The following is the full transcript of American historian Victor Davis Hanson’s commencement speech titled “Honor, Tradition, and Optimism” which was given at Hillsdale College’s 173rd Commencement Ceremony on May 11, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Thank you for that very kind introduction, Dr. Arnn. I want to offer gratitude and thanks to the Hillsdale senior class here for this rare invitation and the honor of addressing you, the 2025 graduates of this renowned college. I think also the entire student body that’s assembled, past and present, the distinguished faculty, the astute board of trustees, the loyal parents that are here as well, and the honored guests, and of course, our singular president, Dr. Larry Arnn, who graciously hosted me the last 21 consecutive autumns at Hillsdale as a visiting professor of history and classics.
Hillsdale as a National Guide
Before we begin, can I offer just a brief contemporary observation? Has anyone noticed how the eyes of the nation suddenly, the last year, have turned to Hillsdale? This recent interest even surpasses the past considerable attention that the college had always garnered.
Take, for example, Harvard University. It wishes to be free of Washington, at least as the federal government is defined as the present administration. And yet, in its confusion, Harvard still wants $9 billion in federal monies. In answer, the public then directs Harvard to consult Hillsdale, whose model of disavowal of federal funds is longstanding. But yet, under examination, it’s far more principled. You see, Hillsdale’s declination of government money does not hinge on the particular administration in power, Republican or Democrat. Instead, its creed is that the federal government should not dictate to private, autonomous colleges that do not seek its federal subsidies.
And then again, when the Department of Education seeks to restore civic and classical education, it is also looking to Hillsdale. And again, when parents conclude that their public schools have failed to instill a serious and moral education in their own children, they, too, look at Hillsdale for mentoring.
So if in the past Hillsdale was an island of common sense, a sanctuary of all that was good amid a lost and aimless higher education, today it is more than nation’s guide to the rediscovery of personal integrity, of gratitude to the old breed before us, and happiness and hope about the future.
In other words, Hillsdale College has become the nation’s 21st century example of higher education, what it should have been, and yet what we can hope it might be in the future.
So today I would like to reflect on just these three sometimes forgotten American virtues that are here so prominently at Hillsdale: honor, tradition, and optimism. They all embody the Hillsdale campus, and such a code will guide today’s graduates from now on.
My First Impressions of Hillsdale
But let me explain first if I may, if you’ll indulge me by a way of anecdote. In my first year I set foot as a visiting professor at Hillsdale, it was 2004 in the autumn. I was struck on the first day of campus by what I thought were three very strange things, observations that seemed to me unique in my decades-long association with a number of campuses elsewhere.
First, on day one, I discovered that I left a bicycle unlocked on campus overnight. Yet when I walked over to campus the next morning expecting it to be either vandalized or stolen, after all I’m from California, there it was in the center of the now crowded campus, exactly as I had left it. There was something I had never experienced before on any modern campus, and certainly I had never seen such thing in California where I had taught for the prior 21 years.
Second, when a few minutes later I visited the bookstore to check on the book orders of my two classes, I was also stunned at this new place when I scanned the bookshelves. There was no Hillsdale therapeutic course titles like Peace Studies. There was no Environmental Studies. There was no Leisure Studies. There was no Film Studies. There was no Ethnic Studies. There was no Gender Studies. There was no Sexual Studies. There was no Nothing Studies.
And instead there were courses listed in all classical aspects of philosophy, literatures, language, history, mathematics, and science. Here I found only the disciplines that have endured for centuries. And ironically, they even have encompassed and grounded at Hillsdale, but in a much more serious way, the very content of these very studies classes that are not found on the Hillsdale campus.
So given the contemporary landscape of higher education, I thought, what a strange thing for this contemporary American college to trust in the brilliance of some 2,500 years of prior Western educators who in Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem first founded the disciplines and the boundaries of their all-encompassing knowledge.
How much odder that at Hillsdale, nearly alone, that these classes remain constant and uniquely unchanged from their very inceptions. Even as the intelligentsia of today insists on modern courses, therapeutic, novel classes, that they alone necessarily will explain our supposedly new and always changing human nature.
Third, from the moment I first set foot at Hillsdale to the minute I just arrived here Thursday night, I’ve noticed a third and now two decade-long campus anomaly. Students, faculty, and staff are happy. They smile. They say hello to strangers. They shake your hand. And that shared confidence is entirely natural. It’s innate to the point that when I, the stranger, initially remarked on the rare happiness of the campus, some associates said to me that I was the strange thing for expecting anything else at Hillsdale.
Now, we can shrug over how trivial these observations appear. But in fact, they are reflections, glimpses into the fundamental Hillsdale notion of confidence in our civilization and the need for fellowship and positivity to preserve it. And such happiness is quite different from modern campuses elsewhere, I can assure you.
There, the youthful frown is now a normal expression. The cold absence of greeting that seems the baggage of pseudo sophistication. And of course, there’s always the dourness of contrived seriousness and false maturity. It’s as on other campuses, it is as if students alone, unlike the electrician, the assembly line worker, or the farmer, they think they bear the weight of the global grievances and imperfections past, present, and future.
Again, not at Hillsdale.
