President’s Commencement Remarks

Sunday, May 25, 2025
by Elizabeth H. Bradley, President

Before we return to the graduating class, and we will, I want to take a moment to publicly express my heartfelt thanks and admiration for Reverend Sam Speers, who you just heard. He’s retiring from the College this year after 25 years of dedicated and truly loving service to this community. Please join me in showing our deep appreciation.

I also want to take one more minute before turning to the class of 2025 just to recognize all the people who work at Vassar, who make a day like this, this joy, this celebration possible. There are hundreds and hundreds to thank. Thank you so very, very much.

Okay. Now, to the class of 2025: You did it! It is such a delight to be here with you. After four years of hard work, deepening friendships, expanding horizons, more than 100 Sunday emails and, now, this moment together, for reflection and rejoicing.

We have many esteemed speakers here today who are going to make us laugh, remind us how inspiring you are as soon to be graduates, and strengthen us for the future full of challenges ahead. So I’ll keep my remarks brief.

Institutions like colleges and universities and our relationships with them are really a mixed bag for many people. They provide essential services and they serve as major employers, making them central to our daily lives and livelihoods. Yet they can also be deeply disappointing when they appear to be focused on self preservation, or if they betray our deeply held values, or when they cannot adequately address injustices in the world. This year has been one in which institutions of higher education, particularly, are on trial. Some have lost trust, and the navigation of political attacks seems far from over. In this time, I have been and I am deeply proud and indebted to the students and the faculty who have animated Vassar with peaceful protest, with written and spoken dissent, with calls for engaged pluralism, and with restorative practices when we hurt each other. Let me underscore Vassar is committed to engage pluralism, which asks all of us to recognize and embrace the differences among us, keeping dialogue open, learning along the way, and seeking common ground. Our deeply held values of diversity, inclusion, and equity, as written in our mission statement, help us to ensure that our educational offerings are open and accessible to every student, which is the law. We do not discriminate, but rather work to hold open all educational opportunities. In fact, part of the critical thinking skills each of you has developed through the last four years is to ask: Which voices have been omitted. Why? How does that shape our perspective? And how can we include those voices in the dialogue? For freedom, for justice, for long-term peace—we must continue to ask those questions and do so with epistemic humility, recognizing we never know the full story, we never have the only answer, and staying in conversation is really the strongest way forward. I’ve seen this happen in your class again and again for four years, and it gives me immense hope in these challenging times.

I know from talking to many of you that today, the moment of graduation is bittersweet. In some ways, you are so ready to be done with college. You’ve taken the key classes you wanted, you’ve completed a thesis, many of you. You’ve traveled internationally, you’ve fallen in love—well, you have fallen out of love. You’ve written your own play, you’ve won championships, you’ve lost championships, and you’ve found your own voice. And at the same time, how can we let this all go? For me, at least, there is some sadness in seeing you go, and I wonder if there’s something similar in you right now.

Many of you know I like the poet Mary Oliver, who appears in my Sunday email a lot. She was a Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry in 1984 and had attended Vassar as a student in the mid 1950s, and she had mixed feelings about the rules at Vassar, and, in fact I’m told, spent a good amount of time in the trees. Anyhow, she writes often about connections between nature and people, among people, and connections between people and places.

So I’ll end my remarks with a part of her poem entitled “The Return,” which speaks about a thread—a thread that can bring us back to who we are. Here goes:

I touched the thread and wept.
O, it was frail as air.
And I turned then
With the white spool
Through the cold rocks
Through the long webs,
And the mist fell,
And the webs clung,
And the rocks tumbled, And the earth shook.
And the thread held.

I hope you’ll remember, there’s always a thread—a connection—between you, your friends at Vassar, and with Vassar itself. You have worked hard over your time to create that thread, and it is strong. Please stay connected, come back and enjoy campus, and in your difficult and in your joyous times ahead, I hope you will keep close your Vassar memories and those relationships. We are so proud of you. Enjoy the day!