Photo: Ken Salazar, courtesy Mario Jasso/Cuartoscuro.
A graduate commencement ceremony, when it is performed with sincerity, is one of the small remaining American rituals in which a thousand people sit still in the scorching sun for someone else.
On May 2, 2026, that ceremony took place at Regis University in Denver, Colorado on Boettcher Commons, beginning at ten in the morning. The graduates were seated in unshaded rows, the families behind us on the lawn, the faculty on either side. The sky was clear, and the temperature climbed steadily through the morning. Most of us were in full regalia — caps, gowns, hoods marking the degree, tassels marking the discipline — fabric chosen for ceremony rather than for comfort. By the end of the program, several of us had visible sunburn on our faces and necks.
This is not an incidental detail. The physical cost of the morning was the audience’s offering to the form. A thousand graduate and doctoral students who had finished theses, capstones, residencies, clinical hours, and dissertations — many of them while working, parenting, deploying, recovering, grieving — had agreed, by their presence, to sit very still in the sun for two hours. The Jesuit institution that conferred our degrees had agreed, by its program, to give the time back to us: to honor what we had done, to name us, to send us forward.
The speaker the institution had chosen to perform that final motion — to turn from the work we had finished and gesture us toward the work to come — was Secretary Ken Salazar, recipient of Regis University’s Civis Princeps award. The title is Latin for “first citizen.” It is conferred for civic excellence already demonstrated. It is, by its structure, a gift the institution gives at the moment a speaker is asked to give a gift in return.
The form of a graduate commencement is older than the country in which it takes place. It descends from medieval universities, which descended in turn from ecclesiastical and Roman models of intergenerational transmission. The form has a grammar. There are two registers. One looks backward: the institution honors what graduates have done and, in the case of an awarded speaker, the speaker. The other looks forward: the speaker, having been honored, turns toward the graduates and gives them something to carry into the work that comes next. The first register is the institution’s gift. The second is the speaker’s. Together they complete a single motion — graciously accept, then bestow — which is why commencement is a ceremony and not merely an awards gala.
Each register has its own time. The honor takes a moment: a citation is read, a medallion is conferred, the recipient stands. The address takes longer because the address is the work. The speaker, having been positioned as worthy of recognition, uses that worthiness as standing to speak to the graduates about what worthiness looks like in the life ahead. The graduates listen because the speaker has just been certified by the institution as someone whose words about that life are worth listening to. The structure is not accidental. The honor authorizes the address.
The Civis Princeps award, then, is not separable from the speech it occasions. The title is Latin for “first citizen.” In Roman republican usage, princeps was not a synonym for ruler or for the greatest among men — Augustus deliberately chose it over rex because it encoded responsibility rather than dominion. A princeps is the citizen who steps forward first, which means the others are constitutive of the title. There is no princeps without a populus. The award acknowledges, in its very name, that civic excellence is owed back. To accept Civis Princeps is to accept a structural obligation: the others, by giving you the title, have placed you under it.
At Regis, that obligation is given a theological inflection. The university is one of twenty-seven Jesuit institutions of higher education in the United States, and its animating principle is magis — the Ignatian discipline of striving toward the greater good. In his letter to the 2026 graduates, Interim President D. Scott Hendrickson, S.J., framed the day around it: magis, he wrote, is not about doing more but about becoming more deliberately who one is meant to be, and turning outward with the gifts one has been given. The forward register of the ceremony, in a Jesuit context, is magis in action. It is the moment when an elder citizen, having been acknowledged, performs the discipline by directing it outward to the graduates whose lives are about to begin — from formation to enactment.
This is the architecture against which any speaker invited to that podium is measured. Not by whether his life is interesting. Not by whether the issues he cares about are urgent. By whether, in the time he was given, he turned outward.
What follows summarizes what Mr. Salazar did with the time.
The speech opened, properly, with gratitude. He thanked Father Hendrickson, several members of the Board of Trustees, the faculty and staff who make Regis a community, and the long line of Jesuit fathers — Burke, Fitzgibbons, Sheeran, Pragg, Curran — through whom, he said, he had found his bearings. He named his wife Hope, his daughter-in-law Andrea, and his granddaughter Mireya, who were present in the audience. These passages are unobjectionable. A speaker is expected to acknowledge the institution and the family. They take, in the recording, perhaps three minutes.
He then briefly asked the graduates to raise their hands: those who loved their Jesuit education, those from Colorado, those from elsewhere in the United States, those from beyond its borders. The poll lasted under a minute. It is the most sustained direct address to the audience in the speech.
