My graduation last Saturday turned out to be one of those events where I thought “I sure am glad to be leaving.”

I blame the speakers. Of the four people who took the microphone to speak at the ceremony, only one (the Senior Class President) managed to be humorous, interesting and relevant. The others were cringe-worthy and/or eye-roll-inducing.

First up was the Provost (as the President of the College was not present). She managed to be a downer with no stage presence, no original ideas, and no real talent at expressing even recycled ideas. She used her time to describe all of the things that were wrong with the world, including some which aren’t particularly bad for us. For example, she pointed out that we were entering a housing market crisis and a floundering economy. Except that hiring of new college graduates is still strong, and the bursting of the housing bubble actually means that my peers and I will be able to afford to buy homes. But I digress.

The Student Government Association President was also bad, but hers was a failure of style rather than content. Actually, it may have also been a failure of content, but I was too distracted by her endless stream of tired metaphors to notice what she was talking about.

The worst of them all, though, was the Commencement speaker, Peace Corps Director Ronald Tschetter. He gets the lowest grade because a man in his position should know how to give an appropriate commencement speech. Instead, we got the lengthy sales pitch for why we should join the Peace Corps.

Because the Cistern, where C of C traditionally graduates its students, is fairly small, we are each given 4 tickets to the actual graduation, and excess family members can watch the video streaming live from satellite locations. My younger brothers were at one of these locations, and told me after the ceremony that the video got a close-up of me rolling my eyes dramatically at something stupid Tschetter said. I guess disguising my disdain has never been my strong suit.

I’m inclined to dislike the Peace Corps. I disapprove of taxpayer-funded charity of any kind, and its even worse when the resources are as inefficiently allocated as with the Peace Corps. It strikes me as an organization tailored more to the needs of unemployed sociology majors than to the world’s poor.

But this year, C of C has the distinction of sending 25 students to the Peace Corps, so our commencement speech focused on 1) How awesome those 25 students are, 2) How awesome the Peace Corps is, and 3) Why we should all join the Peace Corps so that we too can consider ourselves good people.

Tschetter briefly brought up the idea of “servant leadership,” which I thought would be his segue into the bigger picture. But no, he went right back to how the best way to serve the world is by…can you guess?…joining the Peace Corps!

A commencement speech shouldn’t be about the speaker. It should be about the audience. To pull out my dusty Neo-Aristotelian rhetorical analysis, it should follow the epideictic model of rhetoric, which praises the moment. A graduation is a celebration of the students’ accomplishments, of the hard work that has gotten them to that stage, a recognition of the sacrifices their parents made to get them there, the moment of transition between the world of college and the rest of our adult lives.

We don’t need or want a sermon on why we should have joined the Peace Corps, or how cool it is that 25 of our peers did. Tschetter gave himself the perfect opening with his “servant leader” idea, then dropped the ball. He could have talked about how all of us graduates, in all of our different paths, can exercise servant leadership. How servant leadership isn’t just about joining the Peace Corps, it’s about volunteering in your community, giving to those less fortunate, standing up for ethical behavior in the work place. This sentiment, instead of being at the center of his speech, ended up as a throwaway line at the the end. I get it, you want to promote the Peace Corps. But the speech should be 90 percent about the moment and the students, no more than 10 percent about you. Tschetter inverted those percentages.

When my brother graduated from VMI, his commencement speaker was Donald Rumsfeld. Arguably a man in a far more important position than the Director of the Peace Corps (this was back when he was still Secretary of Defense). And yet he managed to give a truly inspiring speech that focused on the graduates, rather than his own agenda.

Here was the real kicker for me: Of over a thousand students graduating, we had one man walk across the Cistern in his Marine Corps uniform. While Ronald Tschetter fawned over the huge sacrifice that Peace Corps volunteers make giving up Internet access for two years, we actually had a student sitting on the stage prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for his country. That’s real courage.