The Cambridge School of Dallas Class of 2026 Commencement Address by Dr. David Little and Dr. Sabrina Little

This spring, The Cambridge School of Dallas graduated the Class of 2026. The commencement address was delivered jointly by Dr. David Little, a Cambridge alumnus, and his wife Dr. Sabrina Little, both of whom serve as professors at The Ohio State University's John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

Their address was an appropriately substantive, exemplifying the depth of thought that we aim to nurture in all our graduates. Our two speakers walked the Class of 2026 through examples of stock advice often heard during graduation ceremonies, examining each one against the classical Christian tradition, and offering more demanding and rewarding alternatives. Drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas, Augustine, Wendell Berry, C.S. Lewis, Joseph Pieper, David Foster Wallace, Tim Keller, David Brooks, Yuval Levin, Søren Kierkegaard, Alexis de Tocqueville, and others, the speakers offered our graduates a vision of the good life rooted in virtue, vocation, friendship, community, and worship.

We are pleased to publish the full text below.

About the Speakers

Dr. David Little graduated from The Cambridge School of Dallas in 2006 and now serves on the faculty of The Ohio State University. His full faculty profile is available at the Chase Center: chasecenter.osu.edu/user-profile/david-little.

Dr. Sabrina Little also serves on the faculty of The Ohio State University. Her full faculty profile is available at the Chase Center: chasecenter.osu.edu/user-profile/sabrina-little.

The Commencement Address

David: Thank you Professor VanOpstal, members of the board, friends and family, and most importantly, the class of 2026. Congratulations. It’s an honor for us to be here. Almost twenty years ago to the day I was here graduating, and of the commencement addresses I’ve sat through, the one I heard then is the only one I even faintly remember. It was delivered by Prof. Michael Young, who had done his best to teach us logic and Western Civ. when we were unruly 8th graders—and who had had more success entrancing us with Plato’s Republic when we were somewhat better-behaved sophomores. What I remember most vividly is that he had a bust of Aristotle with him on the lectern, which he’d always had with him when he taught, at all three of the makeshift campuses we shared. One classroom involved a functioning stoplight, vinyl shower curtains, and “Harkness tables” made of pieces of plywood thrown over pool tables. St. Mark’s had nothing on us. What I also remember is that at the conclusion of 8th grade, Prof. Young looked each of us in the eye and shook our hands, which was emblematic of the respectful friendships we enjoyed with the faculty here.

Sabrina: Unfortunately, we don’t have the same rapport with you, but we do have Aristotle, who has always been a third wheel in our relationship and was the subject of our first argument. In preparation for today, we watched commencement addresses online, as one can do in 2026, and we have to say that the commencement address, in its standard form, with the typical advice, doesn’t belong at the culmination of a classical and Christian education. So let’s look at some bad advice.

One common piece of graduation advice is to take risks since doing so can lead to success beyond your wildest dreams. This may be helpful advice for someone named Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg, all college dropouts who have given some version of that message in their Harvard commencement addresses. Obviously, some risks are worth taking. Economists will say that it pays to be flexible and willing to switch jobs. But, for this advice to be meaningful, we need to consider the nature of courage. For Thomas Aquinas, courage is rooted in charity, or love of God. Love of God provides coherence to our striving so we can undertake worthy risks in service to our greatest good—relationship with God. So, the first step in taking risks is to seek Christ and His Kingdom and be rooted in the love of God.

Another common piece of advice is to change the world. This is better advice than abandoning the world. But changing the world may not look the way you imagine. If we are to believe the Gospel, then it looks a lot like serving. It is humble work that involves putting others first. It may not involve major accolades or fancy titles. Wendell Berry wrote that the greatest obstacle to planet-saving is likely not greed but “the modern hankering after glamour.” Berry wrote, “A lot of our smartest, most concerned people want to come up with a big solution to a big problem.” But the real work of planet-saving is “small, humble, and humbling.” It is diligent and looks like faithful service. So, our correction to this advice is that we ought not forget what “greatness” means for a Christian.

