Between Exercitium and Speculatio — Harvard’s 375th Commencement
The word that names the morning is older than the university that uses it. Exercise — as in Commencement Exercises, printed at the top of every Harvard program since the ceremony’s founding in 1642 — comes from the Latin exercere: to drive out of the enclosure. Before it described anything academic, anything athletic, anything civic, it described livestock. An animal kept in a pen, then released to do the work it was bred for. The Romans borrowed the word for their legions — drilling soldiers the way farmers drove oxen — and the medieval universities borrowed it from the Romans, attaching it to the public disputations in which degree candidates were required to defend their theses before any challenger who cared to rise. At Oxford and Cambridge, this happened every weekday in Lent. You appeared in the University Church and argued in Latin until someone stopped challenging you or you failed. Harvard imported the practice entire in 1642: nine scholars in the first graduating class defending propositions in grammar, rhetoric, logic, ethics, physics, and metaphysics — morning and afternoon, with a feast between. The ceremony was called, then as now, exercises. You were not being celebrated. You were being driven from the enclosure and put to work.
The opposite of exercitium, in the scholastic tradition, was speculatio — pure contemplation, thought turning on itself without the friction of public demonstration. The medieval university insisted these were not opposites but a cycle: you could not speculate well without exercising the mind against resistance, and you could not exercise meaningfully without a body of thought to draw from. Four years of reading and writing and arguing in the margins of drafts at odd hours in different time zones had been, in this older sense, the speculatio.
I thought about this etymology while standing in line to check in at the Harvard Museum of Natural History at 6:15 AM on May 28th, 2026. My gown was folded over my arm and under the crimson cape. In my hand I was holding the graduation hat with its tassel that kept shedding its yellow threads. My left arm, draped with the gown, was held uncomfortably high to keep the hem off the wet lawn. The air outside still carried the wetness of recent rain rousing the earthy aroma from wet bricks of facades and dirt paths now muddy. As the line moved, I looked around but did not see any familiar faces.
“Have you checked in?” My phone buzzed. A text from my wife appeared on the screen. She and my younger son were at the AirBnb.
“Almost.”
“Busy day ahead. Are you excited?”
“Yes!”
One cold January morning — cold by Northeast Florida standards — I lowered myself into an outdoor heated pool at 4:30 AM. It was in the thirties with the windchill. Gossamer swirls of steam lingered on the undisturbed surface and rose into the predawn darkness. Lights perched above the pool had their gaze fixed upon their reflections on the water divided by the lane ropes which rippled faintly in the chilled morning breeze. Birds tired after the previous day’s toil were still resting and had not commenced their morning ablutions. The familiar chlorine smell wafted and hovered in the quiet of the morning. When I set my water bottle at the pool’s end its clang echoed back from the tile walls startling me. I shivered from the navel up, the rest of my body adjusting to the warmer water below. I pulled off my prescription goggles and with both thumbs cleared the condensation from the inside, and sealed them back around my eyes. Now I could see the large clock on the changing room wall and read the breakdown of the exercise drill on the laminated sheet that I placed next to my paddles. I pulled the skull cap over my ears, adjusted the straps, ducked to check the seal of my goggles and pushed off the wall into my first lap.
As I swam, I felt an odd duality of sensations — my bent elbow lifting out of the water and my upturned cheek would feel cold, then warm as the arm entered the surface again; the top layer of water where my hand pierced through would feel colder than the deeper warmth below, my kick driving through both temperatures at once. It was as if I swam in a liminal space between warmth and cold; neither fully in nor fully out. Strokes propelled me forward because of the alternation, not despite it.
After an hour and a half, I concluded my morning exercise, climbed out of the pool, and put my fins, paddles, and buoy board into my swim bag. Shivering in the frigid morning air, I hurried toward the changing rooms and the comfort of a hot shower. I felt great. I felt ready for the day.
