Commencement Cup 2023: Who Won the Woke Crown?

As Princeton Falters, Can Yale Keep Pace with Harvard?

Commencement season is come and gone, which means it is time to judge the state of our indoctrinated elite. True, much can be gained by examining curricular content, but the real measure of what matters to a college and its graduates is to be found in what they celebrate most proudly at the culmination of their studies. The days of Solzhenitsyn preaching against soulless secularism are long gone; Harvard didn’t get rid of its old motto, “For the Glory of Christ,” only to sit back and let some uppity foreigner make its students doubt that Cambridge-accredited man is the center of the universe. No, changes were made, and now all the best colleges make it a point of pride to live entirely by lies. The question no longer is which of our leading schools is hopelessly woke. What America wants to know is: which is the wokest? The tip of the groupthink spear, as always, is to be found in the Big Three: Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. While safety schools like CUNY are still insulting Israel like it’s the 1990s, the most prestigious members of the Ivy League look fearlessly to the mindless ideological trends of the future, like castrating children and judging people by the color of their skin. Which school wore wokeness best? Let’s go to the tape.   

Yale fielded a surprisingly weak lineup this year and did not have a strong woke showing at all. There were many elements in their commencement that would not have been out of place in any normal ceremony, as speakers comported themselves with dignity and provided generic messages of congratulation to the graduates. Even the honorees, such as eminent historian Robert Caro, seemed a deserving lot. This understandably caused great anxiety on campus, and satellite efforts were made to salvage the college’s reputation. The Yale School of Public Health, for instance, brought in noted Covid misinformation spreader Apoorva Mandavilli to assure its graduates that they were not the baddies. However, most Commencement analysts believe that doubling down on double masking seemed more of a panicked afterthought than a sincere attempt at groupthink. This just wasn’t Yale’s year.

With Yale stumbling, Princeton sensed an opportunity, and the Tigers pounced. Their president dedicated his Commencement address to celebrating a progressive potpourri of radical causes, from legal protection for corporate media lies to legal protection for showing porn to children, with plenty of CRT and DEI thrown in, finished off with a paean to an unrepentant communist . Even better, the only old white man to receive an honorary degree was the acceptable kind, one that dresses like a woman. All in all, in an off year, Princeton’s performance would have been enough to run away with the Commencement Championship – probably to Cuba.

But this was no off year. The Cambridge juggernaut was not going to take pediatric porn peddling lying down. They knew they would have to rise to the challenge, and they did. Harvard is the only remaining school of the Big Three to continue to require the Covid vaccine for all undergraduates, and that’s for a good reason – their campus is laser-focused on being the worldwide leader in progressive groupthink. If you want your leadership class willing to do anything, believe anything, inject themselves with anything, to show that they will always comply, this is the college to look to. At first glance, it seemed like festivities were to be headlined in atypically anodyne fashion, with Tom Hanks extolling the importance of truth. But Harvard could afford to play it loose by that point, and any initial excitement Princeton partisans may have felt upon seeing Hanks’ name on the program was sorely misplaced, for minutes before Hanks took the podium, history had already been made: “Vic Hogg, the University’s first nonbinary Commencement speaker, thanked all their peers who helped make this final semester possible.” In the historic Hogg’s memorable words, “I came here on a mission, to get land back to indigenous tribes, and to fight for queer and trans people.” Sorry Princeton, better luck next year.

The only way any other Ivy can compete going forward – maybe – is to castrate their valedictorian in real time, while giving each graduate a Covid booster as they accept their diploma. Even then, it might not be enough. Harvard will not relinquish its woke crown without a fight. Good luck to all the competitors as they make the necessary adjustments this crucial offseason, but the betting favorite looks to remain Crimson for the foreseeable future.

As the Big Three devours its children, normal people were graduating from college, too. Dr. Ben Carson spoke at Patrick Henry College, where graduation festivities include “the personal commissioning of each graduate for service to Christ and His Kingdom.” At Hillsdale College, Bishop Robert Barron – a middle aged white man who scandalously does not think he’s a woman – reminded graduates that we all worship something, and if it’s not God it will be a fruitless idol. As parents across the land survey this latest edition of the Commencement Cup, Barron’s message is well worth remembering: “everyone, even the most secular, the most unchurched, operates under the aegis of something he or she considers supreme, some summum bonum, some highest good.” Take a look at what your child’s “dream” college celebrated as its highest good at this year’s festivities, and ask yourself: is that what I want my kids to worship?