This past Sunday I was privileged to deliver the valediction to the graduates, friends, and families of the University of Rochester Department of Religion & Classics. It’s always best to be brief with these sorts of things so I wrote first the version that I wanted to write and then found a way, on the spot, to edit out whole pages. You can’t be too brief on a day full of inspiring and never to be remembered speeches.
Occasionally a celebrity breaks through the usual pageant of banalities but in truth there are only a few like Vonnegut or Foster Wallace, and I make no pretensions at being any less forgettable than the next. Honestly, it’s best not to really be too well remembered; this isn’t a day to ignite controversy or draw attention away from the families gathered to celebrate.
You will notice here I only tangentially touched any political notes and studiously avoided anything that might bring unwanted notice---this farewell was an effort to admire the daring choice these young people made with their majors and less to imagine the brave all too new world with which they will contend.
In today’s NYTimes there is a genuinely terrifying article by a graduating Stanford senior about how AI has reshaped his education. All I can say is that I found nothing about it surprising and everything about it revealing of our current age. It’s plain enough that’s there’s no going back, there’s no world ahead without AI and even less notion of what it will mean to when we are expected to make more connection with machines than with human beings.
Until these recent years, I thought I understood the role of educator was viable and, dare I say, even what it mean to be an educated person. But I no longer know where we are going, only that we cannot look back too long if we mean to have any say in the future. Perhaps its best that way, I mean it’s plain that I don’t represent the future.
But like all of us, I still hope to ask: who do I want to be? So that is what this valediction is about---the the courage and commitment it took for these students to study the ancient classics, archeology, and the religions of the world knowing full well that but that nothing about these subjects will land them a job or advance their prospects. Still, they all did something that’s difficult to do, they all put their curiosities and passions in front of these other, very serious concerns, and I hope I live to see at how their choice for the education we offered will inform their futures. Above all, I admire their character as much as their achievement, and I hope that is what I convey here.
&&&
The Valediction for the Graduating Class of Religion and Classics Majors, 2026
Congratulations graduates, it is truly your day. And you have earned it. Your family and friends celebrate you as we do. Graduating college is one of life’s big deals. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, including yourself.
Others have suffered comparably to our Rochester winters (aka “spring” semester). And undoubtedly they have done difficult things even if they have not had to determine the imparisyllabic nature of the Latin third declension, Greek irregular athematic μι-verbs that reduplicate in the present, or the required use of the dual in Sanskrit---nor have they had to answer to your question: what are you going to do with that, a major in Classics or Religion?
With your grammatical prowess you can scare your friends and impress the heathen. Don’t count on it to get you a date but you can certainly entertain yourself even if the job does not require a classical language. (Amuse thyself is Rule Zero.)
Roll it out for them, don’t be shy, you are not the dilettante, you’ve got the creds:
In Greek you can ask them,
Θα θέλατε πατάτες τηγανητές με αυτό
Tha thélate patátes tiganités me aftó?
In Sanskrit, taya sah alukan icchasi va?
तया सह alukan इच्छसि वा?
When they look at you befuddled puzzlement, you can render the question in English a an invitation to those you’re serving so ably:
Would you like fries with that?
You have long understood that job prospects in your given subject were more than a little suspect, but I assure you, you’ll never fail to bring others into gauzy mystification at your ability to apply your degree. Before I tell you why, recall what the Wizard told Scarecrow before his fateful departure from Oz, “Anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity... But they have one thing you haven’t got: A diploma!””
Your accomplishment will appear today on durable media---what used to be known as printed paper---and your University has undoubtedly already asked you for an alumni contribution. The latter is a sure sign that you have indeed graduated.
It’s not likely you came to Rochester to major or minor in Religion or Classics, who dreams of that? But “we are such stuff as dreams are made on” and by daring to dream, you have brought passion to purpose---and there is little as difficult we manifest in life, and you have already done that.