Another refrain in graduation speeches is to be undeterred by failure. Never give up! It is true that most of us can do a better job with perseverance, particularly in a screen-based culture where our attention is undermined at every turn. But perseverance is only a virtue when we persist toward good ends, and in the right ways. Never giving up—regardless of the goal and heedless of the cost—is not the virtue of perseverance. It is the vice of intransigence, and it claims the lives of people climbing Mount Everest every year. Conditions change and it becomes unsafe to continue ascending, yet the intransigent climber refuses to relent. Real perseverance requires being prudent about when to continue and when to call it quits.

Live every day like it’s your last. This is also common graduation advice. Live in the moment! There is something to be said for having urgency and perspective on the shortness of life. James 4:14 says, “What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” We thought about putting that verse in the program. If cultivating an eternal perspective is what this advice means, then, go ahead. But this is a generous interpretation. Ultimately “live every day like it’s your last” sounds like poor stewardship. If I lived every day like it was my last, I would never vacuum. I would not commit to arduous goods—like academic pursuits or challenging relationships. I would make reckless decisions and act more like a visitor on planet earth than a pilgrim, traveling a long journey toward God. “Living every day like it’s your last” is not helpful advice for building a life in pursuit of goods that take longer to secure.

Cultivate empathy is also a common refrain in graduation speeches. See things through another person’s eyes. “Empathy” is enjoying a moment of controversy. According to some, if we empathize with those with whom we disagree, empathy becomes “toxic” and manipulative; we are likely to succumb to a misguided viewpoint. According to others, empathy is a panacea for all our social ills. If we can just feel what others feel, then we will be united in mutual understanding. The reality is a bit messier. Empathy is the ability to see out from and share in the emotions of others. Like other human capacities, it is an insufficient guide to the moral life. It can’t tell us what is just. It is biased in favor of those we know or who look like us. We empathize more with people in our group and with those who are better-looking. This means that if an injustice occurs and it’s far off from my personal experiences, I am unlikely to empathize.

Empathy can facilitate connection, but its value is contingent upon our character. It requires compassion and justice—to do the right thing when we “share in” another’s pain. It takes intellectual firmness—to hold fast to our own viewpoints upon encountering opposing perspectives. It also requires wisdom to know how and when to act when we detect various harms. Maybe instead of “cultivating empathy,” we can focus on refining our characters so we can see the world clearly and act suitably.

David: Many commencement addresses extol the virtue of industry, which Ben Franklin defined as “Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.” At NYU and Dartmouth, Taylor Swift and Roger Federer have recently criticized the myth of effortlessness. Watching them may seem to us like a religious experience, but they assure us that their seemingly godlike effortlessness and grace is the payoff of a lot of hard work. At the University of Alabama, President Trump counseled graduates to quote “Work hard. Never, ever stop.” He advised them to do what they love, because if they find their work fun, they, like him, will be able to “work all the time.”

Aristotle, by contrast, thought of work as a means—a necessary evil—for attaining leisure, or schole—for doing those things that are worth doing for their own sakes, without regard for their material reward. He distinguished play, which is a break from work that enables people to get back to work, from leisure, which isn’t passive or inactive, like streaming Netflix or scrolling on social media, but rather is a set of deepening activities that are valuable in themselves—like wondering about the good, the true, and the beautiful, contemplating great art, cultivating virtue, and conversing with friends. If the goal is staying alive, these are “unnecessary actions,” but if the goal is living a good life—if it’s cultivating not just the resume virtues but also the eulogy virtues, as David Brooks has called them, then they are essential. For Aristotle, no successful human life, no education worthy of the name, could be wholly devoted to wealth.

As Max Weber noted, there are ways that the Christian tradition takes a higher view of work than did Aristotle, yet the categorical command in the Ten Commandments is not to work but to rest—to honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. In this vein, rest is understood not as the interruption of work but as part of the rhythm of God’s grace and provision in our lives. Both work and rest are good, and for our good. Since we can’t earn our salvation, we are free from having to justify our existence through our own efforts.

In Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Joseph Pieper argues that the highest achievements of civilization—in areas like philosophy, art, music, and literature—are accomplished by people who are not completely absorbed in economic production. A culture without the space for leisure will lose its capacity for reflection on the ultimate questions, for true education, for great art, and for worship. In a society where work becomes our whole identity, human life is devalued—in Thomas Hobbes phrase, “a man’s worth is his price.” In the Christian tradition, by contrast, all people, male and female, Jew and Gentile, are made in God’s image and thus possess intrinsic worth, and their chief purpose is to glorify God, in part through their work but also with the rest of their lives—their family roles, their friendships, their worship. In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans were constantly busy, obsessed with productivity, and constantly optimizing for professional success, and that while it was enriching them materially, it was also making them restless, anxious, and sad. The tension goes back to America’s earliest history. In the words of Disney’s Pocahontas, “We sail the open sea. For glory, God, and gold.” Unfortunately, God has too often been eclipsed by glory and gold. We’ve forgotten that, as St. Augustine says, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God.

Sabrina: Another common piece of advice is Dream big. Dare greatly. To be sure, striving is important. Considering virtue (or arete) means excellence, certain forms of striving are part of a good life. Thomas Aquinas describes well-ordered striving as the virtue of magnanimity—of considering yourself worthy of great feats that you are indeed worthy of. But on Thomas’ account, magnanimity is compatible with humility and thus recognizes one’s proper limits and dependency on others. Limitless striving is at odds with contentment, humility, gratitude, and reverence. Limitless striving may sound appealing, but it is forgetful of the fact that our “limits” capture a great deal of what it means to be a human.

David: In a Stanford Commencement Address, a speaker [Oprah] said, “What I know now is that feelings are really your GPS system for life … follow your feelings. If it feels right, move forward. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it.” She urged graduates to be themselves, and to quote, “Trust your heart and success will come to you… Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive.” Now, you probably don’t need me to tell you that the classical teaching is not to follow your feelings. And there’s no verse in the Bible that tells you to follow your heart wherever it points, nor will you find Jiminy Cricket’s injunction to let your conscience be your guide. In an obscure movie that I like, The Last Days of Disco, a character says:

You know that Shakespearean admonition, ‘To thine own self be true’? It’s premised on the idea that ‘thine own self’ is something pretty good, being true to which is commendable. But what if ‘thine own self’ is not so good? What if it’s pretty bad? Would it be better in that case not to be true to thine own self?

There’s the rub with the cult of authenticity. The problem with what is technically a Shakespearean character’s admonition is that it’s empty without an account of what the self is and how it’s formed. It too easily slips into a rationalization of selfishness and impulse gratification, which comes at the expense of the molding and governing of your feelings that a good character requires. Our feelings can be false, fickle, and misleading, and virtue requires their direction and restraint. Courage requires governing fear; moderation requires governing bodily desire; justice requires governing selfishness; prudence requires governing our impulse to act. For millennia, these four ways of governing, rather than following, our feelings have held up as characteristics of a good and happy life. Which of our mothers or fathers hoped we would grow up to be cowardly, intemperate, unfair, or ineffectual?

In Plato’s Republic, it’s eventually revealed that each part of the soul, the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive, has its own desires. There’s a rank order to these desires, and the better ones should rule the worse. We shouldn’t let our desires for food, sex, or esteem, interfere with our rational pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful. St. Augustine says that virtue and happiness consist in rightly ordered loves. The first and second loves are loving God and loving others. Material goods, pleasures, honor, and political communities are real goods that are part of God’s created order, but they’re subordinate and ultimately ephemeral. They should be loved only to the extent that they don’t interfere with loving God and loving our neighbor. As Tim Keller has said, sex, money, and power aren’t bad in themselves, but if they’re made into ultimate goods, they’ll consume us. In his Kenyon commencement address, David Foster Wallace said,

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship … If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough … Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you … we all know this stuff already … The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Now, how do we keep the truth up front in daily consciousness? How do we keep from lapsing into the selfishness that is the default setting of our hearts? The Aristotelian and Christian teaching is that reason alone isn’t powerful enough to directly change our default setting. Reason must be joined with habits, friendships, communities, institutions, and faith. At its best, education equips us to choose to structure our environment in a way that will make us into the people we want to become.