On the morning of May 28th, 2026, the day of Harvard’s 375th Commencement, I felt much the same: joy and sadness, relief and excitement, anticipation and apprehension held together at once — emotions I could not reconcile until the day was nearly done.
At check-in, each of us in the Extension School was given a printed program and a small plastic lamp to hold and wave — a pastiche of the golden lamp of learning that sits at the base of the Extension School’s shield, placed there in 1983 to mark what the school stands for: classes taught in the evening, for adult learners who worked by day and read by night. The wheat on the shield recalls a founder’s wish that a Harvard course cost no more than two bushels of it. Today a single course runs to some 514 bushels — the shield would need redrawing to hold the harvest, or a different symbol altogether. The lamp recalls the hour at which such students could finally sit down to study.
After years of coursework done at odd hours across different time zones — burning my own midnight oil — here it was, the lamp of learning, made in China. I held it. Opened its lid to expose the hollow where oil would have gone, in a lamp meant to burn. I marveled that it had survived the tariff-affected supply-chain woes to arrive warm in my hand. I thought of the workers who mass-produced these by the thousand to be exported. They could not have known what this one would come to mean to me. Did they wonder what it was for? I don’t know. But surely they knew this much: that rubbing one would not summon a genie.
There were coffee and snacks for those willing to stand in line; I hesitated, then decided against it. Graduation-morning snacks must be for those whose stomachs hold no butterflies fluttering too frantically — or for those brave enough to chance spilling coffee, or worse, yogurt, on their regalia.
“Shehzad!” Two voices behind me.
I turned and saw two of my classmates and spotted another one nearby. We had spent some eight months together in the pre-capstone and capstone classes; I had come to know them through their writing and their critiques. They looked like their digital versions, only much better. Dressed in elegant regalia, they carried both the relief of a rigorous program completed and the anticipation of what lay ahead.
We lingered and chatted, waiting for our college’s walk to the Yard.
It was around 8:00 AM when everyone lined up and walked together along the winding path from the Museum of Natural History to Tercentenary Theatre. The band played, and friends, family, and curious onlookers cheered us on. At the bend near the entrance to the Yard, faculty members welcomed us, beaming, as we walked past them.
“We’ll see you at the Yard — we’re there now.” My phone buzzed with a message from Faiza.
The academic procession formed at 9:30 AM in Tercentenary Theatre — the open quadrangle between Memorial Church and Widener Library that was so named in 1936 when Harvard celebrated its three hundredth birthday, and which had been the site of these same exercises, in various arrangements, since 1642. On Commencement Day it blazed with the reds, blues, greens, and golds of the university’s varied flags: the three crimson Harvard Veritas banners bearing the ancient shield above the long staircase of Widener; the thirteen heraldic standards of the undergraduate houses and communities — Adams through Winthrop; and the bright banners of twelve graduate schools, Arts and Sciences through University Extension, hung from the trees. One could see the full institutional breadth of Harvard laid out in a heraldry of emblems against the May sky.
I walked with the candidates from University Extension — approximately fourteen hundred of us — entering from Sever Quadrangle along the route graduate and professional school candidates have taken since 1946, when their procession was first routed through the streets of Cambridge before finding its place in the Old Yard. Our route did not take us past Daniel Chester French’s statue of John Harvard — the one sculpted in 1884 from an undergraduate model, since no image of John Harvard himself survives, a fact the program acknowledges with characteristic Harvard understatement by calling it “imaginative.” By tradition, graduating students doff their caps to him as they pass: a gesture of acknowledgment toward a benefactor who exists only in approximation, honored in good faith. I had done so a day earlier, when we gathered on his steps for our class photograph.
