Oliverian Graduation 2026 — Liz Cleveland, Faculty Speaker
Thank you, Abby. Thank you to my colleagues, to the families and friends of our graduates, and most especially to the Class of 2026. I am honored to have been selected as your graduation speaker.
In accepting this honor, however, I felt no small degree of uncertainty. Most commencement speakers are chosen on the basis of their remarkable achievements. Having achieved awe-inspiring success and reached the pinnacle of their careers, they are asked to share some of their hard-earned wisdom and perspective with the graduating students. I, on the other hand, am more often mistaken for one of the students. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to have some thought-provoking wisdom to share with you. I just wasn’t sure that I’ve lived long enough, or been an adult for long enough, to acquire the wisdom in the first place.
When I was about the age you are now, I took a class that introduced me to the concept of “liminal spaces.” The word liminal comes from the Latin word limen, or threshold (I just made Julie P really happy!). It refers to rituals that celebrate the transitional periods in a person’s life. Once you know what to look for, you start seeing them all over the place in various religions and cultures: pilgrimages, periods of fasting, and coming of age ceremonies. In our own culture, graduation acts as a liminal space because it is, itself, a kind of coming-of-age ceremony. You walked into this room as high school students, and you will leave this room as high school graduates. Right now, as you sit on this stage, you are neither–you are in an in-between space, a liminal space, between these two stages of your life. You stand on the threshold between student and graduate, between childhood and adulthood.
As recently as it may have been, I have crossed that threshold, which means that I can look back across it with at least a little bit of perspective. And as I gathered my thoughts for this morning, I did look back across that liminal space to my teenage self. That version of myself has a lot in common with all of you, because she also attended a boarding school. So, in an attempt to describe what a disorienting and profound and revelatory experience boarding school can be, I will defer to my sixteen year old self, who described the experience in real time. And that version of myself, in the midst of some otherwise rather fluffy sixteen-year-old musings, wrote this: “I belong at my high school, it’s true, but because of that I also belong nowhere. In a way, we all came here in order to prepare ourselves for what happens after we leave.”
We all came here in order to leave. This is the paradox that lies at the heart of everyone’s boarding school experience, I think, and perhaps nowhere more so than here, at Oliverian. For so many people, Oliverian is more of a stop along the way, rather than their intended destination. The destination is college, or a career, or a fulfilling, independent life. Even in my own case, my high school was not the endpoint of my educational journey, but rather a means to a collegiate end. And everything that you have done during your time here–every class, every project, every counseling session, every weekend trip, every meal, every load of laundry–is in pursuit of that end. It is, more specifically, in pursuit of helping you to become the person who will attain that end. In other words, everything that you do here is a continuous, experiential answer to the question, “What kind of person do I want to become?”
I think this is what my sixteen year old self was getting at when I said that, because I belonged at my high school, I also didn’t belong anywhere. It’s natural for all of us to do quite a bit of growing and changing in our teenage years, but, as those of us who have been through boarding school will know, it’s a very singular experience to do all that growing and changing in a place that isn’t your permanent home. You spend months at a time in this environment that is singlemindedly devoted to your academic and personal development, you undertake the monumental task of transforming into your young adult self and making a life for yourself here, and then you go back home–only to discover that the outside world has been chugging slowly along as usual in the meantime, without you. You may begin to feel that, because you have become someone who belongs at your school, you don’t quite fit into your old life in the way you once did–but, then again, you haven’t quite finished your transformation into someone who is ready for your adult life, either. So there you stand, with one foot in the life you had before you came here, and the other in the life you hope to live after you leave here–and neither foot firmly planted where you are right now.
In that sense, we might think of your entire Oliverian experience as a liminal space–a space designed to bridge the gap between childhood and adulthood. I had a professor who once described my college that way: a period of time in which we went out into the wilderness of rural Ohio, to remove ourselves from the daily concerns of the world and focus on our personal and intellectual development. Then, after graduation, we would return to the real world and begin our lives in a place where we wouldn’t have to drive twenty minutes to get to the nearest grocery store. I may have missed the memo on that last bit.
In retrospect, however, I think this is a dangerous line of thinking, and in order to explain why, I must turn to the second definition of a liminal space. This is a liminal space not in a spiritual sense, but in a physical one. This kind of liminal space exists to get our bodies from one place to another–like a hallway, or a train station. It is somewhere that we pass through in order to reach our destination, rather than being the destination itself. Someone on perhaps the Internet’s most reliable source–I’m speaking, of course, of Reddit–summed it up even more succinctly: a liminal space is “a place designed to not be a place.”
