The commencement address has become something of a mini-genre in US oratory. Celebrity writers, statesmen and stateswomen, and superstar CEOs are routinely invited to offer their wisdom to a class of new graduates at a university — and that wisdom travels around the world on YouTube.
The more famous the speaker, the better, and the more cornball the wisdom, cynics might say, the further it travels. Here is something whose conventions marry classical oratory (the affirmation of group identity; the nod to history; the exhortatory vision of the future) with the modern vogue for self-actualisation and positive thinking.
Steve Jobs, David Foster Wallace, Bill Gates and J K Rowling have delivered classics of the genre. Barbara Bush (as I noted here in this column a few weeks ago) made a memorable contribution.