Clouds had pulled apart to reveal cerulean patches above the canopy of elms. Rain had been forecast for the afternoon; I could already feel it in the wet air. The previous night’s rain had left the white folding chairs damp, though someone had cleaned most of them before we arrived. I wiped a residual patch of water puddled in the middle of the seat and sat down. An elderly staff member in a formal morning coat, noticing the wet surfaces, produced a crisp white napkin from his breast pocket and cleaned the chair beside mine. My chair sat on a slight incline, one leg lifted by the root of a mature tree at the edge of the Theatre. I noticed and considered switching chairs or moving it. I did not: the former would not have been fair to someone else, and the latter would have broken the neat symmetry of the row.
These trees have stood in this quadrangle and witnessed the ceremonies and the mundane with stoic equanimity for generations — the same trees that watched the Tercentenary celebrations of 1936, that shaded the chairs of classes now long dispersed, that will shade chairs in future Mays that neither I nor anyone seated near me will see. Looking back from where I sat: Widener Library, with its broad staircase and its twelve columns and its three and a half million volumes. Looking forward: the south porch of Memorial Church, where the President’s Division would take its place on the platform built for the occasion, the President seated in a three-legged Elizabethan chair used at Harvard Commencements since the time of President Holyoke in the eighteenth century. Two men in chairs that would not sit level, separated by three centuries, each doing the work the morning required.
And there was I. Sitting in my unbalanced chair, carefully distributing my weight so as not to tip sideways. My crow’s feet — the flat-braid emblems on the gown’s lapels — were white, the color designated for Arts and Sciences and University Extension. Farther ahead, to my right, sat Harvard Medical School’s class of 2026, their crow’s feet green. I had once been where they were that morning — graduating from medical school and slowly realizing it was only a waystation, crucial but partial, before years of additional learning, formal and otherwise. I sat at the far edge of the Creative Writing and Literature cohort, beside the zone reserved for the Medical School’s class of 2026: on the seam between where I had begun twenty-nine years earlier and where I had arrived. It felt like my place.
When all participants were seated, the University Marshal signaled for the ringing of the Memorial Church bell — the five-thousand-pound bronze bell that is rung by hand on Commencement Day. Its deep tone resonated across the Yard and into the surrounding streets of Cambridge. Then the Marshal addressed the Sheriff of Middlesex County:
Mr. Sheriff, pray give us order.
The Sheriff — resplendent in a silk top hat, his silver-tipped staff in hand — rose, moved solemnly to the front of the platform, and struck the staff against the boards three times. In a resonant voice, he proclaimed:
The meeting will be in order.
He has been doing this, or his predecessors have, since the colonial compact between Harvard and the civil authority of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The program notes that he attends as a reminder that he, like the Marshal General of the Colony before him, is invited to preserve order. There is something distinctly Harvard in that formulation — not commanded, not required, but invited, as if disorder were entirely within the range of outcomes.
The first anthem was America the Beautiful. Katharine Lee Bates wrote the words in 1893 after descending from the summit of Pikes Peak, the Colorado plains spreading beneath her, a grandeur that demanded articulation.
O beautiful for spacious skies.
The soloist’s voice soared and the choir followed. Hundreds in academic gowns sat within the enclosed rectangle of the Yard and listened; a few who knew the verses sang along.
I read through the program. Around me, people stood for photographs. A middle-aged man in the row ahead rehearsed what appeared to be a speech, his lips moving without sound. I later learned that he was the invited student speaker for the afternoon Extension School graduation. Several graduates spoke excitedly on their phones, confirming that family members had found the viewing area in the Yard. My attention moved in alternating strokes — outward toward the ceremony, inward toward the relief of completing the degree and the elation of joining the long thread of Harvard alumni stretching back to the nine who first graduated in 1642.
An excited voice called out loudly:
“Mom! I’m here. I can see you on the stairs. Turn to your right and look straight. I’m the one waving next to the big tree in the back!”
She had one phone wedged between her shoulder and ear and another in her hand. She stood facing a group of five students lined up for a photograph.
I could now name the unease I had felt since waking.
My mother was not here.
She had been the first to know.
Five years earlier, when the acceptance letter arrived, I was in Jacksonville and she was in Pakistan. After her kidneys began to fail, she stopped making the annual trips to the United States she had once enjoyed.
