This story was originally produced by the Valley News. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
It wasn’t until Rachel Dratch joined the improvisational comedy group “Said and Done” during her sophomore year of college that she began to fit in.
On Sunday, the Tony-nominated comedian, actor and alumna of both Saturday Night Live and Dartmouth College called on her comedy and acting background to deliver the commencement address to Dartmouth’s class of 2026 and promised that her 20-minute speech would change lives.
“Not to brag, but I also just earned a degree here today,” Dratch told the gathered class after receiving an honorary Doctor of Arts degree. “For most of you that’s a Bachelor of Arts, and for me it’s a doctorate. For you, it took four long years and for me less than a minute. I guess I’m just a quick study.”
Dratch was one of six who received an honorary degree from Dartmouth on Sunday morning. The college awarded about 2,200 degrees to students from 49 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico and 58 countries.
During her 20-minute speech, Dratch reflected on her years at Dartmouth and her early career, encouraging the graduates to not give up on their dreams even if they face rejection.
After graduating from Dartmouth in 1988, Dratch decided to pursue her “crazy little dream” of becoming an actor, she told the crowd. She completed a batch audition for 40 graduate programs and all of them rejected her.
After the failed audition, Dratch shifted her focus and moved to Chicago to join the improvisational comedy troupe Second City.
“Lucky for me, I was told that anyone with a little improv experience and a pulse could get into the classes,” at Second City, Dratch said.
Despite having both qualifications, Dratch did not get in.
She earned a spot on her second attempt. Nine years later when she secured an SNL audition, Dratch also didn’t get it until her second try.
“Don’t let those rejections define who you are and make you lose faith in yourself,” Dratch advised. “That ‘no’ can be a magical guardrail pointing you to a yes you hadn’t even thought of.”
Dratch of course did not leave the audience without a few jokes, noting that she was honored to be addressing the graduating class in a year that also marks 50 years of female graduates at Dartmouth.
“Let’s all applaud something other colleges did 100 years earlier!” Dratch said, poking fun at the accolade. “Dartmouth: We’ll get there eventually.”
She also reprised her most famous SNL character of Debbie Downer to address the state of the world students will enter.
“Due to the construction of data centers and the impending water wars, the most useful college majors now are foraging and hand-to-hand combat,” the comedian told the class in character, punctuated by a signature sad trombone chord performed by graduate Noah Prescott.
Dratch left the group with two other parting lessons: be humble and remember that an “ensemble” of Dartmouth peers can help carry them forward.
To bring the energy up on the Green, the comedian closed by dancing around the stage to a jaunty trombone tune accompanied by her own plastic kazoo.
“Remember, the ensemble will always have your back,” Dratch advised.
During the overcast ceremony, a group of about 13 protesters walked silently around the Green, dressed in black and occasionally banging a gong. Groups staged similar protests at last year’s graduation and at a welcome-back barbecue in the fall.
The group was protesting a range of actions that indicate “Dartmouth’s increasing alignment with right wing political positions,” according to a press release.
They held signs reading: “Rename the Black Family Arts Center”, “no more pretend dialogue,” “Dartmouth stands against Palestinian rights” and “Name it: Dartmouth frightens faculty and staff into silence.”
The college’s actions are “really taken to be an affront to some community members who don’t like having right at its heart . . . an institution which could well be labeled the chief advocate of un-free speech in Vermont and New Hampshire,” Organizer Geoffrey Gardner, 83, of Bradford, Vermont, said in an interview Sunday.
In addition to topics that have frequently been the subject of protest over the past few years, the group objected to the choice to award an honorary degree to Greg Lukianoff.
Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expressions, FIRE, and was honored Sunday as a free speech advocate.
“You have reminded the world that we all benefit from constructive dialogue, hearing opinions different from our own, and testing ideas through rigorous debate rather than silencing them,” College President Sian Beilock said when awarding Lukianoff’s degree.
But protesters say FIRE is not focused on free speech but on limiting government regulations to support businesses and that Lukianoff promotes harmful rhetoric about transgender people, Gardner said.
The college awarded other honorary degrees to former U.S. Ambassador to Romania Alfred Moses, philanthropist Gary Love, playwright Karen Evans, Math for America President Maria Klawe and former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.
Other speeches delivered Sunday focused on bravery and uncertainty.
After being deferred from Dartmouth as a teenager, Valedictorian Ava Rosenbaum’s mother told her it was probably good because she was not a “risk-taker” like other Dartmouth students.
Over four years, Rosenbaum learned from her peers how to be brave and embrace the power of saying “yes to things that scare us” like agreeing to take a 54-mile hike with friends despite “never considering myself an outdoorsy person.”
“We are entering a world with no shortage of problems that are easy to criticize and difficult to solve,” Rosenbaum said. “Dartmouth taught us not to sit on the sidelines waiting for someone more qualified to step in. It taught us to believe that we can be the ones who try, the ones who take risks.”
Dartmouth’s first female graduates set an especially important example of the power of taking risks, Beilock said in her own address.
Their willingness to be brave and act differently serves as a powerful lesson at a time when “trust in American institutions is at an all-time low,” including higher education, Beilock told the gathered crowd.
“Too many look at our institutions and see places that have become calcified, too slow to adapt, too resistant to change, disconnected from people’s lives and struggles,” Beilock said.
The president encouraged Sunday’s graduates to be willing to challenge what is normal.
They might do this, she said, as “reformers” who join institutions and “help them become more responsive, more innovative and more humane” from the inside, or as “challengers” who question “assumptions and start movements” from the outside.
“50 years ago, the class of 1976 left this institution on a day like today very different than they found it, better than they found it,” Beilock said. “That is one of the highest compliments we can pay them. My hope is that 50 years from now, people will say the same about each of you.”
