Year
Class of 2016
Browse commencement speeches from 2016, including addresses by Ken Burns, Barack Obama, and Samantha Power. Each record links to the available source material, transcript, video, and archive context.
5 addresses 10 themes 5 highlights
Highlights from 2016
Records with stronger source signals, summaries, transcripts, videos, or visual archive material.
Ken Burns Stanford University Filmmaker and historian Ken Burns reflects on the value of studying history as a way to understand the present and confront human mortality, sharing a personal memory of community generosity during his mother's illness. He invokes Abraham Lincoln's words to argue that the graduating class is charged with preserving the American union, and delivers a pointed warning against an unqualified presidential candidate he characterizes as exhibiting proto-fascist tendencies. He closes with extended life advice, urging graduates toward curiosity, civic engagement, service, the arts, and voting. InfographicSummaryTranscriptVideoOfficial source 
Barack Obama Howard University In his 2016 Howard University commencement address, President Obama argues that America, the world, and race relations have measurably improved over his lifetime while acknowledging persistent gaps in economic opportunity, education, pay, and criminal justice. He urges the graduating class to recognize this progress not as cause for complacency but as motivation for continued action. He offers advice for young leaders, beginning with being confident in their heritage and blackness and embracing the many ways of being black.
Photo: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza / Public domain / source InfographicSummaryTranscriptVideo 
Samantha Power Yale University Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the UN and Yale '92 alumna, opens with self-deprecating humor before reflecting on her own mediocre early years at Yale and the moments—a professor's harsh critique and watching the Tiananmen Square crackdown—that reset her direction. Her central message is that to make meaningful change, graduates must 'get close': engage individuals directly, break out of informational echo chambers, bring others along, and persist with both patience and impatience. She closes by addressing enduring inequalities in race and gender, citing examples from Yale and the UN, and urging graduates to reject claims that the great rights struggles are finished. InfographicSummaryTranscriptOfficial source 
Matt Damon Massachusetts Institute of Technology Matt Damon delivered MIT's 2016 Commencement address, opening with self-deprecating humor about his "fake graduation" and his connection to MIT through "Good Will Hunting." He urged graduates to "turn towards the problems that you see" and engage with them, drawing on his own work founding Water.org to address clean water and sanitation needs. He encouraged continued learning, listening even to those they disagree with, and using their ideas and persistence to improve the world. InfographicSummaryOfficial source 
Sheryl Sandberg University of California, Berkeley
Photo: World Economic Forum / CC BY-SA 2.0 / source InfographicVideoOfficial source .jpg){kind=link}
Represented themes
Common ideas classified across this year's speeches.
All 2016 addresses
Complete archive records for this year, sorted by institution.