“Beta, America is not for sick people, especially if they don’t have insurance.”
When I received the acceptance letter, I had just finished seeing a patient in clinic. I had ten minutes before my 10 a.m. appointment. I sent a text to our family chat group — my wife and two sons — and to the WhatsApp group shared by my siblings and their spouses.
. I then called Ammi.
“Hello.”
She sounded tired. She had returned from a nephrology appointment and was resting. She asked me how I was doing, why I was losing weight (I was working very hard at it), how Faiza was doing, whether Zuhair had passed his end-of-semester exams, whether Mahad was being careful while lifting weights for his university’s Olympic Weightlifting Club, and whether I had sent money to a charity she had identified.
I answered all of those questions and then added, “I have good news to share.”
I still remember how overjoyed she was. She thanked God, then prayed that this new adventure would turn out to be a good thing for me. That I would do well. That it would not come at the expense of my obligations as a husband and a father.
In the years that followed, her health moved through different gradations of bad. There were close brushes with organ failure and sepsis. Eventually came kidney failure, her initial refusal of hemodialysis, and then her reluctant agreement to two sessions each week. Three, she insisted, would place too great a burden on my brother and his family, her primary caregivers. Through it all, she continued to watch her children and grandchildren succeed and sometimes struggle. She attended our older son’s graduation and his admission to audiology school virtually, following both occasions through video calls.
A stroke, a coma, and a chest infection later, she was on life support.
After finishing my evening class, I joined a conference call with my two brothers and my sister in Islamabad, Dubai, and Lahore. We decided to honor our mother’s wish for a peaceful, dignified passing. Faiza and I attended the video call from her hospital room while my siblings stood by her bedside as she was taken off the ventilator.
A few minutes later, she was declared dead.
Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un.
We all said it aloud and quietly prayed.
I sat in my chair on its incline, beneath my tree, and tried to hold all of it: the degree nearly complete; my wife and our younger son somewhere in the Yard’s viewing area — he had walked on stage for his own graduation two weeks earlier as an environmental engineer from USF; and my older son in Tampa, who had been tracking the graduation program with my wife since early morning, waiting for the moment when he could slip away from his graduate seminar and open his laptop.
My brother and his wife in Dubai.
My sister and her family in Lahore.
My other brother and his family in Islamabad.
We were all there.
Our mother was not.
Then the choir sang Will the Circle Be Unbroken.
I had read its verses in the program. There is a difference between reading the verses and hearing the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum give it full voice in an open-air theater. Large speakers, expertly placed, carried the sound with unexpected clarity through the open air.
Will the circle be unbroken
By and by Lord, by and by
There’s a better home awaiting
In the sky Lord, in the sky.
Well, I went back home, home was lonely
For my mother she was gone
As I listened, the song gave voice to what had been moving beneath the surface of the morning all along.
My mother was gone.
The Graduate English Address was titled Losing Our Education — a provocation in the best tradition of the Commencement Parts, a practice that began in Harvard’s earliest history when candidates chosen for outstanding achievement delivered orations in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin before the assembled Colony. The conferral of degrees followed in the order prescribed by institutional protocol.
Conan O’Brien delivered the Commencement Address from the platform on the south porch of Memorial Church, the President beside him in his eighteenth-century chair. O’Brien told a story about getting into Harvard. He was seventeen when he visited his grandmother, who was very old and very frail, and shared the news. She became so overcome that she began to shake, and O’Brien, wanting to be close to her in the moment, leaned in to embrace her and realized, somewhat belatedly, that he had been sitting on her legs the entire time. He joked that he was never entirely certain whether what he saw in her face was tears of joy or the expression of pain in her legs. But he chose to remember it as joy.
The Yard laughed. I laughed.
And then — in the pause after the laughter — I thought of my phone call to Ammi.
