Princeton University’s Class of 2026 began three days of graduation events on Sunday with the 279th Baccalaureate, a Chapel service that put the graduating seniors in caps and gowns for the first time. The speaker, Craig Robinson, urged the class to think of success as progress rather than perfection.
Robinson, the executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches and a former Princeton University trustee, opened by telling the seniors to “Be a work in progress.” He said that idea came from his own time in Princeton, when he called home during his first year feeling overwhelmed and his father answered with a message that stuck with him for decades: he would not be No. 1 in the class, but he also would not be No. 1,001, and no matter where he landed he would always have a Princeton degree. Robinson said his father measured success by persistence, not GPA, and that “permission to not be ‘perfect’ was the first time I felt at ease on campus up to that point.”
The service took place in the University Chapel and was watched by friends and families from Alexander Hall, McCosh Hall and Frist Campus Center. Theresa Thames, dean of religious life and of the Chapel, gave the invocation before Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber greeted the seniors. The Baccalaureate is one of Princeton’s oldest traditions and includes music, blessings and readings from a range of faith traditions, underscoring that the ceremony is as much about reflection as it is about the start of commencement week.
Eisgruber tied that reflection to the university’s public mission, saying the school’s informal motto began with a 1896 speech by Professor Woodrow Wilson and was later expanded on Princeton’s 250th birthday to “Princeton in the Nation’s Service and in the Service of All Nations,” before being revised two years later to “Princeton in the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity.” He said, “For almost 300 years, the concept of making service central to one’s life has been tightly woven into the ethos of this University,” a framing that placed the day’s ceremony in the longer arc of Princeton’s history. For Robinson, the older lesson was personal: the mystique of the place mattered less than the person a student becomes under pressure, and that is the standard the Class of 2026 now takes with it into graduation week and beyond.
