On May 17, President Kumar spoke to the Class of 2026 at the annual Commencement Ceremony in the Academic Quad on the Medford/Somerville campus.
Watch the video of the president’s speech:
President Sunil Kumar
2026 Commencement Address
Sunday, May 17, 2026
Opening
Hello everyone! Warm welcome to our distinguished guests, Mayor Jake Wilson, families, friends, colleagues, and of course, the Class of 2026! [Applause]
Most things we celebrate, we achieve with the help of many others. Giving thanks and acknowledging support must go hand-in-hand with celebration.
Therefore, before I speak to the Class of 2026, let me take a moment to ask them to stand and recognize those who have made this day possible for them:
- parents…grandparents…siblings…partners…children…and friends
- teachers, members of the faculty, deans, coaches, advisors, and staff.
Graduates, please stand and acknowledge these individuals. [Applause]
Thank you. Please be seated.
Your future life as a grader
Except for those among you who are heading off to graduate or professional school, the rest of you are feeling pretty good about a future without exams and without grades. In a literal sense that may prove true, but in a broader sense nothing could be further from the truth. Not only will your work be evaluated throughout your life, you will become an evaluator. You will need to evaluate not just others’ work but the information they give you.
In short, welcome to your new life as a grader. And there is no better time to start practicing grading than right now.
Grading! As exciting as watching paint dry. [Laughter] Hang on to your mortarboards – I think this will prove both exhilarating and terrifying.
No…I have not completely lost my marbles.
Terrifying and exhilarating
Let’s start. Imagine that you have been given a short passage to evaluate that answers the question, “Can beauty help determine truth?”
Indulge me while I read it to you.
The notion that beauty guides us towards truth has captivated thinkers from Plato to modern physicists. This aesthetic criterion for knowledge—that elegant explanations deserve our trust—reveals something profound about human cognition and perhaps reality itself.
In mathematics and physics, beauty has proven a surprisingly reliable compass. Paul Dirac famously declared that equations describing nature must be beautiful, a conviction that led him to predict antimatter before any experimental evidence existed. When multiple theories explain the same data, practitioners consistently prefer the more elegant formulation—and history often vindicates this preference.
Yet beauty as truth-finder carries dangers. Aesthetic intuitions are culturally conditioned and historically contingent. The universe owes us no beauty; it may be fundamentally messy, its deepest truths encoded in equations that offend our sensibilities.
Perhaps the resolution lies in recognizing beauty not as truth's guarantor but as its frequent companion.
[Pause]
Sounds pretty highfalutin and good, doesn’t it? It was an odd and slippery question to begin with, and the passage threads the needle well. The writer knows what they are talking about. No, I am not being an ass and congratulating myself. [Laughter]
That passage was written in its entirety by AI. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1.
[Pause]
We must expect to get such passages with increasing frequency. How are we to tell who wrote what? Does it matter whether this is a genuine, original view or simply a collection of words strung together to maximize the likelihood of acceptance? If everybody is repeating this passage, does that constitute collective wisdom? These questions are at the core of what I find both terrifying and exhilarating about our future lives as graders.
Fortunately, humanity and humanists have been answering these questions for half a millenia.
Humanity has faced these questions before
In the late 1490s, a combative, but careful and brilliant, scholar called Francesco Valla decided to look at the authenticity of a famous document – the Donation of Constantine. Purportedly written in the 4th century CE, the document memorialized the donation of all of Western Europe by Emperor Constantine to the Catholic Church. It was widely accepted and deeply consequential.
Valla demolished the authenticity of the document. He used three arguments:
- It had a bunch of anachronisms and inexplicable errors -- what we would call hallucinations today.
- The Latin style was terrible and deeply pained Valla’s educated ear. It was hardly the Latin one expects of a Roman emperor’s court. The lack of beauty did nudge Valla towards untruth.
- And perhaps convincingly, it failed the common-sense test: Roman emperors didn’t just give away vast swathes of their hard-won domain to fledgling organizations and have either the transaction or themselves survive for long.
Today the document is widely accepted as an 8th century creation, a deep fake, if you will, made 500 years after the supposed event.
[Pause]
Grading Claude’s passage
Perhaps Valla has a few pointers for us, future graders. While I won’t re-read the passage, I suspect that you will be less impressed if you read it again critically. We will post this speech, just in case you miss doing homework in the summer. [Laughter]
There are no obvious hallucinations in the passage. And the style is pretty good. So, there are no easy gotchas here. But in a very fundamental way, the passage is way off: it is answering the question in its most literal sense. As a mathematically trained engineer, I could’ve answered the literal question “can beauty help determine truth?” in one word “rarely.”
When John Keats wrote "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" he was writing a poem about a pot, albeit a very beautiful and ancient Grecian urn. It is very unlikely that he meant any of this literally. As humans, we would interpret the question itself differently. We would know that this question was either metaphorical or metaphysical – I can’t quite tell which. But it wouldn’t be just about physics. Common sense, our intuitive model of the world, however flawed, would kick in.
[Pause]
It takes work
To do this grading in less artificial and more consequential settings is not so easy. But I firmly believe that you have what it takes.
Remember what it means to be a Jumbo:
- You have the depth and expertise in your chosen area;
- You can think for yourself with clarity and candor;
- You are a well-rounded individual with common-sense; and
- You have the humility to learn even from those you disagree with, from life, and yes, even from AI.
As a Jumbo, your knowledge, your training and your experience will help train your intuition, your judgment, your discernment. The more you work on these, the more confident you will be in using them. You will become more adept at evaluating and adopting Claude and future forms of AI. You better understand AI’s benefits, its costs to society and the damage it can cause. It will ideally become a valuable companion and complement to you, rather than a feared substitute for you.
Of course, information is often only a means to the end of action. When you act as a Jumbo
- You know that it is not enough to do well for yourself, it is necessary to do good for others and to take care of the Herd
- You have a set of values and principles that you will constantly test, hone and refine for yourself.
And so, I am confident that you will use AI with judgement and care, just as you would any weapon that is both useful and dangerous.
[Pause]
The University’s Commitment
For its part, the university will continue to educate generations to evaluate and use not just AI but all future tools. In short, we will continue to produce excellent graders. We will do that not by turning humanists into engineers but by leveraging our strong base in, and our firm commitment to, a liberal arts education. And we will educate our students so that they never lose sight of what makes them human even as they pursue the most literal and practical of fields.
What more is there to say but congratulations?
Go Jumbos! Now and forever!
[Applause]