Remarks at the Commencement of the 158th Graduating Class
by Michael I. Kotlikoff, President
As prepared for presentation
Saturday, May 23, 2026
Welcome families, welcome friends, and congratulations graduates!
It’s a great joy and a tremendous honor to be here with you celebrating the amazing Class of 2026, their many achievements, and this terrific milestone in the lives of 9,000 remarkable Cornellians, from 86 different countries, across all of our Cornell campuses and Commencement ceremonies.
And as I congratulate our graduates for completing their degrees, we recognize that nobody makes it to Cornell alone, and nobody makes it through Cornell alone. So, I also want to congratulate everyone who is also graduating, even though they aren’t wearing a cap and gown: the parents and grandparents, siblings and cousins, mentors and friends, here in Schoellkopf and joining us by livestream, who have been part of each graduate’s journey to, and through, Cornell.
Their achievement is also your achievement, and today you are all Cornellians.
Cornell’s founders, in their wisdom, established this university in a place with unparalleled natural beauty; nine months a year of perfect weather for staying indoors and studying; and no easy access by plane, train, or automobile.
It has gotten somewhat better since 1865. I am pleased to report that all of our roads are now paved. But as I think Homer said: Ithaca is worth the odyssey.
As we celebrate this year’s Commencement, I want to take a moment to remember those who are not with us today: the students whose graduation this should have been, whom we remember with an empty chair on the field.
The recognition and respect earned by a Cornell graduate derive from the rigor of a Cornell education — an education you do not receive at Cornell but earn at Cornell.
So please join me in one last, special thanks to the faculty and staff who poured so much of themselves into making sure that your college education was a Cornell education — by pushing each of you to take the more challenging paths that yield the broadest perspective.
As we celebrate your achievements at Cornell, we are also approaching another celebration: the 250th anniversary of our democracy this coming Fourth of July. I want to offer some thoughts on the role that Cornell has played over our 161 years as part of that democracy.
What we celebrate in this country every July Fourth, and this year for the 250th time, is not the day that America came into existence as the nation we know now: the world’s first modern democracy. The event we celebrate was, in effect, the announcement of a plan. The Declaration of Independence gave notice that the people of the American colonies intended to do things differently from then on. It laid out not only their intentions but the founding philosophy that inspired them: “that all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
It was a plan of stunning and radical ambition in a world where, for most people, the path your life would follow was mostly decided by the circumstances of your birth.
But it would take nearly 200 years for those inalienable rights to be extended to all men and women, regardless of their race, religion, education, or wealth.
That we do not live, in 2026, in a nation where the rights of “we the people” are the rights of only some of the people, is a debt we owe to every one of the Americans who have striven, each in their own way, over the past 250 years, toward that more perfect union.
Two of them were Andrew Dickson White and Ezra Cornell, who recognized the enormous distance that lay between the American ideals of equality and opportunity for all and the American reality of 1865 — and believed that a new kind of education could help close that distance.
They imagined a new university for a still young democracy — one that would welcome any students with the talent and drive to succeed. One that could answer the needs of a shattered nation, rebuilding from the American Civil War: by providing world-class education in the liberal arts, the sciences, and the professions to students of every background, regardless of their financial need — men and women born in America and beyond, of any race or nationality, any faith or none — who would live and learn together.
An education in such an environment, the founders reasoned, would yield graduates able, as A.D. White put it, to build “better things in our beloved country.” They would go forth equipped not only to lead lives of meaning and impact but to bring forth, in every generation, the democratic values of our nation: from an institution where any person could find instruction in any study.
Over time, the Cornell model became the American model: giving rise to an enterprise of teaching and research that has become the envy of the world, fueling our economy and our well-being, and attracting some of the world’s most talented minds — including so many of you here today.
Democracy in the United States in 1865, as in 1776, was very much a work in progress.
It is still a work in progress today.
And the only tools we have to continue to build a more perfect union are, as they have always been, the human minds taught and shaped in each generation:
To participate in civil society, with integrity; to evaluate evidence thoughtfully, consider claims on their merits, and make decisions with a commitment to evidence, truth, and the common good.
To respect the rules and institutions that enable our societies to function, even when the interests of individuals and communities collide.
To choose solving problems over scoring points; to live with compromises that aren’t perfect, while we work for ones that are better.
And perhaps most important, to do the hard work of disagreeing successfully; to debate and discuss, with civility and respect, instead of shutting other voices down.
All of this is what we strive to teach here at Cornell.
Educating students to live in a democracy, like democracy itself, can be a messy business, particularly in times of political tension.
Universities are the training grounds, the playing fields, for our democracy. It’s where students learn to exercise the right of free expression — and to understand their responsibility, as part of a society, to protect those rights for everyone. It’s where students are exposed — where they must be exposed — to ideas they disagree with, that they find distasteful or offensive. Where they encounter, and must encounter, people who are different from themselves.
A training ground isn’t good for much if nobody ever steps on the grass or steps over a line.
In our democracy, everyone must be able to air their views, to protest and debate, to say things others might find offensive. And all of us need to understand not only how to exercise those freedoms but how to respect them. In our classrooms, students are asked to consider context, evaluate data, and mount an argument with evidence, logic, and integrity. Outside the classroom, we ensure the freedom to speak out and vent the frustrations inherent in a world that all too often disappoints. But playing fields and democracies have rules that are meant to protect everyone. Enforcing those rules is rarely popular. But without those rules, one person’s passion becomes another’s tyranny.
At its best, a university is where students who care deeply and are truly driven to seek change in the world, can do much better than demand a world that does better: They acquire the tools to make it better.
Our democracy is not perfect and neither is Cornell.
And the reasons why we celebrate democracy at this, its 250th anniversary, are the same reasons we celebrate and honor all of you today at this Commencement.
You’ve achieved so much.
You have so much still to achieve.
Two hundred and fifty years after declaring our independence, our nation finds itself, not for the first time, in an age where universities — places where any idea can be argued, any question explored, any path followed without fear of reprisal — are seen by some as threats.
Where the shared norms and values of both academics and democracy — of intellectual integrity and respect for truth, of care for the common good and responsibility for each other, of respect for the rule of law at home and abroad — are themselves at risk.
We again live in a time when some would have us say, not those people — and not those studies.
A time when the values and ethos you have learned at Cornell are needed as much as the skills and knowledge you have acquired here.
Because the rights and responsibilities, the freedoms and the values that make our academic community possible, and the tenacity and talent and determination that brought you here today, have prepared you all to carry the unfinished work of democracy forward, wherever you may go.
Today we graduate our 158th graduating class with the most ambitious of goals and the most democratic of aspirations: to build a country and a world that is better for everyone who lives in it.
And I would like to send you on your way with the words of a member of the Cornell Class of 1921: E.B. White, whom many of you encountered through his works for children, including “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little.” In 1943, deep into the Second World War, E.B. White received a request from the Writers’ War Board asking for a statement on “The Meaning of Democracy.”
“Surely the Board knows what democracy is,” he replied. “It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth.”
Democracy, I would add to this Class of 2026 graduating at the 250th birthday of this democracy — is the unfinished work that awaits.
For better things in our beloved country.
Congratulations to you all.