Editor’s Notes: Delivered by former professor Robert Reich, this UC Berkeley Keynote Address 2026 is an inspiring commencement speech dedicated to celebrating the graduating class. Reich emphasizes that the most profound lesson from their university years is to remain lifelong students, viewing learning as a continuous journey driven by curiosity and community. He challenges the graduates to embrace leadership as a moral vocation by preserving democracy, protecting the powerless, and speaking truth to power in an increasingly unequal world. Concluding with a message of profound affection, Reich expresses his absolute confidence that the empathy and energy of the new graduates will make the world a much better place. (May 18, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
Opening Remarks
ROBERT REICH: I’ll be short. Thank you, Shay. Staff, administrators, alumni, parents, significant others, insignificant others. And finally and most importantly, members of the great class of 2026. It is a profound honor to be with you today.
Now, I know every commencement speaker probably says this. The graduates down on that little farm in Palo Alto will probably find somebody to say how honored they are to speak there, but as we all know, those other places are not Berkeley. Yeah!
Now others today have referred to Berkeley as the best public university in the world. I think that understates the reality. Berkeley is the best university in the world.
Now, I may be accused of some bias. I had the privilege of teaching here for 17 wonderful years. Yet as someone who attended and taught in other places, I can honestly say that nowhere is quite like Berkeley.
Yes, it’s beautiful. Yes, the weather is superb. Yes, its faculty are world renowned. But more than anything, this place is best because of you. The best students I have ever had the honor of teaching.
You are exceptionally curious, remarkably kind, amazingly smart, and you care extraordinarily about each other.
On Teaching, Learning, and Berkeley
Three years ago I taught my last big class, my last big undergraduate course in Wheeler Hall. Some people call what happened next retirement. I hate that word. I didn’t retire. I just graduated to the next stage.
But here’s the truth. The truth is I have missed you. In fact, maybe one of the reasons why I’m talking to you today is because you took pity on me and decided you wanted me to talk to you as your commencement speaker, and you wanted me to stop roaming around the campus telling everybody how much I missed you.
There is a reason why both professors and students have such affection for this place. While your time here is relatively brief, in the span of what hopefully will be a long and happy life, the bonds formed here, the people you met, the way you learned to think, the passage from childhood to adulthood will never leave you.
Do you remember beginning your formal education, maybe the first day of kindergarten? Do you remember? My memory is a little fuzzy on that score because that was back when Abraham Lincoln was president.
The Secret We Never Told You
But if you think that you are now leaving your student days behind, I want to let you in on a little secret. It’s a secret that we on the faculty have not told you, but now is the time for you to know.
You may have had your last final exam and your last term paper, but the most important thing we have taught you is to be a student as long as you are alive. Life is about learning.
While our job as professors has been to teach you, what makes being a professor so rewarding, especially in a place like this, is that we are also learning from you. To be a teacher is also to be a student. To be a student is to be a teacher. Two parts of the same impulse, to engage with a world continuously replenished by curiosity and community. I see in teaching and learning an embrace of life itself.
Think about how much of who you are now you have learned from the people now sitting next to you in their caps and gowns. And think of what you have been able to teach them.
Leadership as a Moral Vocation
A question that often haunts me is who will be the teachers tomorrow? Not only in the formal classroom sense, although classroom teachers are desperately needed, but also in the larger sense of helping make sense of the world and showing the way forward. That is, leading.
You do not need to be cloaked in formal authority to be a leader. You don’t need a fancy title. You don’t need a big office. You certainly don’t need to be a cabinet secretary to be a leader. Many of our most important leaders through history have had no formal title. Martin Luther King Jr., Dolores Huerta, Rosa Parks, W.E.B. Du Bois, Susan B. Anthony.
To be a leader, you need to understand where we should be heading and why, what we need to do to get there, and how to summon the intelligence and energies of many people to help accomplish it. In other words, leadership is a moral vocation. Leadership is a moral vocation.
The Purpose of Learning
We live in a world obsessed with doing things. We’ve invented incredible tools. Machines, robots, now AI. I appreciate your response.
But a much more interesting problem, and more important than what we are doing, is why we’re doing it. Engineers are already designing headphones that can simultaneously translate other languages. It’s absolutely remarkable. But the purpose of learning, and the purpose of learning even a foreign language, is not just in order to learn how to order a beer in Belgium. It’s to teach ourselves how to see the world from different perspectives and connect with people who have other ways of living and knowing.
As I used to tell my students, “The very best way of learning anything is to talk with people who disagree with you.”
The purpose of so much of what you’ve learned and will learn is not just to master complicated concepts or solve difficult problems, but to understand why you have mastered these concepts and problems.
