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?
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.
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.
The earliest commencements in this country were, as one commentator notes, “modest affairs, often held in churches or public meeting houses… ” Not so today.
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 the faculty marshal. This year, our faculty marshal 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… 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.
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 wish I could say that things are better at the conclusion of the school year. They are not.
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… 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.” What he could not know as I hugged him one last time 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.
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. 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 Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. An earlier version of this column was posted on SheerPost.
