commencement

Commencement comes from Old French comencier (to begin), from Latin com- (together) + initiāre (to begin, from initium, beginning). The word means a beginning, a start. It has been used for university graduation ceremonies since the thirteenth century, when the completion of a master's degree at Cambridge or Paris was understood as the commencement of the graduate's career as a teacher. You were not finishing. You were starting.

The medieval logic was precise: a master's degree was a license to teach. The commencement ceremony was the moment the university authorized a new master to begin teaching independently. The ceremony was a beginning because the degree opened a door that had been closed. Without the degree, you could not teach in any university in Christendom. With it, you could teach anywhere. Commencement was the key turning in the lock.

American universities adopted the word and the ceremony, adding their own innovations: caps and gowns (standardized in 1894 by the Intercollegiate Commission), commencement addresses by distinguished speakers, and the processional march. The Intercollegiate Commission's rules specified black gowns for all degrees, with colored hoods and tassels indicating the field of study. The standardization made American commencement visually uniform from coast to coast.

Modern commencement speakers are expected to deliver wisdom to an audience of twenty-two-year-olds who are simultaneously texting, sweating in polyester gowns, and wondering about their student loans. The best commencement addresses — David Foster Wallace's 'This Is Water' (2005), Steve Jobs's Stanford speech (2005) — transcend the genre. Most do not. The word commencement still means beginning, but what begins is less certain than it was in the thirteenth century.