Andrew Thompson, a senior at the University of Maryland, woke up on Wednesday to the news that his commencement speaker would not be a politician, tech executive or astronaut.
Rather, he would be sent off into the work force by a cheery, fleece puppet the color of pea shoots: the “Muppet Show” star Kermit the Frog.
That was great news for some students, who have already started calling the May graduation ceremony their “Ker-mencement.” Still, Mr. Thompson said that he and his roommates felt deflated. He didn’t want to sound ungrateful, but he couldn’t see why he was supposed to listen to life advice from a fictional character.
“It’s a little silly, having a puppet as a commencement speaker,” said Mr. Thompson, 22, a mechanical engineering major.
This year, the pomp and circumstance of graduation will play out against a backdrop of upheaval in higher education, as the Trump administration seeks to dismantle the Education Department, cut research funding and deport foreign-born students.
What speaker could possibly deliver an uplifting message to graduates while navigating that political minefield unscathed? The University of Maryland knew just the frog for the job: Kermit, whose creator, Jim Henson, graduated from the school in 1960.
To some students, like Rohin Mishra, 21, the opinion editor of The Diamondback, the school’s independent student newspaper, it almost seemed as if the university were trying to avoid “having to deal with real issues, by virtue of not having a real speaker.”
“I’m sure it’ll be funny,” he added. “I’m sure it’ll be nice. I don’t know how much insight it will bring.”
Asked whether Kermit’s selection had anything to do with minimizing the ceremony’s potential for blowback, a spokeswoman for the University of Maryland said in an email that Kermit had been chosen to honor Mr. Henson’s legacy. She said the choice had received positive feedback from students.
The commencement speech is an increasingly unattractive gig to many high-profile speakers, said David Murray, the executive director of the Professional Speechwriters Association. He saw Kermit as an “intriguing,” and potentially effective, workaround at a fraught moment for academic institutions.
“The schools are walking on eggshells,” he said. “Nobody is leading with their chin, because everybody is afraid of having their endowment messed with, being investigated, having their funding cut off.”
Kermit is likely to adhere to his script. Still, the splashiness of the choice may come with its own risks, he added: “What if Kermit says something that could possibly construed as D.E.I.?”
Frank Reifsnyder, a spokesman for Muppets Studio, said in an email that Kermit’s speech would be written by a Muppets writer, and that Kermit’s voice and movements would be provided by Matt Vogel, the character’s puppeteer since 2017. (Mr. Reifsnyder declined to say whether Kermit’s speech would address current events.)
Kermit has been through the graduation rigmarole before. When he was commencement speaker at Southampton College, then part of Long Island University, in 1996, some students decorated their caps with stuffed frogs. Others groaned.
“I’ve been here laboring for five years and now we have a sock talking at our commencement,” Samantha Chie, a marine biology major at L.I.U., told The New York Times at the time of the commencement. “It’s kind of upsetting.”
Similar divisions emerged on the University of Maryland campus this week.
Geoffrey Zhang, 22, a senior majoring in government and information design, had heard some of his classmates argue that the school should have chosen a more substantive speaker.
“I, frankly, am really excited for Kermit the Frog to come,” Mr. Zhang said. He thought the frog would bring “the kind of fun we need when the world is so uncertain.”
Apurva Mahajan, 19, a junior studying journalism and government, had observed a mix of excitement and apathy among students. “I think it’s a very safe option, because Kermit can’t really say anything crazy,” he said. “I feel like it will be a generic commencement speech.”
Maybe that’s the lesson the university is actually communicating to its students, beneath whatever charmingly nasal encouragement Kermit doles out on graduation day: to err on the unobjectionable side when things look dicey.
It is a very 2025 lesson indeed, dispensed at the precise moment when top law firms are under attack from Mr. Trump and universities are abandoning flagship diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Whether it invigorates the crowd at commencement remains to be seen.
“I don’t even think I’ll end up going,” said Mr. Mishra, who is graduating with a master’s degree in applied political analytics. “I’ll watch the speech on YouTube or something.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/style/kermit-university-of-maryland-commencement-reaction.html