Since you have also had to explain yourself unlike your peers majoring in, say, accounting or business, you have demonstrably learned the difference between solving a problem and making an argument. I implore you too not to quarrel too much with yourself about your choices. Quarrels may be the outcome of well-founded disagreements, but they are not how we learn; they may prove meaningful but only when we dare to enter the contest of ideas in which we employ the powers of disproof and commit to offering uncertainty a place at the table. Instead of being quarrelsome make the case for being educated. You have learned not to allow the courage of your convictions to become the cowardice of certainties unchallenged.
As if you need more challenges in these challenging times, our future lies in your willingness to resist mere compliance or submission to those who would usurp your autonomy of mind and heart. Instead, be the alternative who declines violent reaction and invites the entanglement of honest conversation. This won’t be easy because it’s not the easy way, not always the simplest way, it will ask more of you than just what feels good, because what’s right won’t always feel good.
Few have learnt to revel in discomfort and most regard uncertainty to be but terror, without considering how our anxieties are fueled by a reluctance to engage life’s unavoidable complexities. We’d all prefer to keep it simple. We’ll dodge, bypass, or abstain because making the effort for deeper connection is always daunting; we then end up feeling lonelier, less fulfilled because that’s what happens when we go along to get along.
Making good trouble as John Lewis taught is never too soon or too late, speaking truth to power is how you will make a difference, and never default into complacency just because avoidance is the easier default. Isolation into self or tribe will prove costly, and it is the price paid by those who have not yet felt the urgency to turn towards the fire rather than run into safe redoubts.
This being educated will feel all rather counter-intuitive but now you know that soporific surrender is no choice at all. Your education has brought out the need to reject passivity in favor of receptivity; you are not by-standers but witnesses and participants in the creation of this world. You are creators because you translators, not only of words but of meaning for the human soul.
When the time comes---and it will---when four-wheel religion rolls up and you see a baby carriage, limousine, ambulance, or hearse, you will be the one people turn to. When things matter, you will have what you need and for others too.
Students of the Classics have known this need to create anew what has been true in every generation at least since Chapman’s translation of the Odessey in 1616. For those less familiar, there is a word in the very first line of Homer that compels re-translation, not because we don’t know what it means but because meaning made in the past must be re-made; for this is how we become educated to address the paradox of our human nature.
We are at once as we have always been. Humans gonna human. And at the same time, as our Buddhist friends remind us, we are creatures made of change, by our times, and in need of a narrative that speaks to the moment. We are simply human but never simple, be that in intention or task.
The Greek word describing Odysseus is polytropos, literally, poly meaning many/very/considerably/confoundedly and tropos, ways/form/style/manners/modes sometimes wise. Chapman translated the polytropos of the hero alliteratively as “many a way wound with his wisdom,” Cowper in 1791 “for shrewdness shamed and genius versatile,” Fitzgerald in 1961 “skilled in all the ways of contending.” My personal favorite: from Fagles in 1996 “ who declared him “of twists and turns,” and more recently by Emily Wilson, “complicated.”
Each has its charms, all justify their choices with interpretive erudition, and because of you, they will not be the last to attempt a translation of heroic experience. We may cry out, ‘please just tell me what it means’ but the very word polytropos tells us, well, it’s complicated, that our choices demand foresight, incite reflection, and will confound us in hindsight; nothing finishes the task of meaning but you will come to your own understanding and more likely than not it won’t be for the last time.
Things worth your time won’t really ever finish, time will run out on you while you are still giving matters the meaning they need now. You’ve learned not to separate your need for another translation from the pursuit of meaning. Life may insist that you to get it “right” but you will want more from your on-going odyssey. These are truths you’ve learned because you dared to study the classics, religions, and have learned to how to learn. You will never be less polytropos every time you ask what it means to be human.
Go and make the case that reaches people where they are to bring them to where you think they need to go; you won’t always be right but there’s no better feeling than offering a translation, making an argument that shows people how to change sides by discovering how they already siding.
Shouting across the river to the Zen master, “can you tell me, how do I get to the other side?” you may be confused when she replies, “why you are already on the other side!” It’s not the other side you are seeking so much as it is the connection with yourself. And if you start there, you’ll discover within yourself the need, the deep urgency to connect with others.
