The Silence and the Warning: What Stanford's 2025 Commencement Missed

Stanford Once Warned of War. This Year, It Didn’t.

On a bright Sunday, June 15th 2025, Stanford University invited Olympic champion Katie Ledecky to deliver its commencement address. A woman of unquestionable discipline and grace, Ledecky spoke to the Class of 2025 about perseverance, excellence, and purpose. Yet in a moment when the world teeters on the edge of catastrophe—when missiles fly between Israel and Iran, and conflict still burns in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and beyond—her speech made no mention of the grave realities facing humanity.

There was no allusion to war. No cry for peace. No reminder that the graduates stepping into the world today may be asked to solve global crises tomorrow.

Her silence was not malicious. It was measured, strategic, and likely guided by a speechwriting team. But it left a void.

To fill that silence, I turned back 85 years, to another June commencement on Stanford’s campus: June 16, 1940. That year, as war tore across Europe and Hitler's tanks rolled through France, Stanford’s president, Ray Lyman Wilbur, stood before the graduating class and said what needed to be said. His address, titled "The Freedom That Men Die For," is not just a speech—it is a moral reckoning.

Wilbur saw the world as it was, not as we wished it to be. "The world is speeding down the hill," he warned, describing how the very tools of progress—represented by the wheel—had been co-opted to bring about mass destruction. The wheel that once carried civilization forward had become the engine of tanks, of mechanized war, of torture devices.

He spoke of democracy not as a slogan but as a fragile inheritance, requiring constant vigilance and moral clarity. He spoke of freedom as something that must be protected, not taken for granted. And he did what so few leaders do today—he named the danger. He acknowledged that civilization itself was being "broken on the wheel."

Wilbur’s words are a challenge to us now. In 1940, before Pearl Harbor, before the United States had entered the war, he used a graduation ceremony not to pacify but to prepare. He did not entertain; he warned. He did not pander; he called forth conscience.

What does it mean, then, when in 2025 a brilliant young woman stands on the same stage, at a similarly perilous hour, and says nothing of the world’s pain?

This is not a critique of Katie Ledecky as a person. It is a critique of the cultural moment we are in—a moment that prefers comfort to confrontation, applause to truth, and neutrality to responsibility.

Wilbur called on his graduates to protect freedom, to resist regimentation, and to value human dignity over standardization. His was a speech of consequences.

Ledecky, for all her achievement, gave us a speech of inspiration without risk.

Today’s students deserve better. They deserve a commencement that not only celebrates their accomplishments but challenges them to be guardians of peace, justice, and freedom.

Ray Lyman Wilbur showed us what that looks like. We should listen. Before the wheels spin out again.