Commencement 2025 Sunday, May 25, 2025

Want to show your Bobcat pride? Download one of our printable PDFs.

Want to show your Bobcat pride? Download one of our printable PDFs.

We are looking forward to welcoming Bates families and friends to campus in May to celebrate the Class of 2024. We will continue to update this website as more details are confirmed.

The 158th Commencement of Bates College will take place on Sunday, May 26, 2024, beginning at 10 a.m. and ending shortly after noon on the Coram Library Terrace on the Historic Quad.

As bleary-eyed seniors slowly arrived on Commencement morning, we were there, inviting them to pose for slow-motion portraits. Slow no more!

It’s a line from a postmodern novel: “Which do you drink? The water or the wave?” We plan to drink the water. But then the waves come crashing, says Chris Schiff in his Baccalaureate address.

“A great, unpretentious, family-style Commencement!” is how a livestream viewer from Santa Fe, N.M., described this year’s Bates graduation. Here’s how it went, hour by hour.

The 157th Bates Commencement saw degrees conferred on 439 Bates seniors and an address by author and scholar J. Drew Lanham — a self-described “bird-loving Black kid” from South Carolina — who spoke about freedom and Benjamin Mays, and called on the graduates “to be better, to do better” and “to be an arc in the bigger circle” that gives power to our freedom.

The Class of 2023 ivy stone was designed by Abby Segal, who is a professional magician. But there’s no dazzling illusion in the design, just simple storytelling about a class navigating COVID.

This year’s Senior Address at Commencement will be offered by Rishi Madnani ‘23 of Langhorne, Pa., who came to Bates with two major expectations about his path forward. And both were upended.