On That Commencement Speech

From Katie Roiphe:

Every time it happens that someone breaks out of the inspirational platitudes with a hostile or challenging commencement speech, people are ruffled and interested, and it seems like an anomaly or maybe a mistake. But these mini-nervous breakdowns in commencement speeches are a recognizable genre, borrowing heavily from the truth-telling ambience of a J.D. Salinger story or novel. The outward stance “I am not going to tell you the fake thing you think you are going to hear” is very common, though few achieve the authentic surprise, the true frisson of a graduation speech that shakes people up, and almost never does it get as good as “2,185,967 pairs of Uggs.”

The temptation to tell the gathered students—all dressed up under their graduation gowns, in the heat, the smell of fresh mown grass, the watercolor-blue sky, celebratory cakes in boxes on counters at home—something they are not expecting must be hard to resist for a certain kind of charismatic, boundary-breaking educator or writer or other distinguished person. There is rarely such a rich, glimmering possibility for upending platitudes and an audience so primed, so emotionally wrought, so unusually open to listening, so uncharacteristically reflective.