Santa Fe Commencement Speaker Ben Sasse (AGI98) Shares His Advice for a Life Well-Lived
June 3, 2026 | By Jennifer Levin
More than 120 seniors and members of the Graduate Institute received their degrees at Santa Fe’s 2026 Commencement on Saturday, May 23. Families traveled from 30 states and a dozen countries to watch their loved ones walk across the stage and listen to a keynote address delivered by Ben Sasse (AGI98), a former U.S. senator from Nebraska and 13th president of the University of Florida, who publicly shared in December 2025 his diagnosis with terminal pancreatic cancer.
“Mr. Sasse’s academic, professional, and public achievements have been a source of pride for many of his fellow St. John’s alumni,” Santa Fe President J. Walter Sterling said while welcoming Sasse, an alum of the St. John’s College Graduate Institute in Annapolis, to the stage. In Sasse, Sterling observed, he and others at the college had long recognized a kindred spirit.
“When he gave his famous first speech on the Senate floor,” Sterling said, “any Johnnie would have been struck by the many uses of the word ‘Socratic’ or its variants—I count[ed] six times. Without having researched it, I am confident that was a record of some sort—and a fitting one for a Johnnie to hold.”
Equally fitting was Sasse’s ensuing speech, which stressed the value of a St. John’s education in a society increasingly resistant to curiosity, complex debate, and novel ideas. He kicked things off on a humorous note, eliciting laughter as he recited the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales, a Program staple, in Middle English. Mixing comedy and undeniable joie de vivre with somber yet salient takeaways on the world’s current state, he encouraged graduates to resist the pull of their smartphones—a technological force he called a “casino” and a “liar,” describing the ubiquity of doomscrolling as an escape from physical embodiment. The author of New York Times bestsellers Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal (2018) and The Vanishing American Adult (2017) also tackled waning public trust in institutions, the comfort offered by conspiracy theorists, and the simultaneous dangers and possibilities of artificial intelligence.
An antidote proffered by Sasse was reading the Great Books. “A liberal arts education is never finished,” he concluded. “It is a transformation that could [happen] in high school and … can still happen at age 35, 55, 75, 95.
“It is a conversation through the ages available to anyone who would engage big ideas with both humility and curiosity. In a world that increasingly thinks of everything in terms of quantification, the liberal arts teach us that the biggest things in life will always be the qualitative riddles. The liberal arts also teach us that the virtues are not merely intellectual. They also have to be practical. You can never think your way to a good life. You have to live it.”
Sasse shared his five key habits for cultivating said good life: keep reading, work hard, rest consistently, travel seriously, and build relationships. “None of these habits is particularly profound,” he observed. “They’re things that your parents and grandparents have probably told you, whether they’ve read these books or not … They’re enduring precisely because they’re foundations of lives well-lived, where habits recur. And these habits will root us.”
Sasse’s speech was the focal point of a ceremony that included awards presented by Santa Fe Dean Sarah Davis for outstanding student essays and various academic distinctions, as well as student leadership. Abigail Petrich (SF26) received the Richard D. Weigle Prize for her senior essay, “Where Philosophy and Poetry Meet: An Exploration of Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis,” and Chris Lilly (SFGI26) accepted the Weigle Prize for his master’s essay, “Otherwise Than Said: The Genesis of ‘Diachrony’ and the Levinasian Reduction in Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974).”
The Class of 2026 also sang a rendition of Palestrina’s “Sicut Cervus,” the college’s unofficial anthem, and Katarina Wong (A88) of the St. John’s College Alumni Association congratulated them as the group’s newest members—a designation the graduates marked by tossing their mortarboards into the air.