Sabrina: In the coming months you will be in a new place, setting your own schedule and forging habits, with your newfound freedom, which will influence, not just your time but the person you are—your character. Our encouragement is to take seriously the work of habit-formation. Too often we carefully plan our careers or prioritize our fitness goals. Then we throw up our hands when it comes to our moral characters as though there is nothing we can do. But there are things that you can do to develop a good character. You can surround yourself with exemplars—who model what a good life looks like and can motivate you to do likewise. Like Odysseus, who tethers himself to the mast of his ship because he knows he will be unable to resist the Sirens, you can structure your environment so you are not tempted beyond what you can feasibly bear. For example, if you are inclined to gossip, make friends who are above reproach in their speaking. If you are distracted by your phone, lock it in another room.

You can also practice the virtues, and I do mean practice. Aristotle writes that “men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre. So, too, we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts.” When it comes to virtue, you have to do them to be them. Virtues develop slowly through intentional actions, similarly to how you become excellent in other domains, such as athletics and music. You can develop a good character, just as you can become a better athlete or musician. You do have agency with respect to your character, but a good character must be chosen—repeatedly and in small ways. It does not happen by accident.

David: In the coming months you’ll be making new friends and keeping the old, and those two activities should involve reflection and deliberate choice. Friendships are too powerful to be taken lightly. We’re tempted to pursue friendships that gratify the lower parts of our souls—to choose friends who enhance our status, advance our professional goals, or who simply make life more pleasant—what Aristotle called friendships of utility and pleasure. The Aristotelian and Augustinian advice is to find friends who challenge us and help build our characters—who are facing in the direction we want to be facing—what Aristotle calls virtue friendships. Building character, as we say, isn’t always the most pleasant activity.

No less important, I think, will be consciously deciding which friends you’re going to keep, because friendships require work, and your time and attention are limited. They don’t naturally survive when you’re no longer spending your days together. Twenty years ago, Prof. David Denton gave us that blunt advice, and I can speak at least for my sister and me that our Cambridge friends have been some of the best friends of our lives and provided important ballast in the years after graduation, even as we were in far-flung parts of the country.

In this era when Americans are unhappier than ever, more likely to eat alone than ever, more likely to live alone than ever, when birth and marriage rates are falling, when the surgeon general can declare an epidemic of loneliness, and since we’re standing up here together, I don’t think it’s too soon to be looking for and thinking about finding your Sabrina—the most important friend of my life. Here, too, you’ll want to be deliberate and not just drift into a trial marriage of convenience. From the very beginning of a relationship, you should ask: Is this someone with whom there’s shared admiration and mutual respect? Is this someone with whom I could go through life, wing to wing and oar to oar? At its best a marriage will combine all four of the Greek loves that C.S. Lewis so eloquently described—affection, friendship, erotic desire, and selfless love.

In the coming months you’ll be choosing which communities and institutions, if any, you will belong and commit to. Americans are inclined to prioritize personal freedom—to avoid commitment and responsibility, perhaps increasingly so. We live in an age of institutional failure and distrust. But the idea that we’re entirely free to choose our own destiny and shape our own existence—to create our own identities, to forge our own communities—is overwhelming, paralyzing, and immiserating. Kierkegaard defined anxiety as the “dizziness of freedom.” That’s why the classical and Christian traditions teach that there’s freedom in constraint—that total freedom is an illusion. We will end up serving something, whether it’s God, others, or our basest desires. In his recently published book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, David Eptstein argues that constraints are important to creativity, innovation, and our own psychological wellbeing. Bach is known as one of the greatest composers of all time, but in addition to being born into musical family and following his father into his line of work—not choosing his own path, Bach worked within the formal constraints of the sonata and fugue structures, the liturgical calendar, and weekly church deadlines. He innovated even as he was constrained and formed by a preexisting tradition. He innovated because he was constrained.

