2026 Ivy Day Remarks

Welcome—to students, to trustees, to faculty and staff, and to the alums who have returned to this place that impacted you. And welcome to the immensely proud families and loved ones who have made the journey to be here with us.

Class of 2026, today, as part of this tradition, the alums are here to welcome you into their community. And we are all gathered to celebrate your graduating class and to do something else as well—to think together, one more time, about what a Smith education actually is. What it has been asking of you. What it has been building in you. And what it sends you out into the world prepared to do.

I want to talk about what we mean when we say we “educate the whole person.” And I want to argue that this commitment—which might sound, in calmer times, like a bromide, a nondescript and pleasant institutional aspiration—is, right now in this moment, one of the most urgent and serious things we do.

Sophia Smith had little formal education. And yet she possessed a clarity of vision that has shaped this institution for a century and a half. She believed that the world needed the minds, hearts, and voices of educated women. Her wager was not simply that women deserved access to knowledge, it was that education, fully realized, transforms a human life—it liberates potential, enlarges capacity, and allows a person to be more fully themselves.

That vision was never only intellectual. The whole person—capable of discovery, of leadership, of belonging—was always the aspiration. And when Smith describes its mission as developing “the whole student—mind, body, and spirit,” it is being faithful to something Sophia Smith understood before most of her contemporaries could see it.

Let us examine the phrase “mind, body, and spirit” carefully. It is easy to say. It’s important to understand.

For mind, we mean intellectual rigor—the capacity for complexity, the discipline of sitting with an idea, we hope, until you understand it from the inside out. Persisting with the puzzle, the process, the concept. This is what Smith is known for, and it is what our graduates have practiced—in classrooms and laboratories and studios and seminar rooms across this campus. You have honed the ability to think in new and more complex ways. That is no small thing.

When I say spirit, I refer to the ineffable but crucial sense of belonging, of purpose, of orientation, of breath—the direction Smithies carry when they leave this place. Not just a credential, but a compass. A sense of responsibility, a set of commitments about who you are and what you are here for—something greater than yourselves.

And then there is the dimension that receives the least attention in commencement addresses and deserves far more: the body.

The research is unambiguous. Physical vitality shapes how students learn, persist, lead, and recover. For students navigating the particular intensity of a Smith education, wellness is not supplemental. It is load-bearing. You cannot think well when you are depleted. You cannot belong fully when you are running on empty. The body is not separate from the mind and spirit. It is the ground on which they stand.

And there is a fourth dimension I want to name, one that runs through all three: the capacity to be in genuine relationship with your mind, body, and spirit and most fundamentally with those of all the people around you, especially people who are different from you. To live and work and think in community across lines of difference, to engage with curiosity even when we’re defensive and anxious, to require of ourselves intellectual depth rather than the first emotion we feel, and to pursue rather than avoid even the most difficult conversations. This, too, is part of what it means to educate a whole person. And it, too, is something Smith has been asking of you—in every house meeting, every late-night debate, every moment when your assumptions were interrupted by someone else’s reality.

You are all whole Smithies. Go forth, and be that, in the world.

You, class of 2026, are graduating into a world that is, by any honest accounting, extraordinarily demanding. It is demanding intellectually, it is demanding physically, and it is demanding spiritually.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how knowledge is organized, how work is completed, but we cannot allow it to supplant what it means to think for ourselves. The questions it raises are not only technical, but philosophical, ethical, and deeply human.

And then there is this: a deepening cultural and political fracture that is making it harder for people to inhabit the same reality, let alone build toward a shared one. There is conflict within nations and between them; conflict among friends and family. Any one of us can get caught up or lost in the swirl of a social media echo chamber. Public discourse often mistakes volume for reasoned argument and contempt for conviction. These things erode the very conditions that make democratic life possible.

You cannot engage in democracy if you are not able to bring your whole self to difficult discussions. That sounds simple, but we know it is profound. Democracy is not a spectator activity. It requires presence. It requires the willingness to speak, to listen, to be changed by what you hear—and to hold your ground when the argument requires it. It demands people who know how to engage across difference with both conviction and dignity.

This is precisely why, on behalf of Smith, I joined the College Presidents for Civic Preparedness—a national platform committed to cultivating in students the skills and dispositions that democratic life demands. Because I believe that our graduates are not just entering careers; they, you, are entering civic life. And the preparation you receive here at Smith—the practice of reasoning carefully, arguing honestly, and remaining in relationship with people who see the world differently—is not incidental to your education. It is central to it.

Higher education is under pressure from those who misunderstand the liberal arts, from those who reduce education to its economic returns, from a pace of change that makes it tempting to narrow our ambitions.

Smith’s answer is not to narrow the definition of education. It is to deepen it.

When we ask students to navigate genuine complexity, to lead with courage, to build a more just and sustainable world, we are asking them, we have asked you, to do that work from somewhere. From a self that is integrated—intellectually alive, physically resilient, grounded in purpose, and capable of deep connection. You cannot do that work from a place of depletion. You cannot do it from isolation. And you cannot do it if the education you received trained only part of who you are.

The whole-person model is the argument that rigor, fully understood, includes the body and the spirit—and the practiced capacity to remain in honest relationship with others even when it is hard.

To our graduating seniors, you are the evidence for everything I have just argued. You know what it costs to show up fully, year after year, in a place that asks as much as Smith asks of you. You know the relationship between being well and being capable—between feeling that you belong here and being able to do your best work. You know that the moments that sustained you were not only in the library or the classroom, they were on the playing field, by Paradise Pond, in the houses where you learned to live alongside people you had not chosen but came to know and love. They were in the conversations that made you uncomfortable—heavens, that made me uncomfortable—and the ones that made you feel, perhaps for the first time, entirely seen.

Every generation of Smithies inherits something from the last and passes something forward.

What this particular moment represents is a community recommitting to the original and still-radical premise that women deserve an education that develops them completely—in mind, in body, in spirit, and in their capacity for the difficult, essential work of living and leading in relationship with others, and that includes all of us, regardless of how we identify.

Today, in a time that is antagonistic, in a time that is asking us to question, we have to attend to our whole selves. And let me say for the record, Smith admits students because of their whole selves. I invite you to consider donating to the President’s Discretionary Fund by visiting smith.edu/standwithsmith so that we may continue to do this work. I invite you to Stand with Smith and all of the people we admit, and educate, and graduate, and celebrate as alums. And I invite you to carry forward, in your own beautiful and unique lives, the fullest version of what Smith has given you. Not only what you know, but how you inhabit your own life. Not only what you can argue, but how well you can listen. Not only your individual excellence, but your commitment to the communities you will build and sustain.