Hank Green delivers 2025 Commencement speech with grace and gusto
Green: “Keeping oriented toward people – not building around them as an obstacle, but building for them – is the thing that I wanted to be focused on”
PHOTO COURTESY OF DAKA EJILEMELE
PHOTO COURTESY OF DAKA EJILEMELE
On May 29 at the OneMIT Commencement Ceremony, science communicator Hank Green delivered the commencement speech to the graduating class of 2025: silly but pensive, scientific yet humanistic.
Green openly engaged with the graduating class, joking that some people were seated close enough to the podium that he could almost “crowd-work” them.
Opening his speech with jabs at unironed stoles, facts about bones, and a description of what he terms “Hahaha I fooled them again” syndrome (an alternative to “imposter syndrome” where Green describes being “pleased” to have “cleverly convinced” people that he belongs), Green introduced the survey he had sent out to the graduating class prior to his speech. He focused on one question in particular: What was the most MIT thing you did while you were at MIT?
The most common response – unsurprising given the Institute’s motto of Mens et manus – was “built.” Among the things built were bridges, startups, Geiger counters, and ukuleles.
Acknowledging the pressures new graduates face from rapidly evolving “opportunities and tremendous disruption” due to climate change, rapidly developing artificial intelligence, and attacks on higher education, Green stated, “I imagine that it can be pretty easy to focus on the building and less on the people.”
With his educational YouTube channels Crash Course and SciShow becoming a staple in American public school classrooms, Green is no stranger to neither the physical sciences nor the process of building an organization. “If I could attribute my success, whatever it is, to anything besides luck, it’s that I literally can’t stop believing that there is any better use of time than learning something new,” Green said. He stated emphatically, “If I learn something new that day, that is a good day.”
In an interview with The Tech and MIT News, Green said that he feels everyone possesses such curiosity, including his eight-year-old son, who recently wanted to know what dark matter is. “Wouldn’t we all?” Green joked.
“[Curiosity] may be the single most important factor in your career,” Green said. In his speech, Green said that rather than letting curiosity be steered by capitalist impulses, social content platforms, or impossible problems, it should be oriented to align with one’s values.
“If we let ourselves be oriented only by those forces, guess what problems we will not pay any attention to? All of the everyday solvable problems of normal people,” Green said. Later, he added, “curiosity doesn’t just expand the number of tools you have and how well you’re able to use them, it expands your understanding of the problem space.”
Green shared in the interview that his current personal goals involve bolstering fellow science communicators. Green, along with his brother, John Green, started vlogging on the YouTube channel Vlogbrothers in 2007, sending into orbit an online community called Nerdfighteria. In 2012, they launched Crash Course and SciShow, now with over 16 million and 8 million subscribers, respectively. They’ve also launched a multitude of podcasts, each published several New York Times bestselling novels, and raised over ten million dollars for charity. Since then, Green has had to navigate changing modes of communication – including the sudden booming popularity of TikTok. He recalled thinking, “You can't do science communication in a minute. That's impossible. All you can do is dance videos. And then I saw some people doing it, and I was like, ‘Well, f*ck, you can.’”
Now, he helps others develop those skills. “When I was growing up,” Green shared, “there was just one Carl Sagan, and I'd like for there to be a million of them. I’d like for that weight to be shared more.”
His latest pursuit is a book tentatively titled “In Defense of Cancer,” a title that may elicit a confused reaction. A 2024 post on X by Green may help to explain: “In defense of cancer, it kills itself too.”
However, in an increasingly complex and divided world, it is no longer enough to solely be fluent in the language of science, Green argues, but also in understanding conflict, and how people’s minds change. “You can't hate people for being an opponent,” Green stated. In his interview with The Tech, Green described his interest in pre-bunking misinformation, explaining, “The most effective strategy we have is just getting to them first,” which starts by listening, and understanding.
In the midst of troubling attacks on free speech and democracy, as well as trust in science, Green acknowledged to the new graduates that the world can feel “so big,” but that these thoughts “alienate you from the reality of human existence, from your place as a builder, not just of tools, but of meaning.”
“It might be a playlist for your friend, and it might be the Human Genome Project. All of that, we're doing it for people,” he said in the interview. “Keeping oriented toward people – not building around them as an obstacle, but building for them – is the thing that I wanted to be focused on.”
Green left the new graduates with four points of wisdom, ranging from the light-hearted “don’t eat grass,” to philosophical encouragement to “accept that your joy can be one of the things that you produce.” He stated that some people keep ideas in their head in fear of exposing it “to the imperfection of reality,” and urged the graduates to “stop waiting” and “get the ideas out.” Finally, he reminded the audience to “ask yourself where value and meaning come from, because they don’t come from banks or tech or cap tables. They come from people.”
“Something very special and strange is happening on this planet and it is you,” Green said.
Green ended his speech with a salute that oriented both the love for science and the dedication towards people that define MIT graduates: “When I asked you what you did at MIT, you said you built. But when I asked you what was giving you hope, you did not say buildings. You said people. So, graduating class of 2025, go forth, for yourself, for others, and for this beautiful, bizarre world.”