What This Year's Graduation Ceremonies Can Tell Us About the Future of the Ivy League
Above: Harvard president Alan Garber at the university's commencement.
College graduations are always occasions for mixed emotions: excitement and anxiety, sadness and joy. For the graduates of elite universities, however, the dominant mood this year might be relief. The Class of 2025 has not had an easy time of it. They graduated from high school during the first full year of COVID, and when many of them started college, they were still social distancing in virtual classrooms and residential pods. After that health crisis finally came to an end, it did not take long for a political one to emerge. Pro-Palestinian protests earned the ire of Congress, and the Trump presidency brought massive cuts to federal funding for research and repeated attempts to kick international students out of the country. Add to all this a job market that was starting to look a little wobbly under the pressure of AI and the possibility of a tariff-driven recession. Pity the person who had to figure out what to say to the beleaguered Class of 2025.
Columbia University's acting president, Clare Shipman, barely got the chance. Boos drowned her out the moment she was introduced to address undergraduates during a cold and rainy Class Day last week. The sun was shining the next day for the university-wide commencement, but the mood was just as dark. Greeted once again with boos, Shipman struggled to get the audience's attention, let alone its sympathy. Columbia's administration lost support among many students when it broke up the pro-Palestinian encampment and invited police on campus to arrest protestors. During one of Shipman's speeches, a few students shouted, 'You arrested us!' The administration lost even more students' trust after agreeing to demands the Trump Administration placed on the university. On both days, the crowd broke out in chants of 'Free Mahmoud!', a reference to the Columbia graduate student and U.S. permanent resident Mahmoud Kahlil, who was detained by ICE. After two days of jeers, Shipman might have wished Columbia had canceled graduation ceremonies like it did last year.
Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, used the occasion of graduation to make a defense of the American research university, which was something of a sequel to an essay he published in The Atlantic in March. That piece traced the history of the postwar research partnership between higher education and the federal government and called out the need to stand up to the threat the Trump Administration posed to all the good that had come from it. Lacing in references to Alexis de Tocqueville and Socrates, Eisgruber returned to the themes of his essay in a brief speech that was a display of erudition and clarity, even if it was lacking in the inspiration that the graduates might have been looking for on their day. It's well and good to tell students to leave Princeton with 'a fierce independence of mind,' but ferocity and independence were likely little comfort to an audience of twenty-two-year-olds facing rescinded offers to grad school and the increasingly dimmer job prospects.
The job market casts a shadow over every graduation ceremony ever, but after four years of economic growth and record unemployment, that shadow was longer than most students likely expected a year ago, even students in the Ivy League. A recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that in dozens of fields a majority of recent college graduates aged 22 to 27 were unemployed or underemployed, which they define as 'a college graduate working in a job that typically does not require a college degree.' The fields with the worst combined outcomes are likely not surprises, but it's notable that computer engineers have the third highest unemployment rate among recent graduates.
Things will likely work out for most of the Class of 2025 at Harvard College, where more than half the graduates are going on to jobs in finance, technology, or consulting. After months of turmoil, Harvard managed to hold a graduation ceremony this week that was largely free of disturbance. Several speakers responded with defiance to the Trump administration's efforts to ban Harvard from enrolling international students. Harvard Kennedy School student Yurong 'Luanna' Jiang cautioned her classmates, 'We're starting to believe that people who think differently, vote differently, or pray differently—whether they're across the ocean or sitting right next to us—are not just wrong. But it doesn't have to be this way.' Hundreds of graduating seniors wore white flowers as a sign of support for international students, and Harvard's president, Alan Garber, welcomed the audience 'from down the street, across the country, and around the world.' In case anyone missed it, he repeated himself, 'Around the world. Just as it should be.' In stark contrast to Shipman's reception at Columbia, Garber was given a hero's welcome with a minute long standing ovation from an audience grateful that Harvard had taken a leading role in resisting the Trump administration's attack on higher education.
At the same time, it was hard not to wonder how many students felt that politics were overshadowing their college experience to the very last minute. It would have been hard not to feel the presence of the Trump Administration at these Ivy League graduations, but at least one speaker made sure to keep the focus on students and what they were feeling that day. Jodi Kantor, whose reporting with Megan Twohey at the New York Times sparked the #MeToo movement, was greeted much more warmly than the president and with good reason. Her speech displayed the empathy and sharpness that has clearly served the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist well. She acknowledged that many in the audience felt that 'the story of [their] education had been one crisis after another' and recognized the anxiety some had suffered over four of the toughest years higher education has seen since the Vietnam War. Those crises will keep on coming, but that is not what Kantor wanted to dwell on. Instead, she left them with some good advice, advice that every parent fretting about where their kid will go to school might well heed themselves: 'Let's drop the assumption that your experience in college will dictate what becomes of you afterward.'
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