The following is the prepared text of remarks for delivery by Stanford President Jonathan Levin at the 135th Commencement Ceremony on June 14, 2026.

Most mornings for the last 36 years, I’ve started my day by walking across the Stanford campus. Much has changed. When I was an undergraduate student in the early 1990s, there was no Engineering Quad, no Children’s Hospital, no Knight business school campus, no Bing Concert Hall, no Far-illaga gym, not even a Near-illaga gym, no O’Donohue Family farm, and no Coupa Café. Also, no phones, so even with fewer buildings, I was often lost.

The absolute center of campus activity, and the main link with the outside world, was the Stanford Post Office. Everyone had to stop in White Plaza to pick up their mail, so there was always a gathering of students around the post office boxes. It was delightful; and, it’s no wonder that Stanford students invented the modern internet.

Obviously, the campus has been transformed.

But a great deal has endured: the beauty of the red tile roofs, the warmth of the California sun, the smell of night jasmine on a spring evening, the buzz and breadth of activity. Today, that means electric bikes, scooters, cyclists, tour guides walking backward; a few weeks ago, a group of students gave me a ride in their self-driving golf cart; and always, a few too many people risking disaster by looking down at their phones.

Walking past a classroom or a cluster of students, the topic might be a Langston Hughes poem, a Supreme Court case, or the latest advance in protein folding. Last year, when the CoDa building opened, I enjoyed stopping by in the evening to see Camille Utterback’s dramatic art installation and dozens of students studying in the atriums – problem sets I expect, although I know at least one film major who favors CoDa. This year, I made a point to walk nearly every day through the beautiful new Graduate School of Education, with students gathered at the outdoor tables.

Stanford is a place full of people who are deeply serious about what they are pursuing, whether it is a law degree, a dissertation on ceremonial Aramaic bowls, an honors thesis on market design, or a national championship in women’s golf. It is also a place where people don’t take themselves too seriously, where we are curious to learn from our peers and colleagues, and sometimes in awe of them.

That is why Stanford’s campus, for all the years I have walked across it, has felt open and expansive – an environment of discovery and collisions and new perspectives.

During your time here, this has been your home. You’ve taken challenging classes and conducted research. You’ve made friends and built communities. You’ve navigated tumultuous politics and the launch of a new technological era. You’ve been the ones talking about education and literature and computer science.

Class of 2026, you helped to rebuild Stanford traditions – Full Moon on the Quad, the Band Run, Flicks, Midnight Breakfast – and invent new ones: the On Call Café and line dancing. Many of you got to see Lake Lag – with water! This year, you even won back the Axe. Bravo!

I am confident that as Stanford graduates, you have learned a great deal. If we’ve really done our job, you will learn far more on the journey ahead.

The writer Wallace Stegner, who founded Stanford’s creative writing program, once wrote a lovely book about teaching. He talked about exposing students to ideas and inspiring them to write. He also said of teaching, “Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All one can do is encourage the will to explore.”

I know you’re leaving Stanford with that will.

Exploration and new perspectives

One of the Stanford moments of exploration and discovery I will remember from this year happened thousands of miles away from campus – when the Vera Rubin Observatory in South America saw first light and started to release images of the cosmos.

The observatory is conducting one of the most ambitious astronomy projects ever conceived. Every night, it takes a picture of a third of the southern sky.

The images are captured by the world’s largest digital camera, built by scientists and engineers here at Stanford.

The pictures – 20 trillion bytes of data each night – are sent back here to campus. Over the next 10 years, they will be combined to create the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which will help astronomers explore the structure and origins of the universe.

The discoveries that are coming from Rubin are possible because it looks at the sky in a different way. Most telescopes capture a narrow slice of the sky. Rubin surveys a vast swath.

The history of astronomy has many examples where new perspectives led to discovery. Galileo used an early telescope to help prove that the Earth orbited the sun.

The telescopes that improved on Galileo allowed astronomers to define the rings of Saturn and measure the distance between stars. The trade-off was that the images they produced were upside-down and reversed.

The inversion must have been incredibly disorienting. But a different perspective gave clearer views and a better understanding.

Sometimes – perhaps – often disorientation comes before things resolve into greater understanding. I expect that, too, is an experience that you’ve had here at Stanford.

Friction and illumination

At Stanford, not everyone studies the universe through a telescope, but we are all constantly asked to shift our perspectives. Universities are designed to bring together people with a vast array of expertise and different ways of looking at, and thinking about, the world.

This is a great power of the university. In a few moments, we will confer degrees from seven schools. Among you are artists and physicians, humanists and pioneers of technology; political scientists, lawyers, educators, and physicists. Each of you brought to Stanford a different background and different interests. Each of you has had the freedom to navigate your own path, and to forge relationships, hopefully lifelong ones, with your peers.

That panoply is distinctive to American universities, and essential to our educational mission, especially to providing a broad liberal education. The best learning, insights, and solutions come from the freedom to think and from connecting disparate ideas. That is why the campus is designed to create intersections and discussions and friendships.

A campus with a broad range of views is not always easy. The proximity creates friction. There is friction in bringing together people who think about the world in different ways, have different aspirations, perhaps value different things. But when the university is at its best, the friction is illuminating. It generates light rather than heat. That is what we try to accomplish at Stanford.

So as you graduate, I encourage you to explore, to be ready to shift perspectives, and to not shy away from friction, but in doing so, to seek to bring light – to the people around you and to the world.

Class of 2026, congratulations!