotherapy sessions or obtain refills of psychiatric medications. “I’m delighted when I get called in the spring,” Kadison says. “I congratulate [parents] for calling and encourage them, whatever is working [for their child], to continue that and to make contact with us early in the fall when they arrive.” If the family lives nearby, he suggests they visit Harvard’s campus and make arrangements for care before school starts. “We’ll talk to them and get things in place,” he says. “It’s really reassuring.” As the current school year comes to an end, the need for reassurance is in the spotlight on college campuses. In the initial weeks following the tragic shootings at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, in Blacksburg, many schools immediately focused on reviewing their safety policies and crisis response procedures. But the episode also raises broader questions about how students’ mental health care is being monitored and whether schools are adequately equipped to oversee their students’ mental well-being as well as their education. EVERYDAY STRUGGLES Every fall, thousands of students who come to campus are already taking a psychiatric medication or involved in regular psychotherapy sessions. While extreme violence to others by individuals with mental health disorders is rare—suicide is far more frequent than homicide at colleges—campus health

"Everything leads me back to the feeling of the blues." B.B. King, 1974

INTRODUCTION King's name is synonymous with the blues. At the age of eighty-one, the blues patriarch maintains a rigorous schedule of performances throughout the nation and overseas that would exhaust a much younger artist. King's performances and recordings have shaped the blues for more than six decades, reaching out to each new generation in terms they understand and embrace. As an artist, King defies definition. Born Riley B. King in 1925 on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta near the towns of Itta Bena and Indianola, he was profoundly shaped by gospel singers in the black church, as well as by blues artists like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson. 1946 he hitched a ride to Memphis, where he lived for ten months with his mother's cousin Bukka White, a noted blues artist. Memphis, King launched his career as the Boy, advertising Pepticon medicine on radio station WDIA and also performing with Bobby Bland, Johnny Ace, and Earl Forest in a group called Beale Streeters. King adopted the nickname Beale Street Boy, which he shortened to Boy, and then to B.B. 1950 King's Three O'Clock Blues topped the rhythm-and-blues charts for four months and launched his career as a professional musician. He organized his own band and went on the road, barely two years since he made his last cotton crop in the Delta. Thus began a career that has continued uninterrupted to the present and underscores the power of his line, Night life is a good life, the only life I know. For twenty years King played over three hundred one-night stands a year in black-owned clubs known as the Chitlin' Circuit. He also played week-long engagements each year in large, urban black theaters such as the Howard in Washington, the Regal in Chicago, and the Apollo in New York. As the Civil Rights Movement developed in the early sixties, King's career fell into a slump. Younger black audiences found his music uncomfortably close to the world of Jim Crow, and white fans of the folk music revival felt he was too commercial. Only when the Rolling Stones, the Paul Butterfield Band, and British and American rock groups acknowledged King as their idol did his career revive. After his first European tour in 1968, King was embraced by white audiences in the United States, and their support has steadily grown since that time. Unlike many other blues artists, King eclectically blends diverse styles in his music. As a child, he played his first music on the one-strand-on-the-wall, a traditional instrument made by stretching a wire from a broom handle between two bricks over a metal bolt on each. He plucked the string and moved a bottle up and down to change the notes. King's guitar style is strongly influenced by blues guitarists Lonnie Johnson and T-Bone Walker, and by jazz guitarists Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian. He blends their styles with delicately bent notes and powerful vocals drawn from his musical roots in the Mississippi Delta. King's recording and performing career is truly unique. He has issued over seven hundred recordings, and has met with presidents, heads of state, and the Pope. A familiar figure on television features and advertisements, he continues to tour and greets fans with his warmth and humor. I first heard King's music in the 1950s on Nashville radio station WLAC's late-night blues show Randy's Record Shop, which was hosted by John R. Richbourg, Gene Nobles, and Bill Hoss Allen. As a teenager in Vicksburg, Mississippi, I danced to King's records, along with those of Elvis Presley. The blues and rock and roll were intimately linked in my life during those years. Our friendship began in the 1970s when I taught at Yale University. King generously agreed to visit the campus and shared his music with my students several times. 1977 the senior class selected King as their commencement speaker, and President Kingman Brewster awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, stating, In your rendition of the blues you have taken us beyond entertainment to the deeper message of suffering and endurance that gave rise to the form. …

