Pinsky — the U.S. Poet Laureate — delivered a speech that was essentially a meditation on cultural memory and what holds a nation together. He began by asking why commencement exercises were so elaborately ceremonial, and answered that they celebrated 'the two great obligations or standards that apply to every tribe and culture on earth: caring for the young ones and honoring the wisdom of the old ones, including the ways and wisdom of the dead.' He then applied this framework to the United States, arguing that America lacked the two traditional repositories of cultural memory: 'a single unifying folk culture' and 'a social class that considers itself the hereditary curators of art.' In their absence, shared memory was both more fragile and more essential. Pinsky quoted Chief Seattle — 'They are not powerless, the dead' — and W. E. B. DuBois, who wrote of sitting with Shakespeare and summoning Aristotle 'with no scorn nor condescension,' to illustrate that cultural inheritance in America was a matter of choice, not lineage.