Congratulations. After four years of hard work, you—or your son or daughter, or grandson or granddaughter, or neighbor or niece, or other sort of ramen eater—are graduating from college. It wasn’t easy. It was probably also very expensive. You may have thought, I’m not sure I will make it. I thought that too. And I remembered that feeling when I dropped in, last night, for late-night custard at Famous Local Diner With Not-So-Secret Custard. But I did make it, and so did you. And here we are together, having made it. The sun is shining, and the rest of your lives are ahead of you.That’s the structure and message of a commencement speech. An accomplished and maybe-famous person is probably giving a similar address right now to a sea of graduation caps spread across a green lawn and under blue skies. All of those hardworking graduates will probably forget the content of the address by tomorrow, if not earlier–and that’s fine.A good commencement speech is not aimed at posterity, proffered to everyone for all time. Instead, it is a temporary moment in which a speaker brings a community together in the moment they share together, and which evaporates immediately thereafter.Dispensing memorable advice is “good in concept,” David Murray, who runs the Professional Speechwriters Association, told me. But it’s a high-wire act that works on vanishingly rare occasions. Think Steve Jobs at Stanford (“Stay hungry, stay foolish”), David Foster Wallace at Kenyon (“This Is Water”), Toni Morrison at Wellesley (“True adulthood””), or John F. Kennedy at American University (“Not merely peace in our time but peace for all time”). But if the speaker isn’t Morrison (who among us has such a way with words?), these speeches are best when they are disposable.[Drew Gilpin Faust: The strange ritual of commencement speeches]An old quip holds that being a commencement speaker is like being the corpse at a wake: The event needs one to take place, but the person who plays the role doesn’t have to do much. But even doing very little can still go terribly wrong. Some speakers are chosen for bad reasons, such as their relationship to a donor. Others have no relationship to the school or town and come off as clueless. Other speakers do not prepare and just wing it. Still others go dark but ask for help at the last minute, when a speech can be only salvaged instead of prepared. Some commencement speakers even show up visibly intoxicated.But even for the ones who do everything right, the graduation speech poses a tricky challenge. A commencement speech is less about the speaker than the audience and the reason they are gathered for the speech. Graduation speakers ought to be renowned, of course—otherwise, why would they get to make the address? But they must make themselves understood as a part of the group that is celebrating graduation.And that act requires disappearing into the background. Graduation is a ritual that works more or less the same in all cases. And as Murray put it, “the ritual is the thing.” The University of Florida speechwriter Aaron Hoover even defined a formula for it: The speaker’s job is to carry out the celebratory ritual in a way that foregrounds the graduating class, the families, and the college itself. Cosmic wisdom is less relevant than the comforting sentiment that everything is going to be okay.Seen from that perspective, the supposedly greatest speeches, like those delivered by Jobs and Wallace, actually violate the principles of commencement speeches by having a life after graduation. That seems weird. But “commencement speeches are weird,” Jim Reische, special adviser to the president for executive communications at Williams College, told me.Hearing Reische explain the matter, I tried to recall my own graduation speaker. It was Bill Cosby, a name that seemed impressive back then, in the 1990s, but which has since been sullied. But neither Cosby’s former glory nor his present impurity caused me to recall anything the former pudding-pop spokesperson had actually said at my graduation. Instead, I simply recalled the fact of it—me being there, the event happening, and him being physically present for it, along with me. “Just give them a nice kind of homily, and then get them to the cocktail party and on their way,” Reische said.This century has seen an arms race in commencement-address celebrity. In the past, a graduation speaker was most often a renowned scholar performing the act as an honor. In the early 2000s colleges and universities started using commencement speakers to compete for prestige, Reische told me. “Some of them were paying a lot of money,” he said, and like everything else, the honor became confused with opportunism (the University of Houston paid Matthew McConaughey $166,000 for a 2015 graduation speech; Katie Couric received $110,00 from the University of Oklahoma in 2006, although the news anchor reportedly donated the fee to charity). Carrying out the ritual in an effective manner took a back seat, at times, to landing a figurehead like Michelle Obama or Taylor Swift.The process is made challenging by organizational politics. These days, most colleges and universities perform a complex process to identify and invite a commencement speaker, usually involving negotiations among a committee of students and faculty, and an administration seeking to acknowledge an alumnus, woo a donor, or outshine a competitor. Many commencement speakers are given honorary degrees, but the prestige associated with such matters has declined over the years; six-figure piles of cash surely seem more useful than an ersatz doctorate given to an accomplished alumnus or once-local homegirl.Controversy surrounding campus speech of all kinds has complicated matters further. This week, a graduation speaker at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, got booed after praising artificial intelligence in her remarks. Rutgers University canceled a graduation speech by Rami Elghandour scheduled for Friday, after students reportedly complained about the tech entrepreneur’s pro-Palestine social-media posts. And New York University students took issue with Jonathan Haidt’s scheduled address, on the grounds that selecting the NYU social psychologist (and Atlantic contributor) and author of best-selling books such as The Coddling of the American Mind disregards “the very real-world crises and systemic hurdles that have defined our graduates’ experiences.” These examples might seem to highlight intolerance and suppressed speech on campus. But they also demonstrate that graduation remarks do not exist outside of that debate.[Jonathan Haidt: Pay attention]No matter how much one might favor free-speech absolutism on campus, the graduation ceremony is not really the place for such controversy. It is easy, if not always simple, to express one’s strongly held convictions on behalf of the self who holds them. It is harder to bring a whole community of differently minded people together around a shared accomplishment. “This is a really important day for a lot of people in that audience, and the goal is to make the day about them,” Reische told me.The speechwriters I spoke with for this story, including Reische and Beth Bowden, a speechwriter at Washington University in St. Louis, where I am on faculty, told me that wrangling commencement speakers can be wearying. Few take up the offer for writing consultation—even if just to ensure that they aren’t saying something contrary to what another speaker, or the university chancellor, might have just said on stage. Some don’t even show up to sound check.Conan O’Brien’s 2011 Dartmouth College speech might be the model commencement address. O’Brien allowed the place and the context to take center stage, rather than his own humor or fame. He said nothing worthy of anthologizing. He cited multiple examples of local Dartmouth and Hanover, New Hampshire, culture—a technique the former Al Gore speechwriter Eric Schnure calls the “howdahell,” a hook that connects the speaker to a specific audience in a specific place, such that they ask themselves, “How the hell did he know that?” O’Brien ranked Dartmouth over his own alma mater of Harvard, where he had also given a commencement speech a decade earlier. And once he established that trust, he delivered an earnest but essentially generic piece of life advice: “Whatever you think your dream is now, it will probably change.”Such an effort requires humility, a virtue that feels depleted these days. Instead, righteousness rules. Last month, the former Barack Obama speechwriter Zev Karlin-Neumann urged the renowned individuals preparing to stand before the class of 2026 to engage with politics directly in their addresses. Given a “profound crisis in our democracy,” he argued, commencement speakers “owe” the graduates “more than recycled anecdotes.” But in light of that crisis, perhaps the most important work a commencement speaker can do is to rise above it, momentarily—to bring a community of people together through what they share in this fleeting moment, rather than to dwell on how they are being driven apart.