A Eulogy For The Valedictory Address
We may be witnesses to the end times of the tradition of rewarding academic success with a one-time speech
Before anyone thinks this is a hand-wringing lament over a tradition that we can’t hold onto because we don’t deserve nice things, it’s not. Also, do we know each other?
The concept of the valediction comes from the Latin valedicere which (as I’m told) means “to say farewell.” Farewell speeches date back to the beginning of human speech itself. Indeed, recent research shows that animals - horses, baboons, elephants and giraffes, among the examples I’ve read about - have their own ways of bidding farewell prior to dying. All of which is to say, this is not a farewell to the farewell speech. Just to a peculiar form of farewell speech.
As a reward for academic performance, however, the tradition of valediction goes (at least) back to the College of William and Mary in 1772 when the then-Governor of Virginia, Lord Botecourt, created a prize for the student who was subjectively rated the best student and orator of Latin in a poll of professors and scholars - preserving a longer-standing, on-going, and far more odious tradition of masking popularity contests as merit-based awards.
The urge to declare an official winner of a matter that’s not - nor should be - the subject of a competition is the hallmark of a mastery culture mindset.
Over time, the valedictory honor was conferred upon the top overall academic performer at institutes of higher learning - which has only increased the size of the chasm between the behavior being rewarded and the prize. Just as the wearing of caps and gowns and other regalia at high school graduations expresses an inexplicable and largely unexamined admiration for the rituals and traditions of the oldest, stuffiest and most insufferable academies, the concept and meaning of valedictorian is its own misguided attempt at a compulsory cosplay of ceremonies that have been cribbed from Oxford and Cambridge.
One of the more curious aspects of the way these traditions are honored is how they’ve been turned on their head. Those black gowns - originally donned as a basic school uniform to create a level playing field that disguised the couture of students from different social classes - are now decked out with stripes and color codes to communicate the attainment of elite status and broadcast the different fields of study in the manner of a military uniform.
The definition of “valedictorian” has evolved to gain an absurd level of significance despite the fact that there’s no universal definition for the honorific that’s agreed upon across academia. Perhaps it’s because it can be a measure of almost anything, laying claim to valedictorian is pursued with cutthroat competitive fervor among those who vaguely understand it to be a distinction reserved for the one very best student of all students, in some measurable-yet-not-always-transparent way.
It’s a competition that’s entirely unnecessary and fully contrived - especially once it is stripped of the non-sequiturial nature of the chief honor that’s usually attached to it: the “right” to deliver the valediction at the commencement exercise.
Without that prize, what’s the point of naming a valedictorian?
If the prize awarded for the valedictorian was, as it probably should be, an Applebee’s gift card and a congratulatory letter that’s suitable for framing, signed with the autopen of the Principal, Dean or Provost, would there be any desire at all among faculty and administrators to single out the one student among many who is at the tippy-tippy top of the graduating class? (For those institutions that honor Salutatorians, I submit that it should be an immutable academic tradition for their Applebee’s gift card to have at least 20% less value than the amount deposited onto the Valedictorian’s gift card.)
I’m pondering all of this because I just read that Southern Cal has denied its valedictorian the time she’s earned at the lectern for her graduation in May, arriving at the right result (apparently for this year only) for the wrong reason. If you're afraid of ideas being expressed by someone you don’t trust, then why carry on the tradition of giving the graduation lectern to the valedictorian? (Or at least, why not be intellectually honest and define the qualifications of your valedictorians in terms that ensure they can be trusted with their turn at your lectern.)
To be clear, my point is not that students should (or shouldn’t) have a right to freely express themselves in their valedictory addresses. I’m as much in favor of a policy that says “we’re going to give a randomly-selected student 10 minutes of the graduation program to say whatever the hell they want to say” as I am in favor of a policy that prescribes that “the creator of the top vote-getting ashtray at the Spring ceramics fair will read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Good-Bye’ at graduation” as I am in favor of not doing anything at all that smacks of valediction.
I’m only against the idea that it’s necessary to identify the “top student” by any methodology (as I can’t think of a methodology that’s not offensive to fundamental precepts of equity in some way or another) on account of the fact that we’re obligated by tradition, and nothing more than tradition, to give such a student the prize of addressing the graduating class.
It’s a bit like the Oscars. If you didn’t first concoct the trophy to hand out, would it ever be necessary to make an official determination that Emma Stone’s acting in Poor Things was superior to Lily Gladstone’s acting in Killers of the Flower Moon - especially when you consider how, in giving their performances, they were not competing to “beat” the other one (or any of the other nominees)?
This is pure speculation, having not acted since treading the boards as Charles F. Maude in the 1980 production of Bye, Bye Birdie at St. Elizabeth’s Academy in Convent Station, New Jersey, but I suspect their acting would have suffered had they been consciously competing to beat one another at acting in their different films.
