Pictured above: Daina Ramey Berry delivers the 2026 Humanities and Fine Arts commencement address. Photo courtesy of GradImages.
Berry calls on graduates to share what they know, create what only they can create and answer skepticism about their degrees through their life’s work
At UC Santa Barbara’s Humanities and Fine Arts commencement ceremony on June 12, 2026, Daina Ramey Berry, the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, challenged the Class of 2026 to carry the rigor, imagination and ethical judgment developed through their disciplines into a world asking urgent questions.
Watch the full Humanities and Fine Arts commencement ceremony on YouTube. Berry’s address begins at 34:00.
The following remarks were prepared for delivery on June 12, 2026, and lightly edited for clarity and accuracy.
Commencement address
Class of 2026, before we rush to the next part of this ceremony, I want to invite you to pause. Take in this moment.
Take in the regalia, the sunlight, the faces of the people who love you, the faculty and staff who helped guide you, and the classmates who have been part of your story. You are standing in a liminal place, between who you were when you arrived at UC Santa Barbara and who you are becoming now.
That is a powerful place to stand.
You are graduating into a world that is asking urgent questions. Questions about work. About technology. About truth. About memory. About belonging. About what it means to live with purpose in an uncertain time.
And as graduates of the Humanities and Fine Arts, you are not leaving here empty-handed. You are leaving with disciplines that have trained you to do something rare and necessary: to look closely, listen carefully, think capaciously, and create meaning where others may see only noise.
For years, we have heard people speak about a “crisis” in the humanities. They point to shifting enrollments, family skepticism, and economic uncertainties.
Some of you know these anxieties well: the familiar “What are you going to do with that degree?”
But when we center the human in the humanities, we know the truth: our fields are not dying. They are evolving. They are transforming. They are renewing themselves for the world in front of us.
And you are proof of that renewal.
In your classrooms, studios, rehearsal spaces, archives, and seminar rooms, you have done far more than complete assignments.
You have practiced the work of interpretation.
You have tested ideas.
You have debated hypotheses.
You have revised, rehearsed, translated, composed, questioned, and begun again.
That is one of the great misconceptions about the Humanities and Fine Arts: that our work is abstract or detached. It is not.
You have learned how to understand context, how to read silence as well as speech. You have learned that a painting can make an argument, that a dance can hold memory, that a poem can carry grief, that a film can alter public imagination, that a language can open an entire world, and that history is never simply behind us. It is in the room with us, shaping what we notice and what we choose to do.
That training has consequences.
We see it in the dance major who studies the body so deeply that they go on to become a physical therapist assistant for performers, helping artists sustain the very instrument through which they tell stories. That is a graduate from UCSB who graduated last year. I met him in the doctor’s office. Who knew?
We see it in the philosophy major whose training in logic and ethics becomes essential to solving complex problems in technology and public systems, like our own Josh Bright, UC Santa Barbara’s associate vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer, who holds a doctorate in philosophy.
We see it in language majors who make collaboration possible across cultures, ensuring that ideas do not remain trapped behind barriers of translation.
We see it in art majors shaping visual culture. We see it in film and media studies majors enhancing critical theory, and yes, winning Oscars, like Andy Jurgensen ’04, who won the 2026 Academy Award for Best Film Editing for “One Battle After Another.”
We see it in music majors composing new sonic worlds, in theater majors building empathy through performance, and in English and history majors bringing careful analysis to leadership, law, education, public service, and civic life.
You may not yet know the exact title you will hold 10 years from now. Many of the careers you will enter are still being invented. The tools will change. The platforms will change. Even the vocabulary of work will change.
But the deeper skills, discernment, imagination, ethical judgment, collaboration, and the courage to ask better questions, will endure.
When the world feels uncertain, it is the artists who help us see clearly. It is the historians who remind us how we arrived here. It is the philosophers who ask what justice requires. It is the writers who give language to what we have not yet been able to say. It is the performers who make emotion legible. It is the scholars of religion and culture who help us understand how communities make meaning. It is the linguists, translators, and teachers who build bridges across difference.
This is not ancillary work.
This work is part of the sinew of a humane society.
Here in Humanities and Fine Arts, you have been trained for a world that needs both rigor and imagination. You have been trained to recognize complexity without surrendering to confusion. You have been trained to find beauty without ignoring suffering. You have been trained to ask not only, “Can this be done?” but “Should it be done?” and “For whom?” and “At what cost?”
That is the kind of thinking our world needs from you now.
So as you leave UC Santa Barbara, I hope you will carry a few things with you.
Carry the mettle you built here, the strength that comes from trying something difficult and discovering that you can do it.
Carry the alchemy of your disciplines, the ability to turn research into understanding, practice into artistry, memory into meaning, and uncertainty into possibility.
Carry your community, the people who reminded you who you were when the work was hard, and who will celebrate the person you are becoming.
And carry the conviction that your education matters.
The world is waiting for you to share your knowledge. Not someday. Now.
Class of 2026, you are graduating at a threshold moment, for yourselves, for this university, and for the society you are about to help shape. You are equipped. You are ready. You are trained.
So seize this moment.
Share what you know.
Create what only you can create.
Speak the truth with rigor and grace.
Make beauty where the world is weary.
Build community where others have accepted division.
And when the world asks what one can do with a degree in the Humanities and Fine Arts, I hope you answer with your life’s work.
Congratulations to the mighty, creative, and resilient Class of 2026.
Go forward with courage. The world is waiting.