He continued: the credential should become the least important thing about you. Harvard, properly understood, is not a destination but a departure — the beginning of an obligation to think carefully, act honestly, remain willing to be wrong, and continue learning long after learning is comfortable or credentialed.
Artium Magister.
Master of Arts.
Not a declaration of completion. A license to begin.
Inceptio — the word that underlies Commencement itself, the word the program prints in its brief history: the medieval ceremony that admitted candidates for the degree of Master of Arts and granted them license to begin teaching.
You commence.
You start.
The pen opens.
Until 1814, Harvard gave no diplomas. For its first hundred and seventy-two years, candidates were greeted by the President, handed a symbolic book, and sent back into the world with nothing tangible. The degree was not held. It was noted. What you carried out of the enclosure was not paper but the alteration itself, the four years of speculatio now converted by the exercitium of the ceremony into something you were expected to spend the rest of your life making less important than the use you put it to.
The Road Home was sung after my section’s degrees were verbally conferred. Michael Dennis Browne wrote the text; Stephen Paulus set it to music. Both are gone: Paulus in 2014, Browne in 2026, the program noting his death with the plain dates beside his name. The choir sang his words on the morning of the year of his death.
Tell me, where is the road I can call my own, That I left, that I lost, So long ago? All these years I have wandered. There’s a voice I can hear That will lead me home.
Rise up, follow me.
I will lead you home.
Then Fair Harvard, sung by the entire assembly — written by Samuel Gilman, Class of 1811, revised most recently in 2018, its final line asking us to be the herald of Light and the bearer of Love till the stars in the firmament die. Then the Pusey Minister pronounced the benediction. The Sheriff of Middlesex County rose a final time, stamped his silver-tipped staff against the platform boards three times, raised his voice above the crowd, and declared: The meeting is adjourned.
The five-thousand-pound bell rang. The University Band struck up a march — Harold Bennett’s Military Escort, composed in 1881, the march that has closed every Harvard Commencement since — and the graduates moved through Tercentenary Theatre and the Old Yard, from the Age that is past, as Gilman wrote, to the Age that is waiting before.
The pen had opened. We were driven out.
We walked back from the Yard to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. We ate lunch in the company of our cohort. The Extension School had extended the university’s reach to people who came to Harvard from careers already underway, from cities and countries far from Cambridge, from decades of professional life that had made them both more prepared and more aware of what they did not know. Many of my closest friendships in the program had been forged at the summer residency, the one week each year when the otherwise distributed cohort became physically proximate, when work done in isolation across time zones briefly became conversation across a dinner table. Most of those friends had graduated in 2025. A few of us remained.
We ate together. We would not all be in the same place again.
The afternoon ceremony was held for candidates of the Bachelor of Liberal Arts and the Master of Liberal Arts — approximately fourteen hundred of us, the youngest twenty-two, the oldest seventy-nine. The Dean of Extension Studies spoke about what it had taken and what it meant. The Associate Dean of Education spoke about the program, its history, its reach. Two students addressed the graduates.
And then, one by one, names were called — and where each one was from.
This is the exercitium in its oldest and most literal form. Not the mass verbal conferral in Tercentenary Theatre before ten thousand people. When an usher indicates, one row stands up, walks to the stage, and stands in line. One by one, graduates step up, and a barcode on their badge is scanned so the announcer can find the name’s phonemes and pronounce it correctly. Eventually one name is called, and they walk across the stage, shake hands with the dean, then stand next to her while a photo is taken.
My name was called.
Somewhere in the back, my wife and our younger son watched — the son who had walked his own stage two weeks before in Tampa. Somewhere in Tampa, our older son watched the livestream on his laptop, having tracked the program with my wife since morning. In Dubai, my brother and his wife were gathered at a screen. In Islamabad and Lahore, my siblings and their spouses had found the live cast and arranged themselves around it. Five cities on two continents, connected by love and bandwidth.
I walked.
From somewhere, our younger son called out, “That’s my dad!”
Exercui.
