Nearly four years ago, the newest members of the University of Chicago community marched through Cobb Gate to the sound of bagpipes, processing through a campus completely unknown to most of them.
On June 6, they walked once more through Cobb Gate and gathered again, this time as graduates of the Class of 2026 amid the cheers of UChicago’s 540th Convocation celebration on the Main Quadrangles.
President Paul Alivisatos said the site at the heart of campus was a “fitting” location for the June 6 campus-wide celebration, in which students across the schools and divisions received their degrees on a warm, sunny morning.
“It is a distinct choice to be outside atop the criss-crossing pathways that serve to connect knowledge across all disciplines. Our presence here is a celebration of the boundless love of knowledge that each of you has brought to the cultivation of your mind here in this community,” Alivisatos said.
He told the new graduates that they had taken in the “habits of intellect and culture” at UChicago to form what he called a “truly Chicago mind”—one set apart by curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. Alivisatos said this mindset, practiced in classrooms and laboratories but also in dialogue, would serve the students well in the next steps of their careers.
“In all of your pursuits, this is the time for you to step up and step in,” Alivisatos said. “The world will be better for you having cultivated—here, with us—your fine, brilliant, inspiring Chicago mind.”
Drawing from Lincoln’s example
In her address to the Class of 2026, renowned legal scholar Alison L. LaCroix, the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law, drew from the life of President Abraham Lincoln to suggest ways of helping steer a democracy whose future no one can yet see.
LaCroix is an expert on the interbellum period, the decades between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. She opened her address with a story from before Lincoln became the man of history, as a 28-year-old lawyer just beginning his career—not unlike the new UChicago graduates.
She recounted how Lincoln had been invited to address a club in Springfield, Illinois, tied to the era's “lyceum movement”—public gatherings to debate politics, science and the arts. The lyceum, LaCroix said, was "a microcosm of the lively, organic civic culture of 19th-century America, or indeed of the University of Chicago."
In his 1838 speech, Lincoln credited the country’s founders with the “fundamental blessings” of the nation's institutions, then named two threats. The first was mob rule, or the “mobocratic spirit,” which left citizens “tired of, and disgusted with, a government that offers them no protection.” The second threat was the potential rise of a tyrant, following people’s loss of attachment to government.
Lincoln’s remedy, LaCroix said, was to bind citizens to the republic through a “political religion” of the rule of law. To this, he looked to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, upheld in the courts.
“He did not know what was coming,” she said of Lincoln, who had no inkling of the pivotal role he would play in the nation’s future, “but what he could do was offer his listeners a set of ideas that would embolden them to feel not alienated from civic life, but attached to it.”
Embracing the uncertain
On Friday, the College’s Class Day ceremony launched Convocation weekend with a recognition of undergraduates and their achievements.
The graduating class selected three student speakers—Matteo Caloia, Ana Emilia Davalos and Vincent Li—to speak on behalf of their peers. They each remarked on the distinctive “life of the mind” and search for truth impressed upon College students.
“UChicago taught us that intellect is not something we perform, but something we practice together,” said Caloia. “It taught us that rigor is not something to escape, but something to seek. And it taught us that protecting the version of ourselves that needs to appear certain can cost us the version still capable of growth.”
Featured speaker David Auburn, AB’91, the Tony and Pulitzer award-winning playwright of Proof, reflected on the merits of leaning into that wider uncertainty. He shared his own path into the unknown of an arts career to describe how the students will “experience struggle and exhilaration, paired” in their own futures.
“I hope you will try to embrace this—not just because it is inevitable, but because it is a good thing,” Auburn said. “Because it means that joy, fulfillment and exhilaration are not things you defer to some later point in your life, after you’ve paid your dues and everything has worked out. You can and will have them all along the way.”
The University’s highest undergraduate honor, the Hugo F. Sonnenschein Medal of Excellence, was awarded to fourth-year student Daniel Kind for his advocacy to address homelessness. He plans to attend law school to further that work.
Honoring faculty excellence
During the Convocation ceremony, the University recognized several outstanding faculty members and honored two scholars with honorary degrees.
The Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Faculty Awards for Excellence in Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring were presented to this year’s eight recipients—continuing a longstanding tradition of celebrating teaching at the heart of the University’s mission.
UChicago also awarded honorary degrees to Louis Kaplow, an economic and legal scholar, and Greg Woolf, a historian and archaeologist of the ancient world.
‘Democracy imbues each of us with honor’
As she closed, LaCroix carried Lincoln’s argument forward in time, to the Confederate shelling of Fort Sumter that opened the Civil War.
Its commander, Major Robert Anderson, had refused to surrender, invoking his honor and his obligations to his government. That stand, she said, fulfilled the “political religion” Lincoln had called for more than two decades earlier.
“Anderson is famous because he said ‘no.’ And because he was willing to face the shells that then began falling,”" LaCroix said.
She turned, finally, to the Class of 2026 before her—and, she noted, to her own two daughters graduating among them.
“Democracy imbues each of us with honor, and in exchange, it asks us to put our honor in the service of the American republic,” LaCroix said.
