John Palfrey Delivers 2025 Commencement Address at Kent School

Kent School

Commencement Address

John Palfrey, June 1, 2025

Thank you, Mr. Hirschfeld, for the great honor of serving as this year’s Commencement speaker at Kent School.

A commencement is about many things all rolled into one. Of course, first and foremost, we gather here to celebrate each of the students who graduates today and moves on to a new chapter of life. And we celebrate the families and friends who supported the graduates, the teachers and the staff who guided their way, and all those who have made Kent School a strong institution over the generations. 

Parents—let me please issue a huge thank you and congratulations to you in particular. You have given a great gift to your Kent student to support them in attending this extraordinary school. As a parent of two former boarding school students, who are both now college students, I know the sacrifice of letting them out of your sight—as well as the many costs in involved. I’m also acutely aware of the life-long benefits of this kind of education. Thank you for giving this great gift to your Kent graduates.

But commencement: what a curious word to use to describe an event that celebrates the end of an academic journey?

A commencement is also importantly about the start of something new—hence the name. Today, you commence the next phase of your life. 

It’s a day to celebrate, yes, but also to think hard about what you now bring with you into the next stage of your lives—whether right off to college, to a gap year, or to do something else.

In planning for this day, I spent some time learning about Kent School and what you stand for. More important than all the academic programs, the impressive facilities, the illustrious alumni—in my view anyway—are the values and the mission that guide you. The values are what defines a great and enduring institution like Kent School:

Simplicity of Life.

Directness of Purpose.

Self-Reliance. 

I am sure you have heard those terms over and over in the past few years, if Mr. Hirschfeld and your teachers here are anything like I was when I was the Head of School at Andover.

It is not possible to know where you are going if you don’t know where you’ve been and what you’ve got in reserve to help you when things get tough. Thanks to Kent, and thanks to your families, I know for a fact that you have some good things in that backpack to help you press through the most challenging of the days ahead.

One of the things that all of us brings with us in life is a family story. Whether or not you know your family history well or only a little bit, whether you have a huge family and lots of relationships or just a family member or two on whom to rely; whether you came here from New York City or Mexico City or Seoul, Korea; whether your family came from China to Cambridge, Massachusetts before you made your way here—we all have a family and we all have a family story. 

Another way to describe a family story is to call it a legacy. I know some people have mixed views about what a “legacy” is these days. But if you think about it, we all have a legacy, like it or not, one way or other—a legacy that our ancestors gave to us. We also have an incredible opportunity: we all have the chance to create our own legacies, through our own lives. It’s not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. It’s our job, I think, to make our legacy a good one—to make it a good thing to the extent we can.

Today, each of you adds a piece to your family legacy: you are a graduate of Kent School. Whether or not you have children or grandchildren who come here too, your family in the future will always say about you, “oh, she went to Kent.” It will be—I promise you—a point of pride, a lovely thing. Each of you has created a new family legacy by coming here, by doing the work, whether you are the first generation here or the umpteenth. This is something you’ve added to your own backpack and the backpack of your family members to come.

Simplicity of Life, Directness of Purpose, Self-Reliance. 

I love these values—and even though I am not, like you all, a Kent School graduate, they resonate for me and remind me of the values I bring through life. They remind me, too, of the family legacy and family values I carry every day.

A part of the family legacy that I carry with me is a well-known great-great-grandfather, Theodore Roosevelt. TR, as you may know, was president of the United States from 1901 until 1908. 

While he is widely regarded as one of the great presidents in our nation’s history, TR was also a man of his time and his social class. He got a number of things wrong: he said a lot of things that demonstrated a mistaken view of the talents and abilities of others. That’s a part of the legacy I get to carry around with me and to grapple with—and also to do something about, to create a more inclusive society than the one he and his peers imagined.

On the flip side, Theodore Roosevelt said lots of things that I bring with me every day in my own backpack—inspiring things that help propel me forward, especially when I face a challenge—and, by the way, we all do, no matter how old, how rich, how powerful, how good-looking (not that I would know!) we become. We all have our challenges, our crosses to bear.

Here are a few of TR’s quotes that I love:

“Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are.” That makes sure that I make no excuses, that I do what is in my power and my power alone, every day that I am able. I think this quote connects directly to your values of Directness of Purpose and Self-Reliance.

“Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” This is an African proverb that he loved to repeat. I think of this one as a reminder to make sure that my actions speak more loudly than my words. This one connects to all three of your values, in my book.

But by far my favorite, and the one with which I will conclude, is this:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” 

You may have heard this speech before or seen a quote from it. For instance, Lebron James likes it too: he often wears shoes with the hashtag #ManInTheArena on them.