From there, the address turned. He began with the global condition — wars across several continents, a warming climate, growing disparity, the politics of division — and pivoted into his own borderlands. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains east of his house, named by a Spanish priest. The San Juan Mountains to the west, named after St. John the Baptist. The San Antonio River traversing the ranch. The two hundred and fifty years his ancestors spent as citizens of Spain and Mexico before becoming Americans. The indigenous blood he carries and asks his audience to be proud of. The history textbooks of Colorado that taught him the Mayflower instead of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This passage is several minutes long. It is autobiographical in the strongest sense: a man placing himself at the axis mundi of a sacred landscape and a long lineage, and inviting the audience to witness his inherited authority.
He moved on to his public career. Attorney General of Colorado. United States Senator. Ambassador to Mexico. The longest anecdote in the speech presented the story of Vanessa, a young Guatemalan woman who survived a tractor-trailer crash in Chiapas while attempting to reach her husband in Wisconsin with their three-year-old son Damián. He described visiting her in the intensive care unit in Tuxtla Gutiérrez. He described her scalp scraped off on the pavement. He described the three trailers, each carrying roughly one hundred and seventy people, each paying fifteen thousand dollars per person to the criminal cartels. The Vanessa story takes several minutes. It is a powerful piece of testimony. It is also, structurally, the moral center of his speech, the moment around which everything else organized itself.
From Vanessa, he moved into policy. The 2006 immigration bill passed by the Senate under McCain, Kennedy, and Obama. The House Republican leadership that killed it. The “third rail of American politics.” The current administration’s border approach. The cartels, the fentanyl, the hundred thousand Americans dying every year. He told the audience the problem is fixable and that he knows how to fix it. The political content occupies the largest single category of the speech.
He closed with his grandmother Antonia, who lost five of her eight children, including a son named Wilito, who died in her arms before they could reach a doctor in Antonito, Colorado. He asked her, in the last years of her life, how she had kept going. She told him she had lived for the three children who survived, and for the grandchildren to come. He delivered the final benediction in Spanish, expressing optimism about the days ahead.
The address to the graduates, as such, can be located in three discrete passages.
The hand-raising poll near the opening.
A line near the middle: he had hope, he said, because of them — the five hundred graduate students in front of him, the undergraduates the next day, those who had come before.
And the Spanish closing, which directs its optimism partly to the students and partly to the institution.
Together, these passages constitute, by generous count, perhaps four minutes of a thirty-minute address.
The remaining twenty-six minutes were given to him: his ancestry, his career, his family, his moral witness, his political analysis, his policy positions, his grandmother. He did not steal the podium to focus on himself. He occupied it in the proportions that a man telling his own life would naturally occupy it — which is to say, almost entirely.
He had accepted the title of Civis Princeps and performed its opposite.
What I felt, sitting in that sun, was a betrayal — not of me, but of the entire graduate audience before him. The form had been violated. A political speech had been delivered in the place reserved for the magis, in the moment that belonged to us.
I drove home that afternoon toward the San Juan Mountains. On the way, I stopped near Saguache, where the confined and unconfined aquifers of the San Luis Valley surface in shallow wetlands. I parked, took the dogs, and walked. I needed to reflect on what had happened.
What I found there was not what I had gone looking for. At first, I thought they were swans — white birds moving in the shallow water, large enough at a distance to suggest swans. As I came closer, the silhouettes resolved. They were not swans. They were American white pelicans, returning. Two days earlier, I had passed this same place, and they had not yet arrived. The American white pelican is one of the largest birds in North America. It does not winter in the San Luis Valley. It stops there, briefly, to feed and to rest before continuing north to its breeding grounds in the prairies and lakes of the upper plains. The aquifer is not their home. It is a stage in a journey whose meaning lies entirely in what comes next.
I watched them with reverence. I had attended a ceremony that morning whose form was an intergenerational transmission, and the man entrusted with that transmission had refused to perform it. Now, at the end of a difficult day, I was watching wild birds perform it for him. They had arrived from somewhere. They were going somewhere. They had stopped here, on the way, to do what was required for the continuation of the journey.
This is what a commencement is. A landing on the way to the next thing. A pause for nourishment before flight. The form belongs to anything in passage — to the pelican on its way north, to the graduate on her way into the work she has been formed to do. What Ken Salazar swept from beneath the feet of the graduates that morning, the pelicans returned to them, by simply being what they were.
The temporary landing of the white pelicans on the aquifer at Saguache was the commencement that the Regis Class of 2026 was owed.
May we carry that landing with us!