Henry Long 2025 Class-Elected Commencement Speech

The class of 2025 elected Henry Long to deliver remarks on their behalf at Claremont McKenna College's 77th Commencement Ceremony on May 17th, 2025. You can watch a video of his speech above or read a transcript of it below.

Thank you, President Chodosh.

As President Chodosh mentioned, I’d like to pick up on a question that he left off on. If any of you have attended convocation over the past four years, you’ve heard it many times before. Say it with me:

Why are we here?

But rather than asking this question in a narrow sense—why we (students) are here (at CMC)—I want to ask it more broadly: 

Why are we here at all? 

It’s a question that should unsettle you to your bones. You should forever be taken aback by the oddity of your own existence. The world around you is just as odd. The universe is bigger and stranger than you could possibly imagine. The 18th century Romantics called this concept “the sublime.” They found it in the splendor of nature and the vastness of the unknown.

Some will argue that the best response to the vastness of the unknown is to be larger than life, to be greedy, to grab what you can. But this is mistaken. If you’re larger than life, you’ll always be squinting to see. Being small allows you to appreciate life in full detail. Life is best accepted as a gift, not seized as a trophy. You can’t truly partake in life’s joys unless you receive it like a child. You must be poor in spirit to recognize the riches on offer.

Now, the right response to the grandeur of the world is wonder, awe, and—dare I say it—humility. Now I know a word like that is hard to hear on a day like today. After all, isn’t today about pride? You’ve worked so hard and learned so much, and yet—in the last analysis, your paltry human wisdom amounts to nothing. Heartwarming, I know. This idea won’t make you popular at parties. Socrates said something like this—so did St. Paul—and they both got killed.

The word humility—and the word human, for that matter—both come from the Latin word humus, which means ground, earth, or soil. That’s kind of a lame namesake, right? But it’s a poignant reminder that we’re material creatures—for dust we are, and to dust we shall return. But we’re not merely material either. We’re also filled with what ancient traditions call “the breath of life,” which is prana in Sanskrit, ruach in Hebrew, and psyche in Greek. This breath, however shallow it may be, inspires a hunger for the heavenly, a thirst for the transcendent, and a recognition of our incompleteness and ignorance.

But that’s not the end of the story. We’re not just stuck wallowing in ignorance. Humility and wonder are the beginning of knowledge, not the end. Even more remarkable than reality itself is our uncanny ability to understand it. The universe follows patterns, which our minds can recognize. Just think for a second about how miraculous that is.

At CMC alone, we have math professors researching the rules of Banach spaces, philosophy professors exploring German theories of metaphysical grounding, and science professors researching tree reconciliation methods for host-symbiont cophylogenetic analyses. I’m not even sure what most of those words mean. But without the strange correspondence between our minds and reality, none of this research would be possible. Science would be defunct, education would be a farce, and this College as we know it wouldn’t exist.

Philosophers have a name for this improbable connection between our mental experience and the world around us: It’s called “psychophysical harmony.” How’s that for a five-dollar word? Some philosophers argue that this harmony is so striking and unlikely, it’s as though it were by design. Follow the patterns of reality, and you may be surprised where you end up.

Graduates, the world you enter is a wonderful place, but it has its dangers. Your life poses a series of questions to you. Despite what some say, there are wrong answers, and these wrong answers will ruin your life. Don’t let the drudgery of your office job, the mundanity of your daily routine, the intensity of your political loyalties, or the vapidity of your Instagram feed distract you from the enchantment of the world.

But don’t just settle for a vague, “vibesy” sense of enchantment either. You should be deeply dissatisfied with how little you know. But you should also recognize that some things are rightly beyond your knowledge and your control. It’s not your job to reinvent the world. It’s your job to humble yourself, learn from the world, and serve others. You’re imperfect, and you always will be, on this side of paradise.

Today is a joyous day, but also a serious one. As you walk the stage, remember that you join in a tradition that spans nine decades here at CMC and ten centuries around the world. Today’s ceremony inaugurates rather than culminates your intellectual journey, and Claremont is a mere Route-66 pit stop on your path towards truth. Your education has led you out, graduation is just a step, and this commencement is just the beginning.

Thank you all, congratulations, and God bless you all.

Now, please join me in giving a warm welcome to our stellar senior class president, who has done so much for our class this year, Tori Williams!