California Institute of Technology President Thomas F. Rosenbaum Delivered Graduate Commencement Address at Bard College’s One Hundred Sixty-Sixth Commencement on Saturday, May 23, 2026
Bard College held its one hundred sixty-sixth commencement on Saturday, May 23, 2026. Bard President Leon Botstein conferred 501 undergraduate degrees on the Class of 2026 and 197 graduate degrees. Bard also conferred 46 associate degrees on students from its microcolleges. Graduate degrees conferred were doctor of philosophy, master of philosophy, and master of arts degrees in decorative arts, design history, material culture; master of fine arts; master of science degrees in environmental policy, climate science and policy, and master of education degrees in environmental education; master of arts degrees in curatorial studies; master of arts degrees in teaching; master of music degrees in vocal arts and master of music degrees in conducting; master of business administration degrees in sustainability; master of science degrees and master of arts degrees in economic theory and policy; master of music degrees in curatorial, critical, and performance studies; master of arts degrees in global studies; master of arts degrees in human rights and the arts; master of arts degrees in Chinese music and culture; master of music degrees in instrumental studies; and master of arts degrees in public humanities.
Text (unedited) of Graduate Commencement address by Thomas F. Rosenbaum
Congratulations graduates, and congratulations to your parents, siblings, loved ones, friends, and teachers who have all helped you along this path of adventure and accomplishment.
It is a great pleasure to join you at this Bard College first, a focused celebration of graduate achievement. There is something different about being able to delve deeply into a subject, to experience the joy of understanding the workings of the natural or constructed world, harnessing the creative process, or parsing societal dynamics, that perhaps no one else has ever been able to resolve. It is revelatory to successfully confront the unknown, and to poke and probe its shadowy outlines until its essential nature comes into focus. In this way, the dividing line between the two cultures disappears, the arts and sciences alike contributing to the expansion of human knowledge and the translation of that knowledge into the insights and implementations that improve people’s lives.
You graduate at a fraught time. Higher education is under assault from the left and the right. The distrust of expertise runs rampant in many quarters. Disinformation dominates myriad channels of communication. Job demands are rapidly changing as AI models supplant and transform traditional opportunities.
It is in this context that your graduate education becomes so important. A graduate degree not only recognizes mastery of a subject, but it teaches flexibility of thought. You may not know the answers to all the problems you will confront as you move through the next stages of your career, but you have the ability to ask meaningful questions and to frame the solutions. There is far more power in an illuminating question than any answer.
You have been equipped to evaluate arguments, to weigh different views and different perspectives, to analyze the veracity of assertions in the search for truth. There is no shortcut to true discovery. The process requires an openness to others, the confidence to stand up to the herd, and the humility to change one’s mind.
As there are no shortcuts, there is no paved path to the future. As you go out from Bard, you just need to start walking. But you do have north stars to guide you and a moral compass to orient you.
We believe in truth. We believe in evidence-based research, to decisions based on data. As the old proverb puts it: If a book falls from a high shelf and hits you on the head and makes an empty sound, then it may not be the fault of the book!
We believe in the interchange of ideas and honoring the contributions of creative individuals from every background and perspective. If one cannot be exposed to this experiential diversity directly, art and literature let us step out of our lives and develop the empathy and imagination that animate the human experience.
We believe in the arts and sciences as means to develop life-long passions and sculpt a better world. In Cicero’s On Duties, his last philosophical work, he lays out for his son Marcus the linkage of the honorable and the beneficial, the virtue of duty to society, and the primacy of civil achievement. The opportunity to contribute to the commonweal is underemphasized in our current culture, but it is no less resonant or powerful for it.
The ability to influence meaningful change requires clarity of thought and clarity of purpose. Let me offer two examples from the world of sustainability, tying together the themes of discovery and service. This is an area of expertise many of you here have demonstrated, and likely the most important challenge for your generation and that of your children.
The first example involves the Caltech chemist Arie Haagen-Smit. When I first visited Caltech—and here I date myself—it was as a college student in August 1976. Caltech is set in Southern California in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, up against the Angeles National Forest. But if you looked north, there was nothing but a gray haze. When I returned in winter 18 months later, all of a sudden there were these mountains clear as day. My first thought was: who put those there?
