Award Winning Journalist and Author Fareed Zakaria Delivered Undergraduate Commencement Address at Bard College’s One Hundred Sixty-Sixth Commencement on Saturday, May 23, 2026
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.— 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. The Undergraduate Degrees Commencement took place at 2:30 pm in the commencement tent on the Seth Goldfine Memorial Rugby Field.Text (unedited) of Undergraduate Commencement address by Fareed Zakaria
President Botstein, faculty, graduates, families, friends, and especially the remarkable Class of 2026.
Thank you for inviting me here today.
I know Bard College, from its reputation but also as a neighbor since I have spent a good bit of time in this area, especially in Rhinebeck, which is just down the Hudson. I’ve often biked here on Saturday mornings—this is a much nicer way to enter the campus. And I know that to hit the right notes here I need to be intellectually provocative, politically aware, artistically sensitive, historically informed, ecologically conscious, emotionally authentic, and—most importantly—brief. I will do my best.
Actually, I’m not THAT nervous. This is my third graduation this year. My daughter, Lila, graduated from college last week. My daughter, Sofia, will graduate from high school in two weeks. Compared to the swirl of emotions that those graduations produce, this one should be a breeze.
Bard has a certain reputation. Other colleges promise to prepare students for the world as it is. Bard has often seemed more interested in preparing students to question why the world is the way it is in the first place.
What a remarkable rise this place has had. Fifty years ago Bard was a small, struggling liberal arts college, overlooked by most. Today it is one of the most distinctive educational institutions in America—a place that has combined intellectual seriousness with civic engagement, artistic experimentation with public purpose. It is not just a college but a movement — one that stretches from music conservatories to prison education programs to partnerships across the world. My congratulations on this remarkable transformation.
At this point, I need to give you a trigger warning. I’ve noticed in this commencement season, some graduation speeches have provoked a few boos from students. So, I should probably warn you that I am about to utter the two most provocative letters in the English language today: A.I.
Feel free to get the booing out of the way.
Who knew that the most charged phrase in 2026 would not be about race, gender, or colonial exploitation but rather computer programs.
But here is the twist. I do not really want to talk to you about AI.
I want to talk about HI: Human Intelligence.
Because while artificial intelligence is indeed arriving with astonishing speed and power, we humans are going nowhere. And this moment—paradoxically—gives us an opportunity to better understand what is essential and unique about being human.
Every generation has confronted transformative technologies that seemed destined to overwhelm humanity: the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the internet. Each inspired wonder and panic in equal measure. And now comes the mother of them all: AI—able to write essays, compose music, diagnose diseases, do high level math, generate videos, pass professional exams, and converse with alarming fluency.
People naturally ask: “What will be left for human beings to do?” But perhaps that is the wrong question.
The better question is: “What does AI tell us about all the things that we humans already do, and do—distinctively and irreplaceably?” The answer, I think, is profoundly hopeful.
Consider first the sheer miracle of the human brain. A human brain weighs about three pounds. It runs on roughly twenty watts of power—about the energy needed to dimly light a refrigerator bulb.
Twenty watts.
Training some of the most advanced AI systems in the world requires data centers consuming hundreds of millions of watts of electricity—enough to power entire cities. These facilities stretch across hundreds of acres, filled with giant servers, massive cooling systems, and miles of cables.
Meanwhile, your three-pound brain is sitting quietly inside your skull, using less energy than a laptop charger. And yet it can do things that still baffle machines.
A toddler can recognize a face instantly in poor lighting, understand tone and emotion, navigate a crowded room, learn language socially, infer intentions, and grasp context—all effortlessly. Human beings can understand irony, ambiguity, affection, embarrassment, love, shame, humor, longing. We can read a room. We can sense tension in silence. We can detect insincerity in a smile.
Machines are astonishingly good at analysis. But humans do more, and we live in a complex world inhabited by other humans.
The computer scientist Yann LeCun (luh-kuhn) has pointed out that human intelligence is not merely computation. It is embodied experience, social understanding, and emotional cognition layered over millions of years of evolution. And so perhaps we should stop imagining human beings as inferior computers.
