A Note from Chris: Commencement 2026

Dear friends,

On Tuesday, May 26, the Whitfield community gathered in Cady Gym for its 73rd Commencement ceremony. It was a joyful evening and a fitting celebration of the Class of 2026. We were fortunate to hear from two voices who captured the spirit of the occasion: Senior Class Speaker Ellen Hunigan ’26 and Commencement Speaker Ryan Mango ’09, each reflecting on how growth unfolds over time and shapes who we become.

Ellen reminded her classmates that “growth rarely looks dramatic while it is happening,” that much of what defines a person happens without an audience, in commitments nobody ever talked about. Her charge to the Class of 2026: “Hold onto the parts of yourself that don't show up in a list.” In her remarks, Ellen talked about Whitfield graduates as “and” students: “artists and writers,” “scientists and athletes.” A living example of such unclassifiable versatility, Ryan drew on his own unlikely path—from Stanford to the Army, from the Olympic trials in wrestling to a career at Procter and Gamble, marketing Old Spice—to offer the graduates two hard-won truths: that progress is rarely the straight line you've planned for yourself, and that “progress in life has very little to do with achieving your goals. Progress is about the human being you become in your aspirations to achieve those goals.”

After our speakers, we honored, as we always do at Commencement, the extraordinary contributions of important members of our community. This year, we were proud to present the Louis Lazarus Award to Mitzie Fenberg P ’26, a parent whose generosity of time and spirit, and deep commitment to the daily life of the school have shaped the experience of Whitfield for countless students and families. Through her work in the café, the campus store, and now The Huddle, she has helped create spaces where students feel known.

We also recognized Jane Piper Gleason '70 with the Chairman's Award, Whitfield's highest honor. Jane's affection for Whitfield has always been rooted in her own experience here, and in a simple but powerful conviction: that every student deserves a place where they feel known and capable of success. That conviction is visible in her extraordinary generosity over the years, and in particular her leadership in reimagining Piper Courtyard, which she originally envisioned as a place where students could simply “flop”—to exhale, to gather, to just be. What distinguishes Jane is not only the scale of her support but the depth of the understanding behind it. Jane knows that spaces shape the student experience, that relationships matter, and that communities endure when they are cared for thoughtfully over time.

Finally, we continued a newer but meaningful tradition by awarding honorary diplomas and class membership to departing faculty and staff who have served the school for twenty-five years or more. This year, we were proud to recognize Todd Gienke H '26, P ’11, ’12, ’17 and Pam Hall H ‘26 as honorary members of the Class of 2026, honoring their many years of service and the lasting impact they have had on generations of Whitfield students.

Yesterday, in my closing words to the faculty and staff before breaking for summer, I shared a series of quotations gleaned from a survey I do each spring of our graduating seniors. Reflecting on the adults and experiences that shaped their lives at Whitfield, their written comments are generous, heartfelt, and extraordinarily moving. I’ll leave you with one of the shortest—and most powerful: “[This teacher’s class] strengthened my perception of what it means to be human, and what right living is.”

Warmly,

Chris Cunningham, Ph.D.
Head of School
The Whitfield School

P.S. For those who are interested, I am appending the text of my Commencement remarks to the Class of 2026.

“Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. … I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

–Henry David Thoreau, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Walden

In The Whitfield School mission—the mission that you yourselves helped to create when you were freshmen–we set ourselves the task of inspiring students to “lead lives of curiosity, integrity, and purpose.” The past two years at Commencement, I offered reflections on this phrase, speaking two years ago on what it means to lead a life of curiosity and then last year on what it means to lead a life of integrity. This evening I want to conclude this series of talks by thinking with you about what it means to lead a life of purpose.

On the face of it, this seems pretty straightforward. At the very least, when we say a life of purpose, we clearly mean a life of meaning and value, a life of “high purpose,” a life that serves a higher good. A life led in the service of goals beyond one’s own narrow self-interest. A good job, material possessions, the ability to satisfy our desire for happiness and pleasure and enjoyment. These are perfectly good, reasonable things—I want them as much as anyone else. But all religions and virtually every culture and ethical system of which we are aware in human history suggest that they are not enough, that we are at our best, as human beings, when we set our sights higher and broader, serving the needs of others and taking aim at goals that transcend our finite, individual lives. You don’t need to win the Nobel Peace Prize or make a life-saving medical discovery, but my hope for you is that who you are—that person of integrity and curiosity—and what you do, in your job, in your community, as a citizen, adds to the long human story of those capital letter virtues and ideals: Kindness, Justice, Equality, Truth, Beauty, Human Dignity and the Common Good. All of us have to reckon with and answer in our own way, the question: Why do I exist? What is my purpose? The way you live your life, every day, year after year, is your answer to this question. Make that answer count.

