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College graduation speeches say a lot about the state of higher education — sometimes without intending to. For every country singer who can "wow" the audience with a message rooted in gratitude, family, and purpose, there are two, perhaps three, speakers who are disinvited for speaking their minds or forced to endure student walkouts.
Such is life on campus today: A few schools overperform and offer students a meaningful experience but far too many award young Americans with little more than expensive disappointment.
Singer-songwriter Eric Church earned rave reviews this year for his speech at the University of North Carolina with his focus on family and the importance of deep relationships. His message was refreshing. Conservatives have spent decades warning that America’s universities were abandoning their responsibility to guide students toward maturity, virtue, meaning, and purpose.
I LEAD A UNIVERSITY. HIGHER EDUCATION IS FAILING STUDENTS — CONGRESS IS RIGHT TO ACT
For those who think that critique is overstated, consider the chaos surrounding graduation ceremonies in 2026.
At New York University, students unironically booed and some walked out on Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist whose work has exposed, among other things, the cancel culture entrenched in higher education. South Carolina State officials disinvited their own lieutenant governor, Pamela Everett, citing her prior comments criticizing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The mob wins again.
Similar withdrawals, either disinvitations or decisions to step aside after student outrage campaigns, occurred this year at Drexel's College of Computing and Infomatics, Rutgers and Georgetown's law school, to name a few.
Shouldn’t college campuses be places where robust debate flourishes? As a distinguished cadre of researchers, professors, and college presidents explain in Higher Education in America: It’s Worse than You Think, ideological disagreement is too often met with cancelation, intimidation, and even violence.
If DEI bureaucracies were intended to cultivate tolerance and protect a diversity of backgrounds and ideas, as these offices generally claim, they have failed spectacularly. Meanwhile, the overwhelming ideological conformity among college faculty has starved students of rigorous debate and the honest pursuit of truth.
As noted in the volume’s introduction, "The great project of liberal education, designed to inculcate knowledge of the truth, appreciation of the beautiful, and the civic virtue necessary to advance both, has been replaced by bureaucracies, activism, anti-Western ideology, and empty credentialism."
Colleges and universities should inspire students to seek truth. Delivering that culture requires administrators with the courage to defend academic seriousness and who will lead with moral clarity. Policies and mission statements mean nothing unless they reinforce a community strong enough to resist mob intimidation.
Lawmakers can pass reforms and police can remove agitators, but campus culture will not recover unless university officials themselves are committed to defending truth and rejecting every form of racism. Without that conviction at the top, the fight to restore sanity on campus will remain just that—a fight.
We have each served in different capacities in higher education, Kevin as professor and college president and Chris as a board member. And we have had the privilege of delivering commencement speeches over the years and find it disturbing that so many graduates now receive diplomas while remaining fearful of ideas that challenge their own assumptions.
A healthy university culture requires more than credentialing. It requires the formation of citizens capable of reasoned argument, moral judgment, and self-government.
Trustees, presidents, and administrators must lead a genuine moral reset on their campuses. They should use every tool available to cultivate institutions where students can learn, debate, and grow in virtue.
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That starts with restoring high expectations for academic performance (notice Harvard’s recent decision to cap the number of A’s that will be awarded to students next year); the utter and complete rejection of racial discrimination on campus; and the ongoing simplification and eventual sunset of the federal student loan system. The second Donald Trump administration has already taken excellent steps in this regard through better engagement between the U.S. Departments of Education and Treasury.
If America is to step fully into its Golden Age, we cannot continue graduating generations of students who have been taught to fear truth rather than pursue it. The next generation deserves institutions worthy of their talent, patriotism, and potential. Rebuilding those institutions must begin now.
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Kevin Roberts, Ph.D., is the president of the Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America.