We are not computers.
We sometimes reduce intelligence to narrow forms of analytical reasoning—the kinds of things that machines can optimize. But as the author Michael Pollan reminds us, human consciousness is richer and more mysterious than that.
A machine can write a sad poem, but it cannot weep at a funeral.
It can generate a love letter, but it cannot fall in love.
It can describe fear, but it cannot lie awake at 3 a.m. worrying about whether it has wasted its life.
And this matters because the most important dimensions of being human are the experiences that we live. The more powerful AI becomes, the more we may rediscover how much we value the distinctly human.
Already, AI-generated novels, essays, paintings, songs, and videos are proliferating online by the millions. Technically, some are impressive. But most people do not care very much about them.
Why? Because art is just as much about the human being behind it—if not more—than about the final product. We relate to art because it comes from another human being.
When we read a novel by Charles Dickens or Toni Morrison or Gabriel García Márquez, we do more than consume words arranged elegantly on a page. We enter their consciousness. We care that another human being struggled, suffered, imagined, doubted, hoped, and somehow transformed all of that into language. These writings are moving because they are, in some sense, imperfect.
The greatest poet in the English language, John Keats, spoke of “negative capability” meaning the ability to live with uncertainty, doubt, and mystery—without the “irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
In Japan, the central concept of Wabi-Sabi celebrates imperfection, incompleteness, asymmetry, transience, roughness, and irregularity. Handmade ceramics are treasured precisely because they bear the mark of the human being—with asymmetries, uneven glazes, and distortions that reveal individuality and craftsmanship.
Broken pottery is sometimes repaired with veins of gold, a practice called Kintsugi. The crack shines instead of being hidden. The resulting surface is rough but what moves us is the visible evidence of frailty and repair.
Think about clothing. Machines can mass-produce garments with astonishing precision. Yet the most expensive clothes are often hand-stitched. Artisanal products are less smooth and polished than machine-made ones. But they are increasingly valued because they were made by the shaky, irregular human hand.
We humans don’t always seek perfection. Sometimes we seek authenticity. Sometimes we seek soul, a term we can barely define but often know when we feel it. Sometimes we just seek a connection with another human, whom we want to know deeply, intimately, warts and all.
For decades, society encouraged us to think of human beings primarily as analytic machines. But perhaps AI is forcing us to rethink that entire framework. Because if machines become vastly better than us at pure analysis, calculation, memorization, and pattern recognition, then what remains uniquely human becomes more visible—not less.
Empathy. Wisdom, Judgment. Courage. Friendship. Compassion. Humor. Love.
The philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” That line feels newly relevant today.
We are entering an era in which rational analysis may increasingly belong to machines, but human beings are gloriously irrational creatures. We fall in love with the wrong people. We cry over sappy songs. We sacrifice for others. We stay loyal to friends. We create religions, nations, poetry, jazz, democracy, and abstract expressionism.
No algorithm would ever have invented the blues, steeped in pain and sorrow. No hyper-efficient program would have designed Venice, an absurdly impractical city on stilts. No machine would have produced Bard College. And thank God for that.
In fact, the danger of the AI age is not that machines will become too human. It is that humans will start trying to become too machine-like.
We already see this happening. People increasingly speak about “optimizing” every dimension of life—sleep, productivity, networking, branding, performance. Students feel pressure to turn themselves into perfectly curated résumés. Workers fear being measured against algorithms that never tire and never sleep.
But human flourishing is not—and has never been—about optimization.
In one of my favorite novels, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day , the butler Stevens spends his entire life trying to become perfectly efficient, controlled, rational, professional—in short, machine-like. And the tragedy of the novel is that in becoming a perfectly functional being, he becomes less human. He loses love, intimacy, authenticity, and moral clarity.
The novel makes the reader wonder, “What is the value of a perfectly optimized human life if it lacks emotional and moral truth?”
In fact, a meaningful life is often messy, nonlinear, contradictory, emotional, and inefficient.
