President Botstein’s Charge to the Class of 2026
Bard President Leon Botstein. Photo by Samuel Stuart Hollenshead
Bard College held its 166th Commencement on Saturday, May 23, 2026. At the Commencement Ceremony, Bard President Leon Botstein gave the following charge to the Class of 2026.
The Class of 2026 will always hold a special place in my life. You are the last class over which I will have the honor of presiding.
I have, therefore, decided to base my charge to you on a passage from the Bible; after all, Bard owes its existence to an act of abiding religious faith on the part of John and Margaret Bard. Their faith in God was deepened by their grief at the death of their young son, Willie. Their response to tragedy did not take the form of rage at the world but the opposite—the determination to transform their loss into a gift designed to make the world better. They built two churches and founded this college.
Few passages from the Bible are more famous than the first eight verses of Ecclesiastes. You heard these verses in the Old Testament Lesson at last week’s Baccalaureate service. I am returning to them again at this commencement.
Verse 1: To everything there is a season. And a time to every purpose under the heaven.
This is a way of reassuring you that as you look back, despite ups and downs, this was the right time for you to be in college, to engage learning to help shape your ambitions, to deepen your knowledge and strengthen your skills. The best time to learn is when you’re young, and naturally passionate and energetic. You will still be young for a long time. Go on learning, expanding and pursuing your curiosity. Keep your capacity for surprise and discovery alive. Try things that may appear neither practical or conventional. Ignore conventional wisdom. Don’t imitate. In the pursuit of knowledge, be courageous. If you wait too long, you might lose the motivation, the will, or even the ability to achieve what you once dreamed of.
Verse 2: A time to be born, and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
We have no influence on when or where we are born and who our parents are. Nonetheless, this blunt fact seems never to have deterred us from complaining about our lives and the times we are living in. No doubt, things around us today are bad. There is far too much injustice, inequality and cruelty. And yes, the job market doesn’t look promising. But circumstances were never entirely cheery or perfect. No graduating class in history left college without trepidation. Resist nostalgia, and don’t compare the present with a mythic construct of a vanished better past. The present is your moment and embrace it.
We may be facing the nadir of democracy and freedom in America and a high-water mark of corruption and cruelty in our politics. Resolve to do something about it. Would any of us have preferred to have been 21 in the 1940s, during World War II or in 1950, during the Cold War and the era of the anti-communist hysteria and witch hunts? Was the world better before the advent of modern medicine that resulted in vaccines, and our continually expanding capacity to combat disease? If the necessity to fight injustice and suffering seems greater, so too is the opportunity to contribute.
As for the time to die, put that question out of your mind. Don’t speculate about your destiny. Suppress any tendency to hypochondria and don’t mask the process of aging. Just take good care of yourselves, and don’t be frightened about the inevitable risks of living.
As to the time for planting, this suggests not everything you undertake will work out; do not be derailed by disappointment and failure. Keep planting. You’re still at a point in life where mistakes are more easily reversed. You can afford to change, shift your careers, or alter your convictions. Even though you invested time and effort, don’t stick to something simply because you started it.
Verse 3: A time to kill, and a time to heal. A time to break down, a time to build up.
The Bible notwithstanding, I’m not certain there is ever a time to kill. Wars may be a necessity—certainly not the one we’re waging with Iran or Russia’s war on Ukraine—in the end, I’m not certain there can be a “just” war. Killing may be necessary but don’t delude yourself that it is ever truly right. Revenge is no justification. It is scandalous that the death penalty still exists in our country, amidst a politics where the purported right to life of the unborn takes precedence over the rights of the living.
The opposite applies to healing. Only for the very old, who have lost the will to live or the capacity to express that will, might healing be withheld legitimately. Every waking hour we possess is a time for healing ourselves and others, physically and emotionally, especially by restoring bonds with others that may have been broken. Practice forgiveness.
As to breaking down things, that is an experience none of us can escape. We are all fallible, imperfect and capable of being wrong. Abandoning something, and unraveling mistakes opens spaces for progress; for the changing of unjust laws, bringing down authoritarian governments, and stamping out greed and corruption. Respond to the vacuum of virtue around us by breaking down things that are not right and by sharing opportunities with those who otherwise would not have them. This has been a central goal of your alma mater, the motivation behind the early college high schools, the programs in prisons and micro-colleges, the scholarships we give, and our welcoming of refugees, and undocumented and displaced students.
Verse 4: A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance.
We all experience loss, and therefore grief. Don’t be afraid. Pain can be overcome by expressing it. Recovery can be a path to a life marked by wisdom, gratitude and generosity. No matter how grim life seems, never lose your sense of humor. Laughing can lead to hope. The joy of laughing is more restrained than dancing, just as mourning is more intense than weeping. The graver the disappointment and loss, the more powerful is the consolation offered by the music, dancing, poetry and comedy we create.
Verse 5: A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.
This verse suggests that you should shed grievances and resentments and extend empathy to those with whom you disagree or think you despise, just as there are times when you must defend yourself and gather all the strength you can to protect yourself from danger, slander, unexamined criticism, and from those who seek to harm you. Seize the moments in life when you should reach out to others in friendship and affection. Beware of hypocrites and insincerity. For friendship, much less love, to hold meaning, it can’t be casual or indiscriminate. Don’t cheapen expressions of affection. Make them represent more than mere words.
Verse 6: A time to get, and a time to lose. A time to keep, a time to cast away.
There will be moments of both success and failure, moments when events, goals or objects you once thought were valuable suddenly seem meaningless. Don’t be thrown by those twists and turns. Be prepared to let go as easily as you once held on. Loss can open up new paths and lead to a new and sometimes better life.
Verse 7: A time to rend, a time to sew. A time to keep silence and a time to speak.
Tearing a garment is a traditional way of demonstrating grief to others. Surgery, the cutting of the body, is required to save a life. But more important are the moments where we show our neighbors and the world around us that we seek to repair the broken and torn. Something that has been visibly fixed—sewn together where it was once ripped—bears witness to our ability to intervene and rebuild lives and our communities.
As to silence, it is justified if silence’s opposite—speaking—is motivated by ignorance, uncertainty, cowardice and ideological fanaticism. Silence, however, should never be motivated by fear, particularly fear of what others around you might think. Silence is a virtue, even a necessity to protect privacy, to avoid betraying others, and for keeping secrets that no one else deserves to know and whose protection might prevent injury to others. The terrifying invasion of our personal lives by algorithms, surveillance, and the manipulation of opinions through social media and an undisciplined press motivated by profit must be fought. Resist the spread of falsehoods, prejudices and rumors. A society where there is no privacy can never be free. Discretion and restraint are essential in a humane community. They nurture the best aspects of our flawed selves.
Yet to keep silent and not to speak out against unmistakable injustice, oppression, and the abuse of power is cowardice. It enables wrongdoing. Stand up for what you know to be right, always remembering that your facts and beliefs might be wrong, and your knowledge incomplete. Matters are not as self-evident as they seem. The rush to judgment can be cruel. Just because you hold an opinion and you feel righteous about it doesn’t make it right. Gossip, rumors, ignorance, advertising and falsehoods now shape public opinion. Ecclesiastes suggests that there is an obligation to speak out when there is evidence of injustice the responsibility for which can be assigned properly by evidence and the application of the rule of law.
Verse 8: A time to love and a time to hate. A time of war and a time of peace.
In American English, no word is more overused than love. Yet our life is dominated by the space between love and hate. Most of life resides in actions that demand forgiveness, understanding, and compromise, that turn out to be neither absolutely good or evil. There is never room for hate, for hate leads to blindness, particularly about ourselves. We all possess redeeming features.
Envy is a form of hate. So too is Jealousy. Moralizing with self-righteousness promotes the illusion of human perfection and the absence of humility. Resist the emotional fury hating brings. And don’t take pleasure at someone else’s pain. Remember that if you want to make your mark in the world, you will take risks, commit errors, embrace compromises and acknowledge the inability to be consistent and always be right.
Once we accept the complexity in ourselves and encourage our better natures, will we discover that hate and violence never succeed and can turn rapidly into war. Wars yield ephemeral victories, not peace. We only have time for peace, and peace in our lives can be achieved only by thought, dialogue, reason and placing truth and empathy in the foreground, celebrating that which we all share and hold in common.
Your alma mater has shown itself to be in the forefront of thinking, learning, and understanding. These can replace the facile emotional rewards of inflicting harm and hating others. The college hopes that it has given you the means to expand your understanding of the world, the interconnections between the good, the true and beautiful, and to avoid fear of the unknown and prejudice against the unfamiliar. Speak in the service of the discovery and defense of truth and justice. That will inspire you to extend kindness to strangers, not only to those whom you resemble or feel close to, without expectation of a reward. In the spirit of this college, work towards a more just and peaceful future, in which the highest achievements of the human species, the work of our imaginations in everything from art to science flourish.
I urge the Class of 2026, soon to become alumni of Bard College, to cherish what makes this college distinctive and its idealism about the interconnections between learning and life. Celebrate the gifts each of you have shown in your years here, the joy of thinking, imagining and creating—the thrill of discovery—and the laughter and delight that art and science and the study of all things inspire in our pursuit of life. As the years go by (all too quickly), the college will need your help.
