When Rachel Dratch arrived at Dartmouth College as an undergraduate, she did not immediately find her place. It was not until she joined a campus improvisational comedy group during her sophomore year that she began to feel like she fit in. Decades later, as a Tony-nominated comedian and a veteran of Saturday Night Live, she returned to Hanover to tell the next generation of graduates that the awkward starts and the closed doors are often the beginning of the story, not the end of it. As NHPR reports in a story produced by the Valley News, Dratch delivered the commencement address to Dartmouth’s class of 2026 on Sunday, June 14, and promised the crowd that her 20-minute speech would change lives.
She opened, naturally, with a joke. After receiving an honorary Doctor of Arts degree, Dratch noted that she too had just earned a Dartmouth degree, except that the graduates in front of her had spent four long years on their bachelor’s degrees while hers, a doctorate, had taken less than a minute. She was, she said, simply a quick study. Dratch was one of six people to receive an honorary degree from Dartmouth on Sunday morning, part of a ceremony in which the college awarded roughly 2,200 degrees to students from 49 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and 58 countries.
A Career Built on Second Tries
The heart of Dratch’s message was about rejection, a subject she addressed with the authority of someone who has absorbed plenty of it. After graduating from Dartmouth in 1988, she set out to chase what she called her crazy little dream of becoming an actor. She completed a batch audition for 40 graduate theater programs. Every one of them turned her down.
Rather than treat that as a final answer, Dratch changed course and moved to Chicago to join the improvisational comedy troupe Second City. She recalled being told that anyone with a little improv experience and a pulse could get into the classes. Despite meeting both qualifications, she did not get in on her first attempt. She earned a spot on her second try. Nine years later, when she finally secured an audition for Saturday Night Live, she again did not land it until her second attempt.
The lesson she drew from that pattern was direct. She urged the graduates not to let rejