Thank you, George and our vocalists. That was beautiful.
I am delighted to welcome all of you here today—family and friends of our graduating seniors; our honorary degree recipients and their friends and family members; trustees, alumni, faculty, and staff; and friends of the College, and especially the Class of 2026.
I am also delighted to welcome Bowdoin’s fifteenth president, Clayton Rose, and his wife, Julianne Rose, and our fourteenth president, Barry Mills and his wife, Karen Mills.
Baccalaureate marks the official end of the academic year. Seniors, as your family and friends, and the Bowdoin community, come together to celebrate with you, today is also an opportunity to reflect on the experiences you’ve had here, and to look forward to what lies ahead.
At Commencement last year, I spoke about the Bowdoin Class of 1825—about its lesser-known members and what made that class so successful. I talked primarily about the relationships they had with each other and how those friendships shaped their time at Bowdoin and the rest of their lives. Today, I want to return from a different vantage point to one of that class’s most famous graduates, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
When Hawthorne graduated, even ten and twenty years after he graduated, it would have come as a shock to him that his work would still be read today. We remember him as the acclaimed author—but there was nothing visible from his time at Bowdoin and early adulthood that would have predicted that success. He was an average student, at best; he was fined repeatedly for playing cards; he was one of the only students who did not manage to get it together to write a commencement address. He described his life at Bowdoin in this way: “I was an idle student, negligent of college rules and the Procrustrean details of academic life, rather choosing to nurse my own fancies than to dig into Greek roots and be numbered among the learned Thebans.” Which might be his remarkably literary way of saying he did not do the reading.
After graduating he moved home and lived with his mother, where he wrote and held down a variety of jobs he found less than interesting. Some years later, he was fired from one of those jobs. This is not, I should add, the career path we advertise in our admissions materials. It was this event—not a promotion, not a fellowship, not some big grand moment—that gave him the time and inspiration to write The Scarlet Letter, which almost immediately was a best seller.
When Hawthorne remembered this stage of his life, he described feeling that he had not lived but had only dreamed of living. Let me offer a different perspective on those years. I believe that those years were years when he was living his life, doing exactly the things that led him to become a writer whose words still speak to us today. His return home, his building of a family, his developing of friendships and a community with other writers, his professional travails and personal losses all gave him the experiences and perspectives that he poured into his writing.
I do not tell you this as a romantic story about a writer. Nor do I tell it as a warning that your twenties and thirties will necessarily be difficult, or as a trope that those difficulties will inevitably lead to success. Instead, I tell you because I think it describes a kind of human work, the kind of human life, that is, at this particular moment, in particular need of defense.
You are graduating into a world in which artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to predict who people are, and what they’re likely to do. More and more, the world will encounter you and understand you through versions of yourselves that have been assembled by institutions, by employers, and by people using these systems but who have never met you in person. These systems are improving quickly. They’re often useful. They are often right.
But there is one thing they cannot do. They cannot see the part of you that is not yet finished. They cannot model the self that is in formation, the questions you have not yet asked, the friendships you have not yet made, the readings you have not yet done, the obligations you have yet to recognize as yours, and also the losses you have not yet experienced. These are the materials from which a human life is made. They are not fully legible in advance.
Turning those materials into a life is what your Bowdoin education has been preparing you for: not uncovering a pre-determined known set of answers, but the slow work of becoming someone capable of forming and re-forming the right questions. When you read a difficult text and stayed with it past the point of comfort, you were doing that work. When you sat across from a classmate whose view of the world was unlike yours and tried, really tried, to understand it; when you stayed up to help a friend with a problem set you had already finished; when you noticed that something you had believed was, in fact, more complicated than you had let yourself see, you were doing that work.
These efforts are the disciplines of the unfinished self. And they are precisely what your education has given to you and has demanded of you.
Here is what I find the most hopeful about this hard moment in this world. I do not know what you will write, what you will build, what you will refuse, what you will rescue. I do not know which questions you will ask that have not yet been asked. I do not know which versions of yourselves you will become through the slow work of these next years—the years that, for Hawthorne, turned out to be the least visible of his life but maybe the most important.
That is not a failure of imagination. It is the nature of what a generation does when it enters the world. And it is the reason any of us bother to teach: not because we know what you will do, but because we trust you will do something we have not yet done, could not have done; something we didn’t even know needed doing, and could not have predicted.
We know you are ready for this. We know it because of the way you have astonished your professors with your curiosity, your rigor, and your willingness to be challenged. We know it because we have seen you on stages and on playing fields. We have seen you win awards, prizes, and fellowships, and because we have seen you give your time, generously and quietly, to this community and to the world beyond it. And we know it because we have seen you, again and again, take genuine care of one another.
Bowdoin is better because you were here. And the future you’re entering: uncertain, unpredicted, and yours to shape, is better because you’re entering it.