Serving a higher purpose should be its own reward–by definition. But for those skeptics in the audience, who might find this a bit old-fashioned or naively optimistic, there are, ironically, a host of practical, self-serving reasons for having a sense of purpose. There is a robust literature in psychology, medicine, and educational research that having a sense of purpose has profound, long-lasting benefits. In study after study, people with purpose tend to have more robust social networks and more meaningful, rewarding relationships. They experience better mental and emotional health, and better medical outcomes. Older people with a sense of purpose experience less cognitive decline, and young people with a strong sense of purpose do better in school. Indeed, while one might think that focusing on yourself is the best path to happiness, people whose sense of purpose transcends their own individual wants and needs experience greater feelings of fulfillment and well-being. 

The key psychological insight seems to be that when we focus on values, on what matters to us, on big picture meaning and purpose, we are better equipped to persist in the face of hardship. No one has made this case more powerfully than Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning. In this provocative and moving book, Frankl, an Austrian psychologist and Holocaust survivor, reflects on his experience in the Nazi Death Camps. In the face of almost unimaginable torment, Frankl tries to understand how some prisoners were able to maintain their sense of possibility and hope. In Frankl’s telling, tending to others, showing generosity and care, holding on to a sense of meaning in the face of suffering were essential to these prisoners’ psychological survival. Frankl writes, “any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him–mentally and spiritually.” (56) In Frankl’s account, a prisoner looking for “inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in [finding] some future goal.” Finally, quoting the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Frankl concludes, “If we possess our why of life, we can put up with almost any how.” Let me be clear: I hope that no one in this room will ever have to experience the kind of suffering that Frankl describes, and I don’t want to suggest any kind of facile equivalence between his experience and our ordinary human hardships. But all of us experience pain, disappointment, setbacks, and failures, moments of challenge and struggle, of tedium and self-doubt. In the years ahead, you will have moments of extraordinary achievement, of growth and success and fulfillment. But there will also be moments of difficulty, when that success and achievement will seem out of reach. Possessing your why of life—knowing the purpose towards which you are striving—will help provide the resilience and the courage and strength you need to persist. 

Finally, I want to suggest that leading a life of purpose means leading a life that is not only inspired by a higher good but also one that is purposeful, intentional. At this point, you know well that there is no shortage of people and institutions and social and cultural forces that want to tell you what to do, what to think, what to believe. Your parents and family, your teachers (including me, today, right now). Religious, political, and other public figures—actors and actresses, musicians, artists, sports figures, writers, and influencers of all flavors. Corporations and all the various media. All of them offering, explicitly or implicitly, a vision of the world that they want you to adopt and share. Things they want you to do or desire or believe or fear or love.

In a now-famous Commencement Address, the late writer David Foster Wallace began with a simple parable: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’” By now in your life, I’m sure you’ve had numerous experiences when you realized you were swimming in water, when you became aware of a previously, apparently invisible reality that you suddenly couldn't not see and then realized to your great astonishment it was there all along. This can be as simple as staying at a friend’s house when you’re young and discovering that not all families are the same or as profound as visiting another country and realizing that entire civilizations understand the world differently than you. 

So there are two things to say: first, those voices that you’ve grown up with are part of that water. Second, listening to all of these voices, uncritically, reflexively, swimming through your life without recognizing the water is like sleeping through your life, drifting along in the current, immersed in a compelling dream. I’m not suggesting that you reject everything you’ve been taught or that there aren’t wise and good people in the world and in your life who are worthy of your respect and attention. There are. But I am encouraging you, at the very least, to challenge yourself, to engage yourself in a lifelong, inner dialog. To look critically at your fundamental values, the things you hold to be true and good and right and beautiful, and consider whether you embrace them because they are part of the water, or whether you have chosen them for yourself. Because if you’re not choosing them, that means someone else or something else is choosing them for you. If you’re not choosing your own life, choosing the person you are and aspire to be, that best version of yourself—if you’re not choosing that, then it’s being chosen for you. And even if these wise and good people are choosing with the best of intentions, the life they choose for you may not be the one that’s best for you, and it won’t be your own.

And so, on the one hand, our mission enjoins us to lead a life of high purpose, of service to others and the common good. A life that, ironically, paradoxically, leads to greater individual and personal fulfillment, health, and satisfaction than a life motivated by purely selfish goals and gain. It turns out that the most purposeful life is also the most fulfilling. At the same time, the mission challenges us to reject the easy, mindless answers our culture offers us—the water in which we swim but that we don’t see. And, instead encourages us to lead a purposeful life, an intentional life, a life of reflection that we choose for ourselves.

We invite you to click the link below to view matriculation information for the Class of 2026 and images from Commencement.