The Virtue of Honor
Behind these three mundane incidents of a bicycle, a bookstore, and the buoyancy of the Hillsdale community, there are larger truths.
I’d like to mention the first: honor. You, the graduating class, have been instructed in, absorbed fully, and will pass on thus a code of honorable conduct that has become a natural, not a forced part of who you are. And it will remain with you in the long road ahead.
Hillsdale has taught you not to worry if you are not one with the current majority of youth. Because you are certainly one with most of the past and future generations. And your confidence in your code of ethical comportment and personal standards will help guide future cohorts and the nation itself to come.
Because your values are real, they’re permanent, and they are ancient, you will not be won over by others who justify their lapses of behavior by situational ethics. Victimization are the fads of the time. You see, without such individual vows of honesty and compassion for others, civilization in its aggregate cannot be sustained. It descends otherwise into the age-old veins of tribalism, disunity, and chaos.
Students at Hillsdale do not steal bicycles because their personal code of honor will forbid it, because they have concern that the poor victim would suffer without his property, and because they know that if many did just that, then their own culture and civilization would crumble, as indeed it has in many places in America today.
Much of our society’s current crisis derived from this personal inability to respect the property of others, to tell the truth, to stand up to the bully, to protect the weaker, and to end each day, in contemplation, that you were more a moral force for the common good than either a neutral observer or even on the wrong side of the moral ledger. When individual behavior and decorum falter, so does a country, which is, after all, only the common reflection of millions of its individuals.
The Value of Tradition
Second, I’d like to mention tradition and how it predominates the Hillsdale student body. The character of the Hillsdale student is nurtured and ingrained by tradition. That word is derived from the Latin noun traditio, a transmission or a handing down something from the past to the present to the future.
So often in this current age of presentism, we in our narcissism and arrogance confuse our amazing technical and material success with automatic moral progress. However, we seem unaware that thinkers of the past, dating back to the poet Hesiod 2,700 years ago, worried about just the opposite. With material progress and greater wealth often comes moral regress. Given the greater opportunities to gratify the appetites with perceived fewer consequences and to use sophistry to excuse the sin.
So too, without traditional reverence for the past, an ungrateful nation suffers not just knowledge loss, but is plagued by hubris, which is so often the twin of ignorance. And thus it believes that it alone has discovered ideas and behaviors unique to themselves and their own era when they are, in fact, ancient. This mindset seeks heaven on earth perfection instead of the good. And thus it obtains neither.
Are we not the sum total of all those who came before us, who for the most part here in America left us a system, a constitution, and an infrastructure that allowed us to start our own lives materially and safely far ahead of those elsewhere and our own generations prior?
And key to this new endangered idea of reverence for the past is a necessary warning that it is neither fair nor just to dismiss those of earlier generations by the standards of the present. Instead, we must remember that those in a premodern society were so often captives of illness and short lives, work so often was synonymous with physical danger and existential drudgery. And yet our predecessors were able to endure that suffering and challenges that we cannot even scarcely imagine.
The Hillsdale reverence, this rare reverence on this campus for the Western tradition and the American past is a reminder not so easily to condemn and erase the dead, lest you and your time shall be judged capriciously by future generations and found wanting. Judge not that you not be judged. And we will be judged in part by the medievalism of our dangerous cities of today, in the electronic cruelty of our internet, and in the fragmentation of the American modern family.
Optimism and the Counter-Revolution
And finally, I want to talk about the optimism that I discovered at Hillsdale and has energized me on every visit. So I want to end on a happy note. I do not want to be dour. Or my wife said as I left, be sure you’re not Debbie Downer, Victor.
I had first encountered this optimism, as I said, at Hillsdale, and I had not seen it on another campus. Your generation is now witness to a counter-revolution. There’s a counter-revolution unfolding of sorts where millions of your American are asking their culture and society to re-examine their behavior and to restore the ancient decency and to look for the good of the past generations and not judge them, as I said, so cavalierly.
Critical to this restoration is your optimism. That is the child of gratitude for all that we have inherited and all that we wish to enhance and to pass on to others not born. With optimism and confidence of the citizenry, a civilization grows, not shrinks. It becomes secure, not depressed or self-loathing. And it looks forward to the future with reverence for the past rather than ashamed of it.
It is now chic to be moody and pessimistic, but uncool to be upbeat and cheerful. But the strength of this country, even in the darkest days of April 12, 1861, or December 7, 1941, or September 11, 2001, has always been its singular ability to remain not just unshaken, but confidence in its values, in its unity, and its inherent strength to overcome all challenges.
The Role of Hillsdale Graduates
In this current counter-revolution that we are witnessing, an effort admittedly divisive to so many, it is not the duty nor the desire of Hillsdale to become a political player. Nonetheless, the nation looks for guidance, answers, and reassurance of the old wisdom. And therefore, it is only natural, as I said, that the college and its moral and intellectual architecture have become preeminent in a fashion scarcely imaginable in the past.
So you, the class of 2025 as Hillsdale graduates, will be asked by your peers in America to provide guidance as never before. And I am confident by your education, by your code of comportment, by your reverence for the past, and by your optimism, you will become natural leaders and exemplars in whatever path you follow. In your era to come, that will be, I think, America’s greatest renaissance, but also its most decent.
