Four Graduations and a Wedding, hosted by Brian Lehrer, presents an on-air commencement ceremony for the Class of 2020 and the parents of graduates.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet and former Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019, Tracy K. Smith's message to the graduating class:

What stirs beneath the surface working its way into words and questions for you? What do you doubt? What have you outgrown? What are you ready to embrace?

May we all move forward in courage, good faith, and the understanding that none of us is alone.

 The full transcript of Ilana Glazer's commencement address:

To the members of the class of 2020, and to those who love and want the best for you—I want to offer an especially emphatic congratulations on a major life achievement.

Graduating right now has got to feel incredibly complex.  We hear every day that this is a strange time, a new and unprecedented moment. And so, to be coming to the culmination of your education during a period of global upheaval, uncertainty and loss must be strange and conflicting. I imagine that many of you are grieving in one way or another. Many, moved by a new sense of conviction, are eager to be of help to communities both near and far. All of us are wondering what the world will look like tomorrow, let alone six months or a year from tomorrow.

It’s hard to speak to all of those things, but I just want to start by saying those are the realities that set my thoughts and wishes for you on this occasion into motion. And I feel this year in particular, that my wishes for you are my wishes for all of us.

Midway through the spring semester, here at Princeton University, where I teach, we went remote. I remember sitting in class during the final week of in-person teaching. We had been instructed to space out our chairs to what was then an unnatural feeling distance. Everyone, in finalizing their plans for leaving campus, was drawing upon some combination of shock, disappointment, anxiety and also courage. For every few students planning to return to their family homes, there was one for whom such a thing wasn’t a viable option—students for whom Princeton’s campus constituted their only safe or stable residence; students whose gender identity or sexual orientation would open them up to non-acceptance, or even abuse or violence; students whose family members were already infected with COVID-19. Students the world over confronted similar urgencies. From that moment on, my sense of the value and relevance of our course material was filtered through questions that arose in that final in-person class meeting: Where are you going? How are you feeling? What’s on your mind? How can I be helpful to you?

I believe those are the questions we should continue to ask, no matter the context, even as we get on with the ongoing private and collective work of keeping going through the current crisis. Where are we going? How are we feeling? What’s on our mind? How can we be helpful to one another?

I imagine these might also be some of the questions on your mind at this juncture in your life and so I kind of want to address you through those lenses.

Where are you going? The once-upon-a-time view of graduation as a time of charging forward on your own into the rewards you’ve long been preparing to receive is not quite the option of the moment. And that’s okay. You now have the opportunity to reflect critically upon what “progress” actually is, and what it might look like in the world you hope to inherit.  

In the last handful of years, I’ve been so enlightened and inspired by my students’ view of the world. From ideas of gender and sexuality to race to class to notions of ability and disability, to name just a few contexts in which they are thinking, my students have alerted me to new modes of freedom and acceptance. I’m eager for your generation to come of age and enter into spaces where their voices and their values can be more widely received. I’m excited for you to teach us that there are alternatives to the prevailing model of self-interest, the ruthless pursuit of profit above all else, and the age-old dynamic of power and oppression. Class of 2020: I’m excited for your generation to teach the rest of us that there are new goals on the horizon worth moving toward.

And, how are you feeling? As we are adjusting to a differently paced daily life, and greater social distance from others as a matter of public health, now is the time to develop a practice of listening to your feelings, and making contact with what I like to think of as your own inner voice. Now is the time to develop a practice of turning down the volume on the many external voices seeking to persuade you of their opinions, their products, their trends and beliefs, and instead to ask yourself what is urgent and meaningful? What feeds you? What affords you a feeling of peace and possibility? What are the values you’d want to claim and attest to? Go quiet—go inward—for a part of every day and touch base with those questions. Get to know what your own voice sounds and feels like at that level of private reflection.  I feel like that’s so important because so much of what we often think education is about is claiming authority, proving your excellence, and you’ve spent time doing exactly those things, but your vulnerability is also a tool and something that can be as meaningful to you as what you know. I just want to affirm that is something you can lean on in a time like this. 

What’s on your mind? What stirs beneath the surface working its way into words and questions for you? What are you puzzled by? What upsets or animates you? What do you doubt? What have you outgrown? What are you finally ready to embrace? Touch base with what might at present be only deep unconscious inklings, and work to manifest them in your life as conscious thoughts, as ideas in flux, as words and questions you might speak to yourself with the goal of refining them into a set of mindful goals and actions. That’s part of what I mean by the question “what’s on your mind?” But I also mean: what do you need to share now, to get off your chest, to let out into the open? That also warrants attention. Whatever it is, and however alone you may believe you are in thinking or feeling it, perhaps you’ll be comforted as I have been by what my mother always used to tell me: There’s nothing new under the sun. You’re not the first person to experience this, and you definitely won’t be the last. 

How can you be helpful to others? How can your own sense of joy, purpose and achievement take into consideration the needs and rights of others? How can your own pursuits affirm or even amplify the innate value of the people you know and the people you may never know? How can greater compassion factor into what you seek to do? How can a commitment to honesty factor in? And how can you be made more whole in spirit by the time, energy and resources you offer to others?

However you answer each of these questions, remember that this is not a one-and-done kind of reflective process. Neither is it easy or even necessarily intuitive. But life isn’t any of those things, either. It’s an ongoing process, one you get better and better at only to find one day that the stakes have suddenly changed, and your old goals are no longer as important to hold onto.

This moment of standing at a crossroads is where graduates like you often find themselves. In 2020, it’s where everyone the world over also happens to be standing. May we all move forward in courage, good faith, and the understanding that none of us is alone. 

→ The Full Ceremony.