Remarks delivered for an informal commencement celebration
May 8, 2020
Len Niehoff
Professor from Practice
University of Michigan Law School
When Kate invited me to offer a few words at this informal commencement celebration, she said that I could talk for as long as I wanted but only needed to do so for about five minutes. At that point, I realized the true brilliance of the University of Michigan Law School class of 2020. You figured out how to get what all graduates have always wanted but have never been able to achieve: a five minute commencement speech. And, to make matters better, you can openly drink while it’s going on.
I may not hit the five minute goal, but I will try to keep my remarks brief because, in the grand tradition of commencement speeches, I have nothing to say that you do not already know. Still, maybe a few of you have lost track of the fact that you know it. And maybe a few others will find some small utility in a friendly reminder.
Conventional wisdom holds that a traditional legal education via the Socratic method helps toughen students up in preparation for a profession where a thick skin comes in handy. I think this generally gets things right, based on the scar tissue I’ve acquired during my thirty-plus years as a practicing litigator. Still, I would be the first to admit that, on the toughening-up front, your third year of law school seriously overachieved.
Acknowledging the immense challenges that the past few months have posed for you is my cue to give a speech you’ve heard a lot recently. I am now supposed to talk about all the good things you have gotten out of the experience of living through this existential version of a force majeure clause.
You know the themes by now: this experience has given you a unique opportunity to build character; it has given you bragging rights in perpetuity over everyone who didn’t finish law school under these circumstances; it has given you a deep inventory of stories to tell your children, your grandchildren, and all of the other captive audiences that life will deliver to you along the way.
You’ve been inundated with those messages for good reason—they’re true. And the workmanlike wisdom of these observations probably explains why they’ve become the fastest-growing clichés in the lives of graduating law students. But I worry that these experiential consolation prizes we have been bestowing upon you miss something very important. I don’t think they show sufficient respect for who you already were when you got here.
Let’s consider the data. A little research tells me that you are, on average, 27 years old. Most of you were therefore born in or around 1993. So let’s take 1999 as the year when many of you would have really started to become meaningfully conscious of the world around you and the events happening there.
Now, let’s think about how that world unfolded. It started with the shootings at Columbine in 1999. Then came the presidential election crisis of 2000. Then the attacks of 9/11 in 2001. Then the increasing awareness of global warming in the mid-2000s. Then the financial crisis of 2007-2008. And so on and so on and so on.
But you don’t need me to lay out this unsettled and unsettling history for you. You lived it. You had to navigate that relentless shitstorm—and as children and young adults, no less.
And that’s my point. The traditional idea of “commencement” entails a quaint and nostalgic idea of innocence. It says: So far, you have moved through life as sheltered and isolated scholars, but now the real stuff, and the hard stuff, and the real hard stuff commences. As if.
The poet John Berryman once wrote to the novelist James Dickey, “the trouble with this country is that [someone] can live [their] entire life without knowing whether [they are] a coward.” You have not had that luxury. The universe has been testing your courage, pretty much non-stop, since your earliest pangs of consciousness.
Before you walked into your first law school class, you had already acquired this singular credential: you had grown brave. You may not have known it. Courage had become such an intrinsic and essential ingredient of life that you may have taken yours for granted, as if it were an involuntary reflex like breathing. But, make no mistake about it, you had developed the virtue of courage—and you had earned it.
That courage of yours saw you through law school and now opens up endless possibilities. I like how the poet Maya Angelou puts it: “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” In short, you have had unimaginable challenges; they have endowed you with unimaginable promise.
I will confess that, at a personal level, I can’t help wishing that the universe had spared you all of that crap. Given my preferences, you’d have grown up—like I did—in a time where the scariest thing in your elementary school was your homeroom teacher, Mrs. Dill, who we could not resist calling Mrs. Pickle. But, then, nobody put me in charge of the great unfolding arc of history, and I’m sure that’s for the best, so here we are.
I will conclude by saying this. I love all of my students, every last one of them, even the ones who don’t love me back. I am inclined—perhaps as someone who earlier in life darkened the doors of two seminaries—to think of law students as members of my flock who are in my care, to worry over them, to fear for them, and to lose sleep over them. And being in my flock is like staying at the Hotel California—you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
But, class of 2020, here’s the thing—and here’s the paradox. You have dealt with, and will for the foreseeable future continue to deal with, one of the most complex and daunting tasks ever set before a University of Michigan Law School class. And, more than any class I can remember, I think of you as being in my flock, maybe because we’ve shared the experience of having the same wolf circling us for several months now.
And yet … and yet … I just can’t bring myself to worry about you. I know what you have seen. I know what you have lived through. I know who you are. I know what you can do.
I can’t bring myself to fear for you. Indeed, the only fear I feel is for anyone foolish enough get in your way.
I can’t bring myself to lose sleep over you. I have too much confidence in the irresistible force of your dreams.
So, congratulations, class of 2020. Today is a seriously big day. Honor it. Celebrate it. Run the mental tape so you remember it. Add it to your already overflowing storehouse of signal and courageous moments.
Then, tomorrow, start putting that formidable energy of yours to work. Grab the world by the lapels. Shake it up. And change it. The world needs your dearly bought courage. The world needs you.
Go get ‘em.
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