What you might do with your mastery and how they could help you connect with others in mastering, or at least improving, your community, your society, the world.
A Personal Journey to Berkeley
I speak from some experience. I did not discover much of this until I was in my 50s. That’s when I came to teach here, the best university in the world.
Now at the time, I’ve got to be candid with you. At the time, I was running for governor of Massachusetts. And I came to the Bay Area to raise money for my campaign. That’s the worst part of campaigning. I absolutely hated it.
I stopped for a cup of coffee at Cafe Strada. And it suddenly hit me. A bolt of light. The clouds opened. It was a day that suddenly became a sunny day. I realized I didn’t want to be governor of Massachusetts. I wanted to be a professor at Berkeley, a public university that prizes education as a public good, where I could teach a diverse group of brilliant students who would help heal the world.
Now thankfully, the good people of Massachusetts saw the light and they decided they didn’t want me to be their governor. And luckily for me, the Berkeley faculty decided they did want me to be a professor here. And so I left Massachusetts and I came to Berkeley. Amazing.
It was like the moment in the movie The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy opens the window of her house that’s fallen into Oz, and everything is in technicolor. That’s really what it’s about. Sometimes getting caught up in a tornado, occasionally coming down with a crash, and if you’re fortunate, opening your window and seeing the beauty of the world you’ve landed in.
The Wave of Youthful Energy
One lesson you’ve taught me is that you are part of an incredible wave of youthful energy, empathy, and intelligence. Whenever I despair, which these days is more often than I’d like to admit, I just take a stroll through the campus, past the Campanile, through Sproul Plaza, under the towering redwoods, and I see the flyers on the bulletin boards, the intricate group dances being rehearsed.
I see you coming to and from classes, and I’ve got a feeling that the nation and the world are not just going to be okay. You will also make them better. Much, much better. Much, much better.
Democracy, Authoritarianism, and Our Responsibility
But I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you, if you hadn’t noticed, that we’re in trouble right now. With each passing day, the systems that have been in place in this nation for nearly 250 years to advance democracy and prevent authoritarianism are under ever greater strain.
Why is democracy so important and authoritarianism so dangerous? Because the moral purpose of a civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise we would be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful would survive.
This moral imperative lies at the center of America’s founding documents. It’s also at the core of the post-war international order championed by the United States, emphasizing multilateralism, human rights, and the rule of law.
Now let me quickly admit it’s an aspiration we, in America, as the United States, have not always lived up to. Maintaining it has required that the powerful possess sufficient integrity and civic virtue, that they not abuse their power, and if they do, they are held accountable.
Yet we now live in a society and a world grown vastly more unequal. This itself invites the powerful to exploit the weaker, because in an extremely unequal society and world, some of the powerful come to feel omnipotent.
But let me be absolutely clear. Unfettered might does not make right. It makes for instability, upheaval, depravity, and war. History shows that norms and laws designed to constrain the powerful also protect the powerful. Without such constraints, their insatiable demands for more power and more wealth eventually bring them down along with their empires, their dynasties, or their nations, and threaten the entire world.
It’s the responsibility of every one of us and of this great university to do whatever we can to preserve democracy, fight authoritarianism, protect freedom of speech and expression, and treat all workers well. And treat all workers well.
It is the responsibility of all of us to seek the truth and speak truth to power, regardless of any pressures and threats the powerful may place on us. And it is our responsibility, our responsibility, all of ours, to work toward a society based on inclusion rather than exclusion.
Mind you, these ideals do not, should not, belong to one political party or one part of America. They are fundamental. They underpin the education you have received. They form the basis of our lives together. They are central to the meaning of a good society.
Closing: We Believe in You
Now I am not going to minimize the challenges you face. From authoritarianism to climate change to the job market and a world in turmoil. But I know that you will take what you have learned at this wonderful place and teach others what is worth doing, how to do it better, how to protect the powerless and hold accountable the powerful. This is the great unending chain of inspiration and responsibility. All of you are products of it, and all of you have the capacity to keep it going.
No pressure at all, but we are counting on you. We believe in you. We also love you. We also love you.
The people who have gathered here today to see you get your degrees, your families, your friends, your significant and insignificant others. We love you. We the faculty who have poured our hearts into teaching you and have learned so much from you. We love you.
And those of you embarking on the adult part of your life today, the part where you’re on your own, when your life is really yours, well, treat it as you would someone you love, too. I mean that. Not in order to boast or gloat. Certainly not in order to look down on anyone else, not to be rich or famous, but to learn to be you, authentically you, to know yourself, to be patient and kind to yourself, and to be the best version of you, you can possibly be.
You are the teachers and leaders the world needs. Thank you.
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