It has been an honor and privilege to share these years with you and I wish you the courage, resilience and patience necessary for great thoughts and deeds. Congratulations.
Post Date: 05-23-2026
The Class of 2026 will always hold a special place in my life. You are the last class over which I will have the honor of presiding.
I have, therefore, decided to base my charge to you on a passage from the Bible; after all, Bard owes its existence to an act of abiding religious faith on the part of John and Margaret Bard. Their faith in God was deepened by their grief at the death of their young son, Willie. Their response to tragedy did not take the form of rage at the world but the opposite—the determination to transform their loss into a gift designed to make the world better. They built two churches and founded this college.
Few passages from the Bible are more famous than the first eight verses of Ecclesiastes. You heard these verses in the Old Testament Lesson at last week’s Baccalaureate service. I am returning to them again at this commencement.
Verse 1: To everything there is a season. And a time to every purpose under the heaven.
This is a way of reassuring you that as you look back, despite ups and downs, this was the right time for you to be in college, to engage learning to help shape your ambitions, to deepen your knowledge and strengthen your skills. The best time to learn is when you’re young, and naturally passionate and energetic. You will still be young for a long time. Go on learning, expanding and pursuing your curiosity. Keep your capacity for surprise and discovery alive. Try things that may appear neither practical or conventional. Ignore conventional wisdom. Don’t imitate. In the pursuit of knowledge, be courageous. If you wait too long, you might lose the motivation, the will, or even the ability to achieve what you once dreamed of.
Verse 2: A time to be born, and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
We have no influence on when or where we are born and who our parents are. Nonetheless, this blunt fact seems never to have deterred us from complaining about our lives and the times we are living in. No doubt, things around us today are bad. There is far too much injustice, inequality and cruelty. And yes, the job market doesn’t look promising. But circumstances were never entirely cheery or perfect. No graduating class in history left college without trepidation. Resist nostalgia, and don’t compare the present with a mythic construct of a vanished better past. The present is your moment and embrace it.
We may be facing the nadir of democracy and freedom in America and a high-water mark of corruption and cruelty in our politics. Resolve to do something about it. Would any of us have preferred to have been 21 in the 1940s, during World War II or in 1950, during the Cold War and the era of the anti-communist hysteria and witch hunts? Was the world better before the advent of modern medicine that resulted in vaccines, and our continually expanding capacity to combat disease? If the necessity to fight injustice and suffering seems greater, so too is the opportunity to contribute.
As for the time to die, put that question out of your mind. Don’t speculate about your destiny. Suppress any tendency to hypochondria and don’t mask the process of aging. Just take good care of yourselves, and don’t be frightened about the inevitable risks of living.
As to the time for planting, this suggests not everything you undertake will work out; do not be derailed by disappointment and failure. Keep planting. You’re still at a point in life where mistakes are more easily reversed. You can afford to change, shift your careers, or alter your convictions. Even though you invested time and effort, don’t stick to something simply because you started it.
Verse 3: A time to kill, and a time to heal. A time to break down, a time to build up.
The Bible notwithstanding, I’m not certain there is ever a time to kill. Wars may be a necessity—certainly not the one we’re waging with Iran or Russia’s war on Ukraine—in the end, I’m not certain there can be a “just” war. Killing may be necessary but don’t delude yourself that it is ever truly right. Revenge is no justification. It is scandalous that the death penalty still exists in our country, amidst a politics where the purported right to life of the unborn takes precedence over the rights of the living.
The opposite applies to healing. Only for the very old, who have lost the will to live or the capacity to express that will, might healing be withheld legitimately. Every waking hour we possess is a time for healing ourselves and others, physically and emotionally, especially by restoring bonds with others that may have been broken. Practice forgiveness.
As to breaking down things, that is an experience none of us can escape. We are all fallible, imperfect and capable of being wrong. Abandoning something, and unraveling mistakes opens spaces for progress; for the changing of unjust laws, bringing down authoritarian governments, and stamping out greed and corruption. Respond to the vacuum of virtue around us by breaking down things that are not right and by sharing opportunities with those who otherwise would not have them. This has been a central goal of your alma mater, the motivation behind the early college high schools, the programs in prisons and micro-colleges, the scholarships we give, and our welcoming of refugees, and undocumented and displaced students.
Verse 4: A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance.
We all experience loss, and therefore grief. Don’t be afraid. Pain can be overcome by expressing it. Recovery can be a path to a life marked by wisdom, gratitude and generosity. No matter how grim life seems, never lose your sense of humor. Laughing can lead to hope. The joy of laughing is more restrained than dancing, just as mourning is more intense than weeping. The graver the disappointment and loss, the more powerful is the consolation offered by the music, dancing, poetry and comedy we create.