Nobody would seek a formally declared decision on their acting if the trophy for it did not first exist. Sure, the point might be debated with vigor in pubs and taverns, but there would be no call for an official resolution of this question absent a trophy.
Wouldn’t it be satisfactory to acknowledge that the past year’s stellar performances include those given by…and then list as many or as few deserving honorees as may apply? How is it not preposterous to claim that Emma Stone “won” at her art - or how is it not even more preposterous to claim the corollary, that Lily Gladstone lost at her art.
The urge to declare an official winner of a matter that’s not - nor should be - the subject of a competition is the hallmark of a mastery culture mindset.
Were the most capable and high-achieving students (taking different classes with different teachers while pursuing different career objectives and avocations) consciously trying to beat one another to claim honors as the topmost regent in a manufactured contest of schoolmanship? Or were they trying to get a solid education and told that they should be distracted from that to pursue a side hustle called “valedictorian?” I suppose the invention of the Salutatorian speaks to this - as some wise person in the faculty lounge realized that the “second-best” student should not be counted as the “loser” in this game that’s been manufactured to fill a commencement speaking slot.
Skating along as the proverbial “mediocre white man” was the traditional hallmark of academic virtue for well-heeled, blue-blooded WASPs who had no more rungs to climb on the social ladder.
I can’t ignore all the other problems with singling out a valedictorian that go beyond there being no logical connection between a top-rated academic performance and farewell speech-making. Let me not gloss over the stress and violence that flow from creating a contest nobody needed, or the racial and ethnic bias that permeates these decisions (even when they’re couched in purportedly objective decision criteria), and the stories of favoritism, and - of course - the cringey awkwardness that institutions like Southern Cal willfully bring on themselves by having to balance concerns related to the ideal of promoting free speech and the free flow of ideas against the pragmatic needs for control and censorship that administrators are sensitized to, all during the most high profile event on the institution’s academic calendar.
All of these problems are easily avoided if, as a preliminary matter, there was no caving in to the existential, supremacist urge to annually name the one and only class valedictorian. As baffled as I am that school officials from all over freely accept the quest to name a valedictorian, the fact that this purely optional exercise persists - and has spread to all levels of academia - despite all of its perils and its harm - is like trying to guess what became of the nose of the Sphinx.
The proliferation of the concept of valediction, however, make me wonder, though, if embracing the collateral peril and harm is the point.
It’s only been in the last century that there is virtue (and material success) associated with being the very, very best student. The Ivy Leagues - for nearly the entire time they were the exclusive domain of white men - were paragons of mediocrity. Even while I was in law school - well after my favorable notices as Charles F. Maude - there was a half-joking adage that went, “The A students become professors, the B students become judges, and the C students make all the money.”
The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Foundation defends the longest-serving U.S. President’s unimpressive Harvard report cards as being intentional and impressive in their own way - in that his grades struck a Goldilocks equilibrium of being neither too close to failing nor too close to making the honor roll. The Foundation offers this verse, composed by a fellow Harvard alum in 1909, to establish how we should revisit his grades as having walked a tightrope precisely as “Frank” had intended:
The able-bodied C man! He sails swimmingly along.
His philosophy is rosy as a skylark’s matin song.
The light of his ambition is respectably to pass,
And to hold a firm position in the middle of his class.
—Robert Grant
So it is, perhaps to the surprise of none, skating along as the proverbial “mediocre white man” was the traditional hallmark of academic virtue for well-heeled, blue-blooded WASPs who had no more rungs to climb on the social ladder.
The rubes, hicks and other collegians whose families were not catalogued in the Social Register needed to set themselves apart to climb the ladder. It strikes me that, in a world once unapologetic about hazing, even when it turned lethal, it may have been sport for the blue-bloods to watch and jeer the students from the lower echelons who had to fight it out to win top academic honors that yielded no bankable return for those already assured of a life of wealth and privilege.
Gaining prestige is a game that’s played only by those who are wanting of prestige. Seeking the status of valedictorian - which comes with the reward of nothing more than a few minutes’ of time at a lectern - was a humiliating endeavor for the blue bloods of the early and mid 20th century…yet it’s a tradition that’s been carried on from Ivy Leagues to high schools - and even middle schools in some cases - despite all the harm it does and the nonsense prize of a speech that’s dangled before those who are eager to play along.
Co-opted by the nation’s “lesser-than-Ivy” academies as a vaunted tradition of the upper crust elite, the entire valedictorian rubric has me wondering if, in truth, everyone has unwittingly appropriated nothing more than an Ivy League hazing ritual.
Viewed in the kindest light, the valedictory vetting process is a well-intentioned folly that operates to the detriment of those who play and promote a game designed to appeal to those who suffer under the “logic” that, if it was good enough for Harvard, it must be good enough for Malcolm X Shabazz High School in Newark, New Jersey.
Unless we’re content to emulate the traditions of institutions that venerated mediocrity. it’s time to bury the valediction. My only question is who gets to deliver the farewell remarks when we do?