I love this quote, which comes from a speech to students in France at the Sorbonne in 1910, because it reminds us all to do something with whatever we have—whatever our skills, abilities, family legacies might be. Whatever you have in your backpack, you have a way to contribute to the greater good, to make something happen, to make some kind of a difference in the world at large. 

Let me be clear that I am not against critics; in fact we need some critics; and I am certainly not against critical thinking. But Theodore Roosevelt was right when he said that the person who counts—and of course it could be someone of any gender, not just a man—is the one in the arena.

Every one of you, each student who graduates from Kent today, has the choice and the ability to become the person in the arena. I don’t pretend to know what that will mean for you exactly. 

What kind of a legacy will you build for your family? How will you build upon the legacy you were born with, the legacy you have now built through your time at Kent? To which worthy causes will you devote what you have and what you will become? I don’t know, of course, but I’m really excited for all of you, and for the rest of us who get to watch what you do. 

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I hope you will bear with me as I tell one final, short story from my current work that someday might resonate with you. These days I no longer work at a school, but instead am president of a charitable foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, based in Chicago. What we do is give money to charities to do good work—in every one of the 50 states here in America and also in Nigeria and India in particular.

A few months ago, a former Andover student reached out to me to see if she could stop by to see me in my office in Chicago. I said of course. She stopped by clutching a small bunch of flowers and a big smile.

She told me she wanted to come by to revisit her younger self, the student who had attended Andover and listened to me speak, over and over, in the chapel years before. 

She had been very successful since graduating from high school and college. She had good job that she enjoyed and no reason to make a change. 

But she was struggling with her next steps, with her future work. It wasn’t that she was having trouble getting work, it was just that she wasn’t sure if the work she was doing would end up being fulfilling. The reason she made it to my office, with a clutch of flowers in her hand, is that she wanted to talk about Andover’s values, values that had sunk in deep for her as a high school student.

I was delighted to talk about these values. The values were the reason I moved my family to Andover, after all, to become its head of school. And I appreciated that she wanted to remember who she was, her younger self, defined by these values.

And then she surprised me: she wanted to tell me about an All School Meeting address I had given that she could not get out of her head. It was one about a time in my life when I had left a lucrative private sector job for a job in academic life. It had to do with an elevator ride and a high rise office in Boston, when I had been a young attorney at a big law firm. 

I was surprised that she remembered it, after a decade, and was pleased that something had resonated over all that time. You see, when you are a head of school—well, I should say, when I was head of school—one worries that students never remember a word you say, no matter how carefully crafted your addresses, no matter how lovingly they are delivered.

What didn’t just surprise me but astonished me, in my office in Chicago: this former student proceeded to restate that All School Meeting address back to me more or less word for word. I mean–down to inflections and pauses. I couldn’t have been more surprised, or more humbled.

What she taught me in that sweet, short, unexpected visit was about finding out who you are. 

These are dramatic times in our world. No matter your view on what is going on, whether you think it is a good thing or less good, there is no denying this is a period of extraordinary change.

This former student of mine was taking the most advantage of this disruption, this period of change as she could–to do real introspection, to dig back deep into what she valued most, what was most resonant and most memorable. That process led her right back to her version of this moment—back to her younger self as an Andover student, back to the values that had shaped her world-view.

In life there will be times of trial for every human being. You should not be afraid of these moments. They come with an upside: these are the times when you find out who you are. It is when you find out which values, which commitments, are most important to you. Mine, it turns out, tie tightly and sincerely to the values of the high school I attended and the one which I served as Head of School. It is a big part of why I was so delighted to be asked to honor you all today on the occasion of your Commencement.

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And back to you, graduates of Kent School in the Class of 2025. I am so happy for you that you will be bringing with you the values that you have steeped yourself in here: Simplicity of Life, Directness of Purpose, Self-Reliance. My guess is that you will return to these ideas over and over again—both explicitly and also in ways you won’t exactly know why. You will bring with you your own family values and legacy—and shape new ones as you go forth and prosper.

Yes, the future into which you graduate is uncertain. But you can know that some things are certain indeed: that you have done the work to get yourself here. That your school, Kent School, will endure and will imbue in others these same values—and that your teachers and staff here will welcome you back to touch base—they will welcome you back here, home again when you need it later in life. Most of all, you can go forward knowing you are ready to shape the world, a person in the arena, yes, self-reliant, and also one who can and will make difference for others.

Congratulations once again, graduates and families, and Godspeed.