Verse 5: A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.
This verse suggests that you should shed grievances and resentments and extend empathy to those with whom you disagree or think you despise, just as there are times when you must defend yourself and gather all the strength you can to protect yourself from danger, slander, unexamined criticism, and from those who seek to harm you. Seize the moments in life when you should reach out to others in friendship and affection. Beware of hypocrites and insincerity. For friendship, much less love, to hold meaning, it can’t be casual or indiscriminate. Don’t cheapen expressions of affection. Make them represent more than mere words.
Verse 6: A time to get, and a time to lose. A time to keep, a time to cast away.
There will be moments of both success and failure, moments when events, goals or objects you once thought were valuable suddenly seem meaningless. Don’t be thrown by those twists and turns. Be prepared to let go as easily as you once held on. Loss can open up new paths and lead to a new and sometimes better life.
Verse 7: A time to rend, a time to sew. A time to keep silence and a time to speak.
Tearing a garment is a traditional way of demonstrating grief to others. Surgery, the cutting of the body, is required to save a life. But more important are the moments where we show our neighbors and the world around us that we seek to repair the broken and torn. Something that has been visibly fixed—sewn together where it was once ripped—bears witness to our ability to intervene and rebuild lives and our communities.
As to silence, it is justified if silence’s opposite—speaking—is motivated by ignorance, uncertainty, cowardice and ideological fanaticism. Silence, however, should never be motivated by fear, particularly fear of what others around you might think. Silence is a virtue, even a necessity to protect privacy, to avoid betraying others, and for keeping secrets that no one else deserves to know and whose protection might prevent injury to others. The terrifying invasion of our personal lives by algorithms, surveillance, and the manipulation of opinions through social media and an undisciplined press motivated by profit must be fought. Resist the spread of falsehoods, prejudices and rumors. A society where there is no privacy can never be free. Discretion and restraint are essential in a humane community. They nurture the best aspects of our flawed selves.
Yet to keep silent and not to speak out against unmistakable injustice, oppression, and the abuse of power is cowardice. It enables wrongdoing. Stand up for what you know to be right, always remembering that your facts and beliefs might be wrong, and your knowledge incomplete. Matters are not as self-evident as they seem. The rush to judgment can be cruel. Just because you hold an opinion and you feel righteous about it doesn’t make it right. Gossip, rumors, ignorance, advertising and falsehoods now shape public opinion. Ecclesiastes suggests that there is an obligation to speak out when there is evidence of injustice the responsibility for which can be assigned properly by evidence and the application of the rule of law.
Verse 8: A time to love and a time to hate. A time of war and a time of peace.
In American English, no word is more overused than love. Yet our life is dominated by the space between love and hate. Most of life resides in actions that demand forgiveness, understanding, and compromise, that turn out to be neither absolutely good or evil. There is never room for hate, for hate leads to blindness, particularly about ourselves. We all possess redeeming features.
Envy is a form of hate. So too is Jealousy. Moralizing with self-righteousness promotes the illusion of human perfection and the absence of humility. Resist the emotional fury hating brings. And don’t take pleasure at someone else’s pain. Remember that if you want to make your mark in the world, you will take risks, commit errors, embrace compromises and acknowledge the inability to be consistent and always be right.
Once we accept the complexity in ourselves and encourage our better natures, will we discover that hate and violence never succeed and can turn rapidly into war. Wars yield ephemeral victories, not peace. We only have time for peace, and peace in our lives can be achieved only by thought, dialogue, reason and placing truth and empathy in the foreground, celebrating that which we all share and hold in common.
Your alma mater has shown itself to be in the forefront of thinking, learning, and understanding. These can replace the facile emotional rewards of inflicting harm and hating others. The college hopes that it has given you the means to expand your understanding of the world, the interconnections between the good, the true and beautiful, and to avoid fear of the unknown and prejudice against the unfamiliar. Speak in the service of the discovery and defense of truth and justice. That will inspire you to extend kindness to strangers, not only to those whom you resemble or feel close to, without expectation of a reward. In the spirit of this college, work towards a more just and peaceful future, in which the highest achievements of the human species, the work of our imaginations in everything from art to science flourish.
I urge the Class of 2026, soon to become alumni of Bard College, to cherish what makes this college distinctive and its idealism about the interconnections between learning and life. Celebrate the gifts each of you have shown in your years here, the joy of thinking, imagining and creating—the thrill of discovery—and the laughter and delight that art and science and the study of all things inspire in our pursuit of life. As the years go by (all too quickly), the college will need your help.
It has been an honor and privilege to share these years with you and I wish you the courage, resilience and patience necessary for great thoughts and deeds. Congratulations.
Post Date: 05-23-2026