As with friendships, the temptation is to approach institutions and communities with our own misguided agendas, to see them as tools for our own material and social advancement. What clubs will look good on my resume? Will carving out time on Sunday for church increase my lifetime earnings? Will it look cool to the people on my hall? We’re inclined today to think of institutions, as Yuval Levin has said, as platforms for our own promotion rather than as formative structures that shape character and serve enduring purposes. Regardless of how we approach them, institutions will form us in specific ways, so, here, too, the challenge is to think long term about the sort of person we want to be and become. For millennia, religious communities have performed this function. Being being committed to a local church community is one important way we can keep up front in daily consciousness that we are not God and that world does not revolve around us.

In the coming years you’ll be discerning your vocation. The idea of vocation, which comes from the Christian tradition, presumes that there’s an external call—that it’s not just going with your gut—following your arrow wherever it points. The Christian’s primary call, the one revealed in scripture—is to love God and love others. Of that you can be sure. How in particular you should spend your time is harder to discern, especially in the context of modern freedom, but it’s not the case that you can do anything you put your mind to, as some commencement addresses suggest—David Little wasn’t destined for the NBA—that much was clear from his four seasons with the Lions. And maybe your experiences in the coming years—organic chemistry, perhaps—will help reveal where your talents lie. You should try to use your talents well, and doing so should be enjoyable. “When I run, I feel his pleasure” as Eric Liddell says in Chariots of Fire. You should also gather the wisdom of your friends and family, but ultimately, don’t get too hung up on the idea that you need your whole life figured out now. If anything, scripture teaches that we shouldn’t live too much in the future. I don’t think discerning your call means ignoring what the world needs, as in the Stanford speaker’s injunction. David Brooks tells the story of Frances Perkins, who didn’t have a sense of purpose until witnessing the shirtwaist factory fire in Manhattan, which killed 143 garment workers, propelled Perkins into a vocation of social reform and eventually to become the first female labor secretary. Others, Brooks says, find their vocations by way of attraction rather than repulsion. Perhaps, like E.O. Wilson you’ll be inspired by wonder at the natural world and be pulled forward by an aesthetic power of attraction.

Sabrina: It’s a cliché to observe that while commencement is etymologically a beginning, it’s also a conclusion, a time to reflect on where you’ve been and how you’ve come to this place, but it’s a cliché for a reason. Classical education trains us to reflect on how we came to this place. It presumes that we’re the inheritors of a tradition that has been handed down to us. It assumes that our civilization’s achievements are partly received—that our achievements are only partly our own and that we should be grateful to God and our ancestors for what we have.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. We’re here to congratulate you on your accomplishment. You should be proud. Staying awake in the period after lunch when you stayed up late into the wee hours translating Virgil, pretending you’ve done the reading in a class discussion when you had a basketball game the night before, and making it to school just in time for first period calculus, narrowly beating your professor, aren’t easy feats. But you should also be humble, because the achievement also belongs partly to your parents, your teachers, and a tradition that spans millennia. That inheritance generates certain unchosen obligations of gratitude and trusteeship, which I hope you will begin to discharge starting today. But, congratulations class of 2026, for your own contribution. The last phrase of Plato’s Republic is eu praxomen, which has the double meaning of we shall do good and we shall do well. It encapsulates the classical teaching that it’s by doing good that we do well. It’s translated into English as “we shall fare well,” which adds a third meaning in English translation of “bye bye.” So, we’ll leave you with that phrase from Plato’s Socrates: eu prattoite: may you, by God’s grace, do good and fare well.