My favorite philosophy teacher, towards the end of the year, once devoted nearly an entire period imploring the "valedictoriables" in our class to keep their speech short, witty, and not fucking boring. I suppose the person who eventually ended up as valedictorian wasn't a student of this great teacher, because what we got on graduation day (surprise, surprise) was a long and boring piece of scheiße that took forever to finish.
But moving on, not being boring is important. This can be achieved by a good combination of delivery and message. Bad delivery (e.g., speaking so goddamned slowly) can obscure a good message, as everyone knows. But a far more serious problem is a message that fails to reach its audience. I usually feel that speeches by administrators, faculty, and annoying "student leaders" during official university-wide events, with their favorite buzzwords "excellence," "achievement," and "leadership," only ever speak to the same handful of people: scholars, straight-A students, overachievers, award-winners, etc.
Commencement ceremony is a great example---a time of high emotions, lostness, and "where the fuck is my life going now?" moments. As an average student, there is no comfort in being inspired to greatness (supposedly) by overachieving individuals who have already done so much. Because for every student graduating with honors, there are several dozen who nearly flunked philosophy (and nearly didn't graduate), never made the dean's list, never been an officer of an org, and struggled with low grades all their lives.
In liberation theology, we were taught to find a way of speaking justly about the experience of poverty. I think it's high time we also found a way to speak of non-excellence, underachievement, and consistent failure.... and for chrissakes, stop taking ourselves too seriously.
To conclude this post, I share this very good speech I found on the ever-reliable interwebs:
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