Good morning! I am Cristle Collins Judd, the President of Sarah Lawrence, and I am delighted to welcome you to this beautiful campus and this celebratory occasion as we gather for the 98th Commencement of Sarah Lawrence College. Parents, families, and friends, thank you for joining us on this milestone day that belongs to everyone under this tent.
Class of 2026, you graduate in a remarkable year as we mark the centennial of the founding of our college. Exactly one hundred years ago today, on May 8th, 1926, Sarah Bates Lawrence died. Despite never receiving a college education herself, throughout her life Sarah emphasized the importance of education, especially for women. So, when her husband William chartered the College a few months later in December of 1926, it was named in her honor.
At its founding, Sarah Lawrence College was an audacious innovation in post-secondary education, with its premise that education should be relational, interdisciplinary, arts-infused and humanistic, grounded in hands-on learning, guided by intellectual curiosity and the belief that students should play an active role in shaping their own paths. It was a timely intervention in 1926, founded on values that we now recognize as timeless.
100 years later, all of us under this tent are the beneficiaries of that vision and those values, privileged by them, and responsible to them.
Graduates, when I asked you over the last few weeks what you’d like me to say in these remarks, one of you suggested that I say that the Class of 2026 is my “favorite” class. Just as your parents would never say you were their favorite child, I’m not going to do that, BUT, you may well count as the most memorable class.
You were the first truly post-COVID class and the creation of the Centennial Gryphon coincided with your arrival. In just one short but very memorable weekend in the fall of your first year, we had three firsts for our campus: a bear on Mead Way, a women’s soccer championship, and a visit from the president of the United States. Midway through your time here you helped us open and establish the HUB as a space of humanity, understanding, and belonging — with WSLC programming animating the campus day and night from its new home. Shoutout to all the HUB spaces and space managers and let’s hear it for WSLC! And you wrapped up your final year with some other firsts: a cross country team championship, a best ever swim team season, and snow on the ground from the first day of the spring semester until spring break. In between, you have made many firsts of your own as you have fully lived into that promise of a Sarah Lawrence education to be “hyphenates” — to connect and combine your interests and your passions in truly creative and novel ways.
Through performances and concerts, readings, poster sessions, podcasts, philosophy cafes, art openings, film screenings, poetry festivals, thesis presentations, athletic competitions, and so much more, it has been my privilege to see up close the richness of your work. Congratulations on the extraordinary variety of jobs, internships, fellowships, and graduate schools you are headed to, across every imaginable area of employment, study, and service from down the street to around the world.
But, just as the early years of our College unfolded against a backdrop of a deeply unsettled world, so too did your years here.
Ongoing and expanding geopolitical crises coupled with new and growing uncertainty on so, so many fronts here at home have been challenging for us as individuals and as a community, sometimes deeply so. We have lived together through times in which we have experienced differences, challenges, fears, and anxieties that are profound, fundamental, and deeply unsettling. The description “disagreement” does not begin to capture the range and variety of ways our campus community experienced these.
I have found myself reiterating a set of principles that hold us all accountable and that let the world know what Sarah Lawrence stands for as we make our way in these tumultuous times. Graduates, as you now make your way in this world, I urge you to remember these principles – aspirational yet essential:
First and foremost, our College is committed to ensuring that all of our students – regardless of race, gender identity or expression, ethnicity, religion, nationality or national origin, disability, or socioeconomic status – have unimpeded access to the educational experience at the center of our mission, that they belong in this community.
Second: We believe that a truly global community – diverse in every sense of the word – is vital to this College. Varied perspectives deepen learning, broaden understanding, and help develop the much-needed capacity for empathy.
Third: We are committed to free expression practiced within a framework of mutual respect. There is no doubt that this may be the greatest challenge of our time, and there is a constant and fundamental tension at the intersection of free expression and mutual respect. But ultimately, one – free expression – is not possible without the other – mutual respect.
And finally, academic freedom and free inquiry are not optional, “nice to have” features of higher education, but cornerstones of it.
These principles ask, if not demand, certain things of all of us: to remain in conversation even when conversation is difficult, to stay engaged with ideas and experiences that do not resolve easily, to resist turning away or silencing and to instead face toward one another and connect, to live together in community at a time when doing so can be challenging.
Just as these principles shaped your classrooms on this campus, I hope they will shape and empower the way you move through the world.
Class of 2026, you leave this place prepared not only by what you learned here, but by how you learned here, and by the people who made that learning possible. None of you arrived at this moment alone.
Your faculty challenged and supported you. Your families and friends encouraged you. Our staff sustained the work of this campus in ways both visible and unseen 24/7.
And so it feels especially right to share a moment of gratitude as we mark this occasion.
Class of 2026, may I ask all of you to please stand and face your parents, family, and friends – those who have supported and nurtured you – and join me in thanking them with a hearty and heartfelt round of applause.
And now, graduates, please turn around and applaud those who have been committed to your pursuit of learning and to your success, and to whom you will continue to be connected long into the future: the Sarah Lawrence faculty and staff.
Congratulations, Class of 2026!
Remarks as prepared for delivery