Austin Sarat ScheerPost
My college, Amherst College, held its Commencement on Saturday, May 23. Like similar events across the country, our ceremony marks a new beginning for the graduates. But it is an ending for the teachers who have worked with them, seen them struggle and grow, and come to care deeply about them.
Being left behind is just part of the job. And what choice do we have? Our students graduate and get on with their lives.
There is, however, no handbook about how to let them go with grace. Letting go of students who have come to mean a lot to you is tough. No doubt about it.
We hope that they’ve seen the value of academic freedom even if they still can’t define it. We hope that they embrace freedom of speech and use it well.
To be frank, I don’t like college graduations much, and as a veteran teacher, I’ve seen more than my share. Still, there is something that makes them, to borrow from Shakespeare, a “sweet sorrow.”
It is something that teachers know, but that my graduating seniors probably don’t and can’t know. Maybe commencement ceremonies themselves could do a better job of clueing them in.
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A Ritual of Regulation
The earliest commencements in this country were, as one commentator notes, “modest affairs, often held in churches or public meeting houses…. The emphasis was on scholarly achievement and the continuation of the Puritan ethos that valued education and moral discipline.”
Not so today.
At schools with ample financial resources, no expense is spared to decorate the campus, to show it at its Sunday best. Some schools even pay lavish sums for celebrity commencement speakers, hoping to get some favorable publicity.
From a faculty perspective, attending commencement means entering into a highly regulated space in which we are just another object of regulation. The vaunted freedom and tolerance for idiosyncrasy of faculty life give way to a set of imperatives.
Show up on time. Line up.
We are given our marching orders by someone designated as the Faculty Marshall. This year, our Faculty Marshall gently chastised her colleagues for failing, in past events, to meet her expectation of military precision in the procession.
Truth be told, faculty at commencements, even at small schools like mine, are mostly decorative. We get dolled up in our academic regalia, as faculty have done at universities throughout the world for hundreds of years in a show of solidarity and support.
We can trace this practice back to the 11th and 12th centuries in Europe. As one discussion of that history explains, “Every commencement ceremony begins and ends with a procession. This ritual was derived from the clerical processions of the Roman Catholic Church, and many of its symbolic elements are still incorporated into graduations today.”
In another example of the impulse to regulate and regularize Commencement, in 1893 the Trustees of Princeton University charged a committee “to prepare and submit to the Board of Trustees for approval, their recommendations as to the adoption of suitable gowns and hoods to be used at Commencements and upon other public occasions, to indicate the University status and the degrees held by the wearers of the same….”
Do the faculty always follow the rules?
Unlike the graduating students, few faculty members mess with the prescribed academic regalia—mortar board with tassel, flowing robe, and hood signifying our degree and discipline. We have a dress code after all.
This year, to mark the conclusion of my 51st year of teaching, I went rogue. Instead of appropriate headgear, I wore a white cap emblazoned with the words, “Stand Up for Democracy.”
It was my own commencement address, boiled down—my own exercise of expressive freedom.
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A Year Few Will Forget
Commencements are supposed to be “stately” and “dignified,” and the faculty is mostly meant to be silent. This is not our moment.
Others speak for us or about us, uttering well‑meaning platitudes about how extraordinary we are, even those of us who have taken our lumps from the ones now praising our dedication and virtue. We are silent witnesses to a moment that bears enormous significance for students and families.
I write these words to speak on my own behalf. It’s been a year that few of us will soon forget.
Last August, in the run‑up to the start of the year, I wrote of “feeling a bit at sea, facing a tsunami of challenges in the classroom….” I singled out the “political climate in the United States,” the fact that “most of my students have been raised in an era saturated with alternative facts, video and audio deepfakes, and so‑called fake news.” I sensed “the challenge posed by artificial intelligence” as well as the climate of fear that stifles open dialogue on college campuses.
I wish I could say that things are better at the conclusion of the school year. They are not.
Academic freedom is still under great pressure.
The challenges I noted in August were still at the forefront of my worries as I marched in Amherst’s Commencement procession. I suspect many of my colleagues had similar concerns.
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Sweetness, Not Just Sorrow
But, in the end, there was sweetness, not just sorrow, at Commencement 2026.
I met the families of my students. I got to have last conversations with many students, some of whom seem to think of me as an elderly uncle who can give them “life advice.”
I treasure those moments.
And then there was a note from a very special graduating student who thanked me for “teaching (him) about empathy and curiosity,” and reminding him that the “good can always be ‘gooder’” and “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” He told me that I had made him a “deeper thinker, a more understanding friend… and he had learned… lessons from me about ‘faith’ and ‘commitment.’”
What he could not know as I hugged him one last time—but what other faculty know—is that teaching him and others like him has made me more empathetic, more understanding, more committed, and more attached to the faith that should animate every classroom: a faith that freedom can be well used.
So, in the end, my greatest lament at Commencement was not about the regulation and decorum. I focused instead on a worry that the graduates did not really know the positive impact they had on their teachers and that I would not have another chance to remind them of freedom’s privileges and responsibilities.
That is certainly the case for me, and I already miss students who have helped make me the kind of teacher and person I want to be.
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others
For more about our original academic freedom collection—including additional work from Professor Sarat—visit here.
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