“This World Is Not Conclusion”

What is Harvard, and what are its students meant to do with it? Though separated by decades, the Harvard commencement ceremony speeches of Robert Mulé ’77 and Thor Reimann ’25 converge in their attempts to answer these same questions.

Each year, Harvard College selects one graduating senior to deliver the Senior English address, a speech meant not just to celebrate a class but to speak to its moment in time. For Mule that meant looking back at a decade of protest, from civil rights to women’s liberation. For Reimann, it meant facing a campus—and country—in the middle of a national debate. With the College’s 2025 commencement wrapping up just one week ago, these two speeches show how a persistent pursuit of tackling global contention is the invisible string connecting Harvard students across generations. 

Harvard’s commencement spans three days and culminates in a University-wide ceremony in Tercentenary Theatre. Central to the main commencement ceremony are three student speeches: the Latin Salutatory, the Graduate English Address, and the Senior English Address. 

Commencement speeches have served as a moment of reflection, activism, and public conscience across many American universities. In 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall used his Harvard address to unveil the Marshall Plan, urging graduates to help rebuild postwar Europe. This year, at the University of Pennsylvania, actress Elizabeth Banks ended her speech with a call to protect abortion rights.

This places considerable pressure—and power—on the students selected to speak. They must strike a delicate balance: saying goodbye to both classmates and Harvard, while also remaining conscious of the nation’s moment. At Ivy League universities in particular, where commencement speeches can be highly publicized, the stakes feel especially high. For instance, Donovan Livingston’s Harvard Graduate School of Education 2016 commencement speech has gained over 9 million views on YouTube. 

The Harvard Commencement 2025 Senior English Address was delivered by Reimann, an Environmental Science and Public Policy concentrator from Minnesota. His speech reflected on uncertainty, responsibility, and the search for meaning beyond Harvard’s gates. 

This year’s ceremony also featured two other student orations. The Latin Salutatory titled De Hereditatibus Pererinis, was delivered by Aidan Robery Scully ’25. The Graduate English Address, “Our Humanity,” was delivered by Yurong “Luanna” Jiang. 

Reimann earned the role through a competitive, multi-round selection process. “It’s a three-round application process,” Reimann said in an interview with the Harvard Independent. “You submit your speech, then you give it two times to a panel…and you get to watch the other people who are also in the process.”

Likewise, working to write a speech that impressed the administration and his peers, Mule took the same stage around 50 years earlier with a speech titled “The Need and a Desire.” Mule opened his oration with a nod to the future’s overwhelming ambiguity. “I direct myself to those half-smiling members of the class of 1977 who do not know where they will be next year,” he said. “And I direct myself to those troubled seniors who may know very well where they will be after graduation…but don’t really know why.”

“As a freshman, I remember feeling like a part of some occupation force which had missed the real battle, which had not fought the long war. Graduates and section people would throw in our young faces such statements as, ‘You can’t understand what it was like in 1969. You can’t appreciate the struggle which we went through,’” he reflected in his address. “Political activism is dead today.” 

Mulé spoke to a generation shaped by upheaval. “The tumult of the 1960s had left us with no clear sense—if there ever existed such a notion—about what was right and what was wrong,” he told his classmates at the beginning of his address. 

Nearly fifty years later, Reimann too echoed Mule’s sense of dislocation—but in a moment when Harvard itself was under fire. “This world is not conclusion,” he began, quoting a 1860s Emily Dickinson poem that had guided him through his undergraduate years and also served as the title of his speech. 

“It has a nice certainty that there is a path out of the current moment,” he told the Independent about the poem. “I view my time in college as this kind of training—a launchpad for exploring the unknown…this is something I was thinking a lot about and continue to be thinking about.”

Whereas Mule’s speech focused on the loss of direction that followed the 60s, Reimann’s addresses the weight of responsibility that falls on students now. 

“With no visible commitment to an external purpose ours would be a time of introspection. And with this turning inward, ours would be an age plagued by ambiguity. In such an age where traditional values and institutions seem to crumble under their own weight, students within Harvard cling to whatever they can for consistency and support,” Mule said in his address. 

Reimann responds to the lack of direction felt by many students with a call to action. “For me, Harvard has often felt like an end, rather than a beginning,” he reflected. “The purpose of our time here really starts today, as we leave campus, and especially as we leave a much different campus than the one we entered, with Harvard at the center of a national battle over higher education in America.”

He provides guiding advice to those same, uncertain students searching for purpose. “Narcotics cannot still the tooth that nibbles at the soul,” Reimann said, quoting Dickinson.

“I wanted to remind people of the power that they have,” Reimann said to the Independent, “and the power that Harvard alumni have had over the history of our country to make really positive impacts in times of deep crisis.”

Reimann was mindful of the responsibility that came with his platform. “Am I talking too much about myself ?” he recalled to the Independent. But ultimately, he found that starting from personal experience allowed him to reveal shared themes. “While I did give the speech,” he said, “the way I viewed it was, ‘It’s not about me. It’s about the class, and it’s about the crazy moment that we find ourselves to be in.’” 

That same impulse—to center community over the self—finds precedent in Mule’s 1977 address. Where Reimann emphasized the moment, Mule emphasized the medium. For Mule, Harvard’s value was not found in its structure or traditions. “It is not the house system…it is not the books or libraries… Harvard’s quality springs from its unique individuals,” said Mule. “When we encounter one another as individuals…we learn, we discover, we build character.

“Veritas is a private human encounter which reveals what we are: imperfect creatures striving for perfection.”

Mule gave his class a framework for seeking truth when institutions falter. Reimann did the same. “This world is not conclusion, ” he repeated. “A species stands beyond.”

Reimann ended his speech by directly referencing the controversies surrounding Harvard in recent months. “Now look, our University is certainly imperfect,” he said, “but I am proud to stand today alongside our graduating class, our faculty, and our president, with the shared conviction that this ongoing project of veritas is one worth defending.”

Reimann’s remarks come after months of contention between Harvard and the federal government. Protests, reports of antisemitism, and funding withdrawals have left the University in a precarious position but a student body who, as Reimann emphasized, is “proud” of administrative dissent. 

Spanning nearly 50 years, both speeches reflect how, in moments of national uncertainty, the Senior English Address serves as more than just a farewell—it becomes a statement about what Harvard is, and what its students are asked to carry forward. 

Natalie Cooper ’28 (natalie.cooper@harvard.edu) writes News for the Harvard Independent.