The journey towards meaning becomes the story of connection from within the complexity of twists and turns. Polytropos isn’t new, it’s that it’s always yours.
As you make the case for yourself, you will find arguing with yourself sometimes feels like madness but that too is the path to deeper connections, for it creates the opening to questions we have not considered and ideas we may otherwise choose not to hear.
Orwell tells us that argument is the art of telling someone what they don’t want to hear. It is an artistry to make such a telling because it makes translation a requirement for the conversation of connection. This is because truth is rarely revealed without discomforting yourself and others. The powerful may not welcome your effort; they too often require the company of sycophants. Learning to live with oneself in the polytropos is far more challenging than projecting vindictive insecurities or claiming never to be wrong. And you alone can never fix it.
Truth is as disruptive as it is revealing, rarely is it comforting unless we make the leap of Zen to embrace discomfort as comfort and imperfection as perfection.
But what you have learned in Classics and the study of Religion is that learning to learn is more arduous than claiming an opinion or asserting a “truth.” In some matters, like those pesky bits of grammatical complexity, problems can be solved. But all the rest demands a deeper dive into the polytropos, as Mendelsohn translated in 2025, “so many roundabout ways.”
Your courage to speak up won’t make you feel more secure; but it will reveal insecurity for all the values it presents, for worse and better. When you question beliefs, the bosses may be offended, but that’s why argument demands artistry. And such artistry is what you have learned and will continue to refine, not because you know the answers but because you have been steeped in asking.
Truth telling not only questions belief, it turns us into seekers. As Plato taught us, argument in the pursuit of truth is much like freedom and happiness: it is not without cost but indispensable to a well-lived life.
Students of religion know how religions prefer to indoctrinate rather than argue. We know how powerful religion can be, not because we’ve been encouraged to think or to seek, but principally to believe. This makes our studying religion all the more important and reveals too how the study of religion is so decidedly different than being religious.
We don’t study religions merely to consider their truth claims; we study religions because we know how much people want truth without wanting to hear any argument that challenges what they’ve been told to believe and more importantly have never learned to question. Our task is not to demean or blame people for who they are but instead try to understand the depth of their need. Everyone in their own polytropos needs your empathy, as you will need theirs.
When religions pretend to make things simple, we study that too but not because the answers are simple but rather because we know how hard it is to live in the questions. In this polytropos , this twisting and turning we have, at the very least, understood that some things you need to do, not because there are tangible rewards or certain outcomes but because you must, because the heart and mind will settle for no less.
As we say farewell today, our valediction is this: don’t make arguments that attempt to convert others to your views. Instead feel the ground beneath you move in ways that compels others to realize how they too must make concessions and refinements; argue to create the need to adjust opinions so that we don’t merely retreat into familiar atrophies of self-complaisance. Everyone leaves a little differently than they came. That’s success. To ask for more is to seek a conversion, an indoctrination, and that is something you learned about, but not the something you learned.
You’ll go make a living, you’ll do things you don’t want to do, sometimes to make money, but you’ll also have another kind of necessity. Not the sort that the world demands of you but the one that you have created in yourself.
As you transact to meet your material needs, recognize what your education has done to you, what it can do for you: you have transformed yourself, you have been transformed. Your (other) double major may transact more profitably in the world---no one ever asks why the accounting major majored in accounting. But yours has been a truly a transformative education, one that has demanded more than transactional abilities.
You have cultivated the ability to change, to connect, and to create your own argument: whatever you think you have learned, you have also chosen to be educated, to make the gift of being human an odyssey of heart and mind that will remake the world. Become that company you wish to keep.
Now go and find more good company, and go with this valediction and a last blessing from the Sanskrit:
Śaśvat purosuo’ vyuvāsa devyatho’ adyedam vyāvo maghonā |
Atho’ vyuchād-uttarānanu dyūnajarāmrtaa carati svadhābhiħ ||: (Rg Veda 1.113.3)
“Look well then to this day. For today, well lived will make every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well then to this day.”
Go make your case, polytropos. Visit with us again when you have the chance.