The people who shape our lives most profoundly are rarely the most optimized. They are the most human, like the teacher who inspired you because she cared deeply. The friend who sat with you for hours during your heartbreak. The parent who sacrificed for decades for her child. The activist who refused to surrender even in the pain of death. The scientist whose curiosity overcame failure.
Human greatness emerges from struggle.
That is why the great works of literature endure. They do not portray flawless beings.
Ernest Hemingway famously wrote in A Farewell to Arms, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
Leonard Cohen put a similar insight into lyrics when he sang Anthem :
“There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.”
Our imperfections are not flaws to eliminate.
They are the sources of empathy, creativity, wisdom, resilience, and beauty.
A machine may someday write a technically flawless symphony. But it will never know the anguish of Beethoven, who composed his 9th symphony—one of the greatest pieces of music ever written—when he was almost completely deaf. When we listen to the Ninth Symphony, what moves us is not simply the arrangement of notes. It is the sorrow, perseverance, and triumph of a composer determined to create transcendent sounds that he would never hear.
That is why HI—human intelligence—matters. Not because it is faster than AI. Not because it is more efficient. But because it is embedded in consciousness, emotion, morality, memory, relationships, and lived experience.
Machines may help us solve problems. But human intelligence still decides what is worth valuing, protecting, building, or sacrificing for.
Your generation will live through extraordinary technological change. AI will transform medicine, science, education, transportation, communication, and perhaps every profession represented here today. Some types of jobs might change, and entire industries will evolve. But throughout all of this disruption, humans will still hunger for what only humans can provide.
People will still want humans to teach their children, they will want humans to help them overcome illness and pain. Humans to console them in moments of grief. Humans to lead them in times of crisis. Humans to make art that is about our own, human condition.
And perhaps most importantly, people will still want to matter to one another.
At its core, human life is relational. We engage with other humans, for better and for worse. We seek recognition, dignity, affection, and love from other human beings. We cannot get any of that from computers or AI, no matter how powerful they are.
Sometimes we think we can. But, the data is now overwhelming and clear; too much engagement with computers and phones makes us lonely and sad. As the scholar Sherry Turkle notes in her book Alone Together , we have embraced technology and received the illusion of companionship without the demands or rewards of friendship.
My hope for you is that instead of competing with AI on its terms, AI prompts you to become more fully human.
So,
Cultivate judgment, not just information.
Wisdom, not just expertise.
Courage, not just confidence.
Cultivate friendships and community.
Learn how to build trust.
Learn how to forgive.
Learn how to laugh.
Because in the end, what we will treasure most may not be flawless intelligence but imperfect humanity.
So of course, let us use AI. Let us use it to cure diseases, expand knowledge, improve productivity, and solve problems once thought unsolvable. But let us also allow AI to illuminate the astonishing distinctiveness of the human mind.
A three-pound organ capable of mathematics and music, logic and love, memory and imagination, ambition and compassion.
And so, graduates of Bard, as you leave this extraordinary institution and enter a world transformed by artificial intelligence, I hope you will also become champions of HI:
Human intelligence, human imagination, human inspiration, and human interconnection.
Celebrate the gloriously imperfect human mind, because our imperfections are not bugs in some system’s code.
They are the cracks that let the light come in.
To the Class of 2026, congratulations and Godspeed.
About the Undergraduate Commencement Speaker
Fareed Zakaria hosts CNN’s flagship international affairs program, Fareed Zakaria GPS, and produces documentaries for the network. He has interviewed Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, among others.
Zakaria is a columnist for The Washington Post and has written five New York Times bestsellers: The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (2003), The Post-American World (2008), In Defense of a Liberal Education (2015), Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World (2020), and Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present (2024).
Zakaria was named a Top 10 Global Thinker of the Last 10 Years by Foreign Policy magazine in 2019. He has received a Peabody Award and three Emmys for his television work, and a National Magazine Award for his writing. In 2010, India awarded him the Padma Bhushan, one of the country’s highest civilian honors, and, in 2022, Ukraine awarded him the Order of Merit. He holds a BA from Yale and a PhD from Harvard.
This event was last updated on 05-23-2026
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