May 16, 2026
President Robert W. Iuliano
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Greetings and Opening Address
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 191st Commencement Ceremony at Gettysburg College.
A special welcome to our parents, families, and friends with us here today and, most importantly, to our Gettysburg College graduates—this incredible Class of 2026!
Class of 2026, you passed through Pennsylvania Hall this morning a very different person than you arrived just four years ago. You have been changed, forever.
You have been changed because of your own hard work and determination, which we celebrate today.
You have also been changed because of the people who walked alongside you on your journey.
Your friends and classmates. Your family and loved ones. Our remarkable faculty, who placed your growth and support at the very center of their efforts. Our GLC staff and our coaches. Our Servo team and our landscaping crews, and so many others.
There is a well-known African proverb, one I suspect you’ve heard: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Graduates, today we celebrate you and just how far you have traveled. But I’d ask that you join me in thanking the many people who traveled together with you—and made your journey all the more joyful and transformative.
You graduate a very different person today for yet another reason, beyond your hard work and the support of others. You also have been changed by the nature of the education you’ve received here.
As you head into a world marked with so much volatility and uncertainty, I want to highlight a particular aspect of your education that will hold you in good stead for the rest of your life. Your willingness to embrace discomfort, uncertainty, and openness as central to personal growth and understanding.
Step back with me to the turn not of this century but of the last. An aspiring poet sends a collection of his work to a well-known Austrian poet of his time, Rainer Maria Rilke, seeking advice.
Perhaps as you have experienced when sharing drafts of your papers with our faculty, the aspiring poet doesn’t get direct feedback on what he’s written. Rather, Rilke offers more reflective advice.
He wrote, and I paraphrase a translation from the original German: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
“Live the questions now”—it’s profound advice. It’s also a bit scary, because it’s a call for bravery. Unanswered questions can be discomforting. They can invite us into uncharted space, to places where what awaits may call into question our settled assumptions about ourselves and the world.
As you have experienced over these past four years, constructive discomfort is okay. It’s where authentic learning and growth germinates.
Consider one of my favorite First-Year Seminars—one I know several of you took. It was provocatively called, “Fail This Course.”
Now, to our families in the audience, don’t be alarmed. Our classes are rigorous, to be certain, but we don’t really want our students to fail their courses.
Even Prof. Birkner, with his notoriously challenging Historical Methods class would agree, right Michael?
Rather, the seminar immersed students in our Rogers Center for Innovation and Creativity, and it challenged them to use the maker space to create a project—from building model rockets to team design challenges.
If you’ve ever done a project like this, it will come as no surprise that the first tries often go awry—maybe even the second, and third, and fourth tries. Maybe it never quite comes together.
In its very design, the seminar captured an essential truth about how a quality education works. About how that education readies you to lead a consequential life. How to, in Rilke’s words, “live the questions.”
To go back to the African proverb, the journey matters as much as the outcome—maybe even more. And here’s what the First-Year Seminar particularly understood: we learn best not when the journey is easy and familiar, but when it is hard and unfamiliar.
When we are exposed to ideas that are new to us or even disagreeable to us. When we take on tasks where we might stumble, where we might face setbacks. When we need help, when we need to lean on a friend or colleague to get us unstuck.
Because here’s the truth about a good education—it unsettles, it disrupts, it puts complicated questions before us, it asks us to see through another’s eyes, it makes us uncomfortable.
These moments of discomfort may be hard, but they are the most life-altering.
Changing you from the person you were to the person you are now.
Graduates, in a few minutes, I’ll meet you down on the stage and, one by one, I’ll hand each of you your Gettysburg diploma. A physical symbol of what you’ve accomplished over these past four years. Something that will bring your thoughts back to campus whenever you see it, whether next week, next year, or 25 years from now when you get ready to return for that seminal reunion.
For powerful as that physical symbol is, you are graduating with something less tangible but at least as important. In the times ahead, you will regularly be presented with the new, the unfamiliar, the uncomfortable. You will experience uncertainty and unease—a new problem at work, a colleague who sees the world very differently than you do, or, as any parent will recount, one of those insightful, wonderous, and unanswerable questions only a three-year old knows how to ask.
Your education at Gettysburg has you ready for those moments. It has taught you to “live the question,” to embrace the uncomfortable, to be open to the unexpected, to learn, unlearn, and relearn. In a world likely to be turned on its head by AI, this may be the most valuable gift of all with which you are leaving here today.
If you continue to hone that sense of openness, and continue to embrace the discomfort, you will thrive in the years ahead, regardless of what life throws at you. And when you reflect on the conversation happening today across the country, a conversation about topics that some argue should be off limits in education, topics that could cause discomfort, consider how your Gettysburg education would have been diminished if it were confined to the familiar and to the comfortable.
At least in my view, we do not “live the question” by taking issues off the table. We live it by examining hard topics directly and honestly.
And we do not “live the question” by restricting what we study and the ideas we confront. We live it by seeing the complexity and struggling to make sense of it.
That’s what a good education does. That’s what we have readied you to do as you face the opportunities and challenges in your lives.
As President of this remarkable College, I am incredibly proud of how our community delivers on this education—now and always. And I am proud of what you have accomplished and how you will use that education in the years ahead.
Let me conclude.
Late last week, one of my graduating advisees stopped by—not quite ready to say goodbye, but knowing that moment was coming fast at us.
Our conversation was both timeless and intensely personal, as she reflected on her gratitude for an amazing four years and the swirl of emotions surrounding her upcoming graduation. It’s a conversation I’ve had with many of you over the past several weeks, and it’s one I know you’ve been having with each other.
We both found ourselves drawn to a quote often attributed, perhaps inaccurately, to the author of Winnie-the-Pooh, A.A. Milne. Perhaps you know it. I can certainly hear Pooh saying it.
“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
Lucky indeed, and what a perfect sentiment for this moment.
My advisee is pursuing a masters next year in Italy. As our conversation concluded, we debated whether ciao or arrivederci was right for the moment. Although the debate quickly exceeded my limited knowledge of Italian, we both felt that arrivederci was too formal, too distant for the circumstances. We settled on ciao, for all the right reasons.
And, so, from me to you, ciao. Although you are graduating today, you will always be part of this community and have a home here. Ciao leaves the porch light burning a bit more brightly anticipating your return.
Congratulations, graduates, and good luck with all that’s ahead.
The Charge
As you prepare to step out into the world as Gettysburg College graduates, remember that we do not cross oceans alone. You will always have this community with you.
So, inspired by the lives of Prof. Birkner and our honorary degree recipients, and moved by the words of our Commencement speakers, Bishruti and Kate, my charge to you is simply this: Be all in.
Be all in for your family and your friends.
Be all in for your colleagues and communities.
Be all in for a world that needs you.
Make a promise to yourself that you will embrace life’s uncertainty.
That you will show up as your true, authentic self.
That you will “Live the questions now.”
And that you will always and forever “Commit to the bit.”
Class of 2026, we believe in you.
At this time, I would ask our graduates to please stand.
On behalf of all of us here at Gettysburg College, I want to thank our families, friends, and distinguished guests for joining us for our Commencement ceremony today.
As President, it is now my privilege to present our Gettysburg College graduates of the Class of 2026! Congratulations—and Do Great Work!