President Botstein’s Charge to the Class of 2025

Bard College held its 165th Commencement on Saturday, May 24, 2025. At the Commencement Ceremony, Bard President Leon Botstein gave the following charge to the Class of 2025.

The time‑honored tradition is for the person in my position to give some kind of final charge. It derives from a religious tradition of sermonizing, which rarely does any good and, people rarely remember what anybody said.

So, I am going to do my best here to the class of 2025.

I wish I had better news for you, but you don’t need reminding that the world you are entering is unprecedented, particularly for those of you who live in the United States. I could borrow the old clichés or use some new ones, but instead I am going to give you 10 pieces of advice.

The first is: Think and speak independently.

Invent your own language and your own way of saying what you think. Don’t borrow slogans, code words, or clichés. My favorite terrible clichés are the way generations are talked about in the media—Gen X. Millennial. It’s pseudo-knowledge like most of what you read online. My advice is be skeptical, find your own words, your own rhetoric, and your own sound.

Second piece of advice: Rely on evidence.

Don’t assume everything you hear about is true. Let me give you my favorite current example. I am going to take this page from Homer. You remember the Trojan Horse? A Trojan priest of the name Laocoön tried to tell his people that this wasn’t a gift from the Greeks—that’s where we get “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts”—but it was actually a trap and would lead to the destruction of their city. We are now facing a kind of Trojan Horse argument in our own country. The President of the United States would like to tell you that his assault on higher education is to protect the Jews of America and to fight antisemitism. As a Jew in the American community, I can think nothing more false and more nefarious than that claim. He is doing exactly what princes, dukes, and kings did to Jews in the 18th century. And those that follow along are like court Jews. It feeds into the most nefarious of all conspiracy theories that everything is controlled by the Jews. As a result, the demolition of Harvard and Columbia is whose fault? The Jews. So, interrogate the difference between false and true claims.

The third piece of advice: Don’t simplify.

Don’t simplify. There are, like Occam’s razor, various arguments for simplicity but some simplifications don’t work. Things are complex and ambiguous. One simplification is all that you read about our current politics. The America we face now is in large measure the result of 40 years of neglect of income inequality—allowing people to lose meaningful work, and let cities rot. This was done by Presidents long before Donald Trump. We tolerated what is now an unbearable gap between the rich and everyone else. There is no doubt that you need to look at what is told to you by pundits and the media and on the internet with the intuition that things aren’t quite so new or simple.

The fourth piece of advice: Listen.

Listening is an art. You should listen to the people who don’t agree with you. You should listen to people who have different ideas. And, from my point of view, you should listen to music, to whatever music you like. Don't live without music.

My fifth piece of advice: Resist all forms of violence.

Obviously, avoid physical violence, hurting people, but also shouting at people, humiliating people, hurling curses, epithets—don’t do it. There’s no reason to. You will improve no one’s life by doing it. If you hate someone and you think someone is wrong, shouting at them will not improve the chances that you might be able to change their minds and reduce enmity.

My sixth piece of advice: Don’t give in to fear.

Don’t give in to fear. Don’t give in to fear even when you are in danger. Yes, I say this to all of our students from countries not in the United States. And we will protect every student and every staff member who has some kind of vulnerability from the point of view of the ICE and immigration services of this country. The image of our government employees arresting a totally innocent individual off the street who was a student at Tufts is the most exact picture of what fascism and totalitarianism does.

I will tell you a personal story from my parents’ life. When my mother was pregnant with my older brother in 1941, her Swiss colleagues in the medical school—she was a professor in the medical school in Zurich—said to her, “How can you bring a Jewish child into this world only for that child to be killed?” Her answer: “this is my only way of expressing the hope that we will escape the danger.” And that child, my older brother, did. No matter how bleak—and you heard it from the speakers here today—there is always a reason for hope. Resist fear because fear leads to cowardice and to self-censorship.

My seventh piece of advice: Always keep a sense of irony.

Don’t overdo seriousness. Retain the capacity for laughter. Smile about how things don’t always turn out the way they are supposed to. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. I have made more mistakes than not. The only way you can do something right is by making mistakes. I had a friend who had a cartoon of Babe Ruth. On the cartoon it said Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times. What do we remember him for? 714 home runs.

My eighth piece of advice is: Don’t give in to envy.

Don’t envy somebody else. It won’t do you any good. You will not benefit. Now you can emulate somebody. You can look at someone—we musicians do it all the time—and say, “They can do that. That’s great. I’m going to learn how do that because it impresses me.  I don’t envy the person, because the envy of the person will not make me know how to do it.” Emulate, don’t envy.

Because you went to college here, the ninth piece of advice is easy to follow: You should never have an excuse to be bored.

Boredom leads to envy, and envy to hatred, violence and discrimination, to blaming other people for your life. It’s easy not to be bored. And I think watching a lot of video entertainment is passive and boring. Do something using your mind and imagination, make something. Sing, write, dance, paint, take photographs, read—not only a short book, but a big one—and you won’t be bored. So, value the excellence around you. Go to an exhibit, old and new art. Whatever you do, you should have no reason to be bored.

My 10th and final piece of advice is: Remember your teachers.

Remember their qualities and the care they gave. Remember Bard College. Stay true to the link between learning and education and democracy and freedom.

With those 10 pieces of advice, I congratulate the class of 2025!