The Commencement Address Harvard Needs

By Jack Butler

Sunday, June 01, 2025

 

These ought to be exciting times for attendees of a certain school in Boston. Perhaps one could call Harvard University’s ongoing conflict with the Trump administration exciting. But certainly not in the way that its graduates this year would have expected by the time of their commencement this past Thursday.

 

The institution is coping as it knows best: through self-congratulation. Abraham Verghese, this year’s commencement speaker, assured graduates that “more people than you realize are grateful for Harvard for the example it has set” and praised the school’s “clarity in affirming and courageously defending the essential values of this university, and indeed of this nation.”

 

Harvard’s attitude is that it has done nothing wrong, either lately, or in the past several decades. This is not the kind of honest introspection that aids the pursuit of the Veritas the school claims to seek. For that, we must turn to a Harvard commencement speaker from decades past. He used the occasion to deliver a righteous philippic that transcended his immediate audience, and the time in which he gave it.

 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn took a long journey to the podium on June 8, 1978. The Russian-born Solzhenitsyn fought for his country in World War II but was forced into the horrendous communist gulag for criticizing Joseph Stalin in private correspondence. He emerged with the material for, among other works, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a brutally realistic (and barely fictional) depiction of gulag life. These works led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. In 1974, the year The Gulag Archipelago, a magisterial examination of the Soviet prison system, was translated into English, the Soviet government forced him into exile in the West. He eventually settled in Vermont.

 

When Solzhenitsyn, plainly dressed and through a translator, addressed Harvard’s graduating class, students would have had no reason to expect from such a man the banal, vaguely adulatory clichés that so frequently ruin the modern collegiate commencement address. Nor, however, could they have anticipated what Solzhenitsyn would tell them. The first hint was his admission that his speech would include “a measure of bitter truth,” though offered “as a friend, not as an adversary.”

 

And bitter truths they were. As balance of power in the Cold War seemed to shift toward Soviet Russia and its allies, Solzhenitsyn criticized the then-regnant American and Western attitude of conciliation toward communism. He criticized “the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces.” He castigated the “American intelligentsia” for having “lost its nerve” during the Vietnam War, as a result of which “the danger has come much closer to the United States.” And he excoriated a West obsessed with ensuring that “the world situation must stay as it is at any cost; there must be no changes” — that is, to a status quo that accommodated the evils of communism, evils he knew firsthand.

 

It does not lessen the power of Solzhenitsyn’s oratory that just two years later, America would elect as president Ronald Reagan, a man who defied these sentiments; and that a little over a decade later, the Soviet Union would itself dissolve. His remarks were far more than a political criticism of the contemporary West. They were a profound moral critique. The West’s dire political situation was downstream of a wider social sickness.

 

America was not immune. There was material abundance beyond the wildest imaginings of our ancestors, yet it had corrupted our capacity for higher modes of living. “A high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism,” he claimed. There was individual freedom, yet squandered in a society rife with “the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror.” There was a free press, yet one more powerful than any branch of government, and an essential part of how “fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges.”

 

Solzhenitsyn believed that, in some ways, his own nation and others around it, places still subject to communist tyranny, were better prepared for the coming struggles. Thus, he could not recommend “your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours.”

 

This sickness, to Solzhenitsyn, had a straightforward cause. The West, including America, had lost its moral bearings. “Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims,” he observed. Now, however, “the West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer.”

 

This portion of Solzhenitsyn’s prophesying came true to an even greater extent after the Cold War. It is striking that he had the foresight to envision (and to reject) some kind of American alliance with China, and to warn against a Western hubris that viewed all countries as “but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life.” He anticipated the Western triumphalism that cast communism’s fall not as a result of reinvigorated moral courage of the sort Reagan embodied, but as an inevitable consequence of material progress. He envisioned a world united by glittering superficialities. And he saw rust and rot beneath the sheen before it truly debuted.

 

But his moral critique is even more striking. The 21st century is afflicted by many of the maladies that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn diagnosed. Yet it must face challenges he did not foresee. In the face of them, too many institutions resemble the one he once addressed: self-involved, self-congratulatory, and self-deluded. Their leaders and products follow suit. For Harvard, and for other defective pillars of society, to recover a commitment to truth is of vastly greater importance than the political controversies of the day. If they do not, we’ll have much more to worry about than Harvard’s just becoming another school in Boston.