Professor Thomas S. Mullaney's 2024 Commencement Speech

Hello everyone! My name is Tom Mullaney, and I’m a Professor of History here at Stanford.

We are overjoyed to be together today, to celebrate and honor our graduates from the Department of History. Welcome to our colleagues, friends, parents, guardians, grandparents, siblings, and significant others… with a special Happy Father’s day greeting to any fathers in attendance… and of course! Welcome to our graduates!!!

Does anyone have the time?

Sorry, I should specify: I’m not asking what time it is. I meant it literally: Who has the time? Time itself. The linkage between our present, our past, and thus our future?

I’ll make it more personal. Has anyone here ever taken the time to label and date every one of your family photos? Not some of them, I mean. But all of them? Thousands. Perhaps tens of thousands. Painstakingly writing out the full legal name of each person pictured, geographic information, the works, all in permanent, archival-grade ink?

Of course, you haven’t. No one has.

The vast majority of graduation cards that will be shared today will read things like “Congratulations Angela, we love you.“ You did it, Anusha.”

That’s not because we’re lazy. It just makes sense. You know who your child is. They know who their sister is. When it comes to everyday life, the situation of life itself gives us all the footnotes we need.  

And above all this, it takes energy—precious, scarce energy—to keep our lives together. Bills. Meetings. Our bodies themselves. Each and every time a cell in the body divides, as many as 10 new mutations can form, an accumulation of trillions of mutations each day that the body needs to account for to keep us together and to keep us going. Continuity and coherence don’t come easy and they don’t come cheap. And so when the choice confronts us—to keep the present intact, or to keep the past intact—the present always wins. 

Well, almost always. And here I turn to our graduates. You chose to be the keepers of time: of our coherence and continuity. You chose to find and restitch the infinite number of unspoken, implicit links we take for granted in our day to day lives—as many as you can, at least—in graduation cards and beyond. And then you turn what you find into stories, constrained by evidence, so that the rest of us can enjoy continuity, not just in the here and now, but across time.

As if that weren’t difficult enough, you’re picky about it. O SO PICKY! Not just any continuity satisfies you. There are continuities out there—store-bought, simplistic varieties, given to us by hatred, extremism, received yet unscrutinized wisdom—and these simply won’t do. And so, just as often, you put on your hard hats, and once again jackhammer open the asphalt of “reality” to re-examine the infrastructure beneath, all while impatient drivers curse you under their breath for upsetting their ride to or from work.

As historians, it’s not that you have the time either. As historians, you make time. And for that we owe you our gratitude.

But let’s get practical. I’m talking LinkedIn profile practical. Transferrable skills practical. What do your graduates know how to do more than almost anyone else? In a word, they know how to stay. To stay in the only place where humanity has ever found questions worth asking, or answers worth giving: in complexity.

The trailer truck arrives, opposing counsel trying to bury your law office in discovery, hiding the needle of their misdeeds, not in a haystack, but in crates upon crates of other needles. Crisis breaks out, engulfing your newsroom, your board room, your emergency room (our graduates take jobs everywhere under the sun) with a problem so complex it at first seems like pure chaos.

There are 2 natural and human responses to complexity like this. To escape or to simplify. To take refuge in silly, simple, dopamine-hacking games. Or to try to destroy this complexity, reduce it to simplicity, and thereby bring about so-called “peace.” The first instinct is escapism. The second, nothing short of totalitarianism.

Thanks to your historians, though, there is a third way: to pour a second cup of coffee and to stay. To hear, but not heed, the neurophysical sirens in our minds, telling us we are in danger, and instead to stay in this discomfort. And to continue to stay, not until the “right answer” presents itself like an epiphany, but the right questions. To turn chaos into questions. Questions into methods. And all of this into problems that can be solved.

And so on behalf of your families, your friends, your teachers, we thank you for being the keepers of time, because more than ever, the world needs people willing and able to stay.

Indeed, I cannot fathom a skill that we more desperately need in the present moment.

So please, whatever is next for you, please stay. And please stay in touch.

Congratulations.