About

Methodology + sources

Commencement Archive is an open, searchable catalogue of U.S. commencement and Class Day addresses from 2000 onward. It currently indexes 371 addresses across 162 institutions.

How records are sourced

Each address is catalogued from the most authoritative source available, in priority order: the institution's official transcript or video, the speaker's own website or a government archive, a reputable transcript archive, and finally news coverage. Every record stores its provenance, the link type, the source's authority, and the date it was last verified.

Copyright

Commencement Archive does not republish copyrighted transcripts. Where a full transcript exists, we link to the original publisher. Each speech page adds only original material — metadata, provenance, and (in a later phase) summaries and highlights. Video is shown via the official platform's embed player.

Verification

Links are re-checked periodically. Of the current catalogue, 130 addresses have a verified-live transcript link and 199 have video. 166 transcript links from earlier imports were found broken and are queued for re-sourcing; these are marked on their pages rather than presented as live.

Newsletter

Commencement Archive Weekly is processed by Buttondown. It is sent weekly, includes an unsubscribe link, and may include simple signup source metadata such as the page where the form was submitted.

Open data

The catalogue metadata, source links, theme labels, and original summaries are available as a static JSON dataset at /data/speeches.json. Metadata and original catalogue annotations are available under CC BY 4.0; transcript and video rights remain with their original publishers.

Last generated 2026-07-12