Well now. “A place designed to not be a place” is such a direct inversion of the line that is, by now, familiar to all of us at Oliverian, “a place to find your place,” that it gave me pause. It’s easy, I think, to write off one’s time at boarding school–Oliverian or otherwise–as an interlude or even worse, an interruption, in one’s life. It’s easy to be so concerned about where you will be in the future that you forget to be where you are, right now. But there is no such thing as a stage of our life that means nothing to us, or contains nothing of value. The things you have learned here, whether voluntarily or (as is often the case) involuntarily, will carry you forward to the next place you go. So will the relationships you have formed, and the passions you have developed, and all the other wonderful things that have helped you to define the person you are right now, as you stand on this stage and prepare to celebrate all you have accomplished.
Ok, so great. You’ve found your way through the wilderness, you’ve done the work of finding your place here, you’re about to get a diploma and a nice handshake from Abby Hood to prove it. Now what? Finding your place here is all very well, but, as my sixteen-year old self has pointed out, your time here is temporary. How do you find your place in a way that lasts, when moments from now you will leave this one behind and move on to a new one?
This is the part where I think I’m supposed to give you some helpful advice about how to do that, but I don’t think I need to. You have spent every day of your time at Oliverian discovering who you are, and who you want to be. If all of us–you very much included–have done our jobs correctly, you are leaving equipped with skills and interests that you did not previously possess. Those skills and interests will help you to determine what “your place” means more than I ever could. At some point in your life, you will probably encounter some place where your skills and interests are not valued in the way that they should be–in other words, a place that is not meant for you. Indeed, you may find many such places. But, as long as you don’t get discouraged, as long you continue to search for your place, I have no doubt that each of you has the ability to succeed. I can say this with total confidence because I have seen each of you do it already. Whether for six months or two years or more than that, every one of you has made a home for yourself at Oliverian. You have found your own way of belonging here.
I don’t mean to suggest, by the way, that the person you are right now, the version of you who has found your place at Oliverian, will remain static. In fact, I very much hope that you won’t. I hope that you will continue to grow. I hope you will find new music that you love, and new art, and tv shows, and restaurants, and museums, and books, and ideas. I hope you will try different hobbies, take up a sport, find ways to express yourself, learn new things, and make spectacularly big mistakes. I hope, most especially, that you will always be surrounded by people who you love, and who love you back. All of those things will change you, as they should. They will help you to become another version of yourself, someone who belongs in another place.
There are going to be a lot of other places in your life, besides Oliverian, that will become your place. They’re already out there, scattered across time and space, waiting for you to go find them. They will all be wonderful in their own ways. But I hope that this one, this place, will always be special to you–just as my high school is special to me–because this one came first. This is the place where you learned what finding your place is supposed to feel like.
I remember the moment during my freshman year when I started to feel like I belonged at my high school. It’s one of those classic boarding school prank stories, involving my roommate’s bed and a box of 800 rubber ducks. Ridiculous as it may sound, running around the dorm with my friends to pull off that silly prank changed me, just a little bit. That was the first moment I felt like I was on my way to becoming someone who could make a home for myself, independent of my family, or the house where I grew up, or any of the other things that made up my life before. I hope all of you have a memory like that from your time here. I hope you have dozens of them.
In the midst of all the confusion of that prank, a stray rubber duck ended up on the floor of my dorm room. Not knowing what else to do with it, I put it on my dresser, next to my alarm clock. It became a reminder for me that home is something you have to carry with you, something you have to make wherever you are. Boarding school was never a place designed to not be a place. In a way, it was the opposite: it was the place that made all the other places possible. It was the place where I discovered that I held within me the ability to find my place–not only there, but anywhere that I went.
That little duck sat next to my alarm clock for all four years of high school. Every time I moved somewhere new, it moved with me: to England, to Ohio, to Boston. It is sitting on my dresser right now, in my apartment, at a little school in Pike, New Hampshire. And it will sit there for a few days more–and then I, too, will pack up my things and move somewhere new. I will put the rubber duck back on my dresser and start finding my place all over again.
When you find your place, you become someone who belongs there. And all those versions of yourself, all the places you’ve ever found, become something that you take with you. And they will help you find the next one.
You came here in order to find your place, and now it is time to go find your place. You came here in order to leave. And now it is time to leave.
Class of 2026. My dear students. I am more proud of you than words can say. I wish you good luck this summer, and next year, and in all the places that your lives will take you. Be safe, be smart, be brave, be kind. And don’t forget the place you found here. Congratulations.