Rainbow to Dark Clouds

THIS YEAR IT WAS MY HONOR TO HAVE BEEN THE COMmencement speaker at 3 medical schools: Drexel University, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Texas at Houston. On each occasion, I felt the same euphoria that I had at my own graduation and at the other commencements in which I spoke or, as Vice Dean of Academic Affairs and Faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, helped with the proceedings. It is exhilarating to experience, up close and personally, the enthusiasm and excitement of so many new physicians who clearly sense their potential to help those who will seek their care, and who want to fulfill their dreams of doing so. One of the most touching of all moments in this year’s ceremonies occurred at UCLA. The “benediction” involved 24 graduating physicians joining the chaplain on stage to speak in the native language of their ethnic groups, no matter whether they were 1stor 10th-generation Americans. The 24 languages spoken ranged from Afrikaans through Gujarati, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, Tigrinya, and Urdu to Vietnamese. The phrase each graduate spoke was, “May we leave here to cure when possible, and to care always.” What could be better wishes for healers to declare publicly? I wept along with most in the audience. Early the next morning, I flew to San Diego to speak at an international meeting of subspecialists; which subspecialty is unfortunately irrelevant because it could have been almost any one. The geographic distance is 111 miles; the psychological distance was an eternity. As I walked off the plane, I was greeted with several ads prominently placed in the airport inviting physicians to visit one exhibit booth or another. It’s a free country, so why not? It was too early to check into the hotel, so I went to the convention center to register. On the way I passed hundreds of people (many certainly were physicians) walking from the center with identification cards in plastic cases hung around their necks on a ribbon emblazoned with the name of a pharmaceutical company. They were also carrying cloth bags adorned with large logos of several pharmaceutical companies—oh, and also the name of the subspecialty society. I politely declined both when they were offered to me, much to the chagrin of the sweet woman who worked the registration desk. When I arrived at the room where I was to speak, a giant placard outside listed the names of the speakers and times of presentations—and the announcement by the names of several speakers that their presentations were sponsored by a particular pharmaceutical company. Of course, there were statements all over the podiums and in the rooms stating that all “sponsored” discussions involved funds from “unencumbered educational grants” that had nothing to do with the choice of speakers or topics. The spirit displayed at the conference was in such contrast to that displayed at the previous day’s commencement. What happened to the altruistic, “above all, help the patient” spirit? After completing my presentation on conflicts of interest (the conference committee apparently had a sense of irony), I returned to the hotel to register. I was handed my room key: a plastic card with the name and logo of a pharmaceutical company on one side and an invitation to “visit us at booth #1501.” Once again, I wept—this time, alone.

Jfk’s Strategy of Peace

Research Article| September 01 2003 Jfk’s Strategy of Peace Theodore C. Sorensen Theodore C. Sorensen Theodore C. Sorensen is of counsel at the international law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. He was commencement speaker at American University on May 11, 2003, and the essay that follows is adapted from his address. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google World Policy Journal (2003) 20 (3): 2–6. https://doi.org/10.1215/07402775-2003-4005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Theodore C. Sorensen; Jfk’s Strategy of Peace. World Policy Journal 1 September 2003; 20 (3): 2–6. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07402775-2003-4005 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsWorld Policy Journal Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2003 World Policy Institute2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Wit and Wisdom from Black Commencement Speakers in the Spring of 2002

Wit and Wisdom from Black Commencement Speakers in the Spring of 2002

In Reply to the Learned

Liberal education may be highly valued for its humanizing effect, its social value, and its place as a school for wisdom. Each of these reasons for prizing liberal education are discussed in light of distinctions between education as a task and education as an achievement, epistemically slight thought and epistemically robust thought, inherent value and instrumental value as types of extrinsic value, and the historical notion and commencement speaker's notion of liberal education. Consideration is given to the roles of the arts and sciences in liberal education and the limits of philosophy in a school for wisdom.

Wit and Wisdom from Black Commencement Speakers. Spring 2001

Wit and Wisdom from Black Commencement Speakers. Spring 2001

Unfolded Hands: Class Suicide and the Insurgent Intellectual Praxis of Mary Ann Shadd

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Barbara Christian. On an afternoon in April 2000, one of the more remarkable convocation ceremo­nies of this year, or any year for that matter, took place at Antioch University’s graduation proceedings. The ceremony was noteworthy both for its choice of commencement speaker, Mumia Abu-Jamal (the former Black Panther Minister of Information currently sitting on death row in a US prison), and for the latter’s call to commit “class suicide” as the explicit theme of his address. Abu-Jamal states that this topic is in response to the graduating class’s “proposed query about an individual’s impact on the world” (Abu-Jamal and Kissinger 3). He names several figures (Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Ella Baker, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Angela Y. Davis) who should appear on any “logical” list of people we admire for having impacted our world. Abu-Jamal then locates the common and decisive characteristic of these figures neither in race nor in their shared commit­ment to leftist politics.

Wit and Wisdom from Black Commencement Speakers in the Year 2000

Wit and Wisdom from Black Commencement Speakers in the Year 2000

Academy can be trusted to put children's health first

Dear Colleagues, Some weeks ago I attended my daughter9s graduation from the University of Virginia School of Law. It was a proud and happy day for the Zanga family, though it will be more difficult for me to tell lawyer jokes in the future. Sitting in the blazing sun on a cloudless day at the edge of summer, I thought it might be difficult for me to pay attention or learn much from the commencement speaker. I, therefore, was delighted the U.S. Solicitor General kept my attention with some profound remarks. At one point he asked — no, challenged — the law school graduates with words delivered several years ago to graduates of this same school by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. His charge to these men and women was to always ask themselves, Can you be trusted?