The answer of course did not involve plate tectonics but smog. LA was blanketed a good part of the year by foul-smelling pollution. The science of smog was solved by Professor Haagen-Smit, a flavor chemist who specialized in the compounds that gave pineapples and red wine their distinctive tastes. He became interested in what he called “the taste of LA,” and discovered that it was the emission of nitrous oxides and other pollutants from automobile exhaust interacting with sunlight that created smog. In fact, he would perform desktop experiments at public lectures producing what he coined “Haagen Smog.”
This is only part of the story. There remains the societal engagement that is often necessary to translate scientific understanding into public action. Haagen-Smit took his case to Sacramento and became the inaugural chairman of the California Air Resources Board. As a result of his involvement, the State issued requirements for catalytic converters to remove the harmful pollutants from automobile exhaust. Now, if you come visit us in Pasadena, you will be able to see the mountains every day.
The second example involves the geochemist Claire Patterson. Patterson was trying to date the age of the Earth using ratios of the various isotopes of lead. In fact, the age he determined, 4.55 +/- 0.07 billion years, is still considered state-of-the-art. However, as hard as he tried to clean up his laboratory so that there would be no contamination of his measurements, he could not drive the background signal to zero. It turned out that lead was literally in the air, a product of the burning of gasoline. Patterson too became involved in public advocacy, which led to governmental mandates to remove the lead from gasoline.
Contributing to the commonweal comes in many forms and flavors, whether in the public sector or in a university, in private industry or in the performing arts. There is no timeline, proscribed path, or optimal solution. One of my favorite philosophers, the Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra, advises that when you come to a fork in the road, take it. Just right. You should not expect that the path you walk will be a straight line. The important credo is to be open to new possibilities and to recognize unexpected opportunities. Life may be serendipitous, but you must be prepared to take advantage of the luck that life offers.
In his poem “Keeping Things Whole,” Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow, Mark Strand, writes with vivid and very physical imagery:
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving
I move
to keep things whole.
You will move through life shaped by your time here at Bard, creating new spaces for yourself and for society. I wish you wholeness and magic on your journey forward as you carve out your personal pathways.
About the Graduate Commencement Speaker
Thomas F. Rosenbaum is the ninth president of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where he is also professor of physics. He is an expert on the quantum-mechanical nature of materials, and has conducted research at Bell Laboratories, INC.; the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center; Argonne National Laboratory; and the University of Chicago. At the last, he served as vice president for research and then as provost before moving to Caltech in 2014. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics with honors from Harvard University and a PhD in physics from Princeton University. He serves as the chair of the Board of Trustees of the Society for Science, as a board member of the Aspen Center for Physics, and on the Los Angeles Committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Post Date: 05-23-2026
Text (unedited) of Graduate Commencement address by Thomas F. Rosenbaum
Congratulations graduates, and congratulations to your parents, siblings, loved ones, friends, and teachers who have all helped you along this path of adventure and accomplishment.
It is a great pleasure to join you at this Bard College first, a focused celebration of graduate achievement. There is something different about being able to delve deeply into a subject, to experience the joy of understanding the workings of the natural or constructed world, harnessing the creative process, or parsing societal dynamics, that perhaps no one else has ever been able to resolve. It is revelatory to successfully confront the unknown, and to poke and probe its shadowy outlines until its essential nature comes into focus. In this way, the dividing line between the two cultures disappears, the arts and sciences alike contributing to the expansion of human knowledge and the translation of that knowledge into the insights and implementations that improve people’s lives.
You graduate at a fraught time. Higher education is under assault from the left and the right. The distrust of expertise runs rampant in many quarters. Disinformation dominates myriad channels of communication. Job demands are rapidly changing as AI models supplant and transform traditional opportunities.
It is in this context that your graduate education becomes so important. A graduate degree not only recognizes mastery of a subject, but it teaches flexibility of thought. You may not know the answers to all the problems you will confront as you move through the next stages of your career, but you have the ability to ask meaningful questions and to frame the solutions. There is far more power in an illuminating question than any answer.
You have been equipped to evaluate arguments, to weigh different views and different perspectives, to analyze the veracity of assertions in the search for truth. There is no shortcut to true discovery. The process requires an openness to others, the confidence to stand up to the herd, and the humility to change one’s mind.
As there are no shortcuts, there is no paved path to the future. As you go out from Bard, you just need to start walking. But you do have north stars to guide you and a moral compass to orient you.
We believe in truth. We believe in evidence-based research, to decisions based on data. As the old proverb puts it: If a book falls from a high shelf and hits you on the head and makes an empty sound, then it may not be the fault of the book!
We believe in the interchange of ideas and honoring the contributions of creative individuals from every background and perspective. If one cannot be exposed to this experiential diversity directly, art and literature let us step out of our lives and develop the empathy and imagination that animate the human experience.
We believe in the arts and sciences as means to develop life-long passions and sculpt a better world. In Cicero’s On Duties, his last philosophical work, he lays out for his son Marcus the linkage of the honorable and the beneficial, the virtue of duty to society, and the primacy of civil achievement. The opportunity to contribute to the commonweal is underemphasized in our current culture, but it is no less resonant or powerful for it.
The ability to influence meaningful change requires clarity of thought and clarity of purpose. Let me offer two examples from the world of sustainability, tying together the themes of discovery and service. This is an area of expertise many of you here have demonstrated, and likely the most important challenge for your generation and that of your children.
The first example involves the Caltech chemist Arie Haagen-Smit. When I first visited Caltech—and here I date myself—it was as a college student in August 1976. Caltech is set in Southern California in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, up against the Angeles National Forest. But if you looked north, there was nothing but a gray haze. When I returned in winter 18 months later, all of a sudden there were these mountains clear as day. My first thought was: who put those there?
The answer of course did not involve plate tectonics but smog. LA was blanketed a good part of the year by foul-smelling pollution. The science of smog was solved by Professor Haagen-Smit, a flavor chemist who specialized in the compounds that gave pineapples and red wine their distinctive tastes. He became interested in what he called “the taste of LA,” and discovered that it was the emission of nitrous oxides and other pollutants from automobile exhaust interacting with sunlight that created smog. In fact, he would perform desktop experiments at public lectures producing what he coined “Haagen Smog.”
This is only part of the story. There remains the societal engagement that is often necessary to translate scientific understanding into public action. Haagen-Smit took his case to Sacramento and became the inaugural chairman of the California Air Resources Board. As a result of his involvement, the State issued requirements for catalytic converters to remove the harmful pollutants from automobile exhaust. Now, if you come visit us in Pasadena, you will be able to see the mountains every day.
The second example involves the geochemist Claire Patterson. Patterson was trying to date the age of the Earth using ratios of the various isotopes of lead. In fact, the age he determined, 4.55 +/- 0.07 billion years, is still considered state-of-the-art. However, as hard as he tried to clean up his laboratory so that there would be no contamination of his measurements, he could not drive the background signal to zero. It turned out that lead was literally in the air, a product of the burning of gasoline. Patterson too became involved in public advocacy, which led to governmental mandates to remove the lead from gasoline.
Contributing to the commonweal comes in many forms and flavors, whether in the public sector or in a university, in private industry or in the performing arts. There is no timeline, proscribed path, or optimal solution. One of my favorite philosophers, the Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra, advises that when you come to a fork in the road, take it. Just right. You should not expect that the path you walk will be a straight line. The important credo is to be open to new possibilities and to recognize unexpected opportunities. Life may be serendipitous, but you must be prepared to take advantage of the luck that life offers.
In his poem “Keeping Things Whole,” Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow, Mark Strand, writes with vivid and very physical imagery:
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving
I move
to keep things whole.
You will move through life shaped by your time here at Bard, creating new spaces for yourself and for society. I wish you wholeness and magic on your journey forward as you carve out your personal pathways.
About the Graduate Commencement Speaker
Thomas F. Rosenbaum is the ninth president of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where he is also professor of physics. He is an expert on the quantum-mechanical nature of materials, and has conducted research at Bell Laboratories, INC.; the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center; Argonne National Laboratory; and the University of Chicago. At the last, he served as vice president for research and then as provost before moving to Caltech in 2014. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics with honors from Harvard University and a PhD in physics from Princeton University. He serves as the chair of the Board of Trustees of the Society for Science, as a board member of the Aspen Center for Physics, and on the Los Angeles Committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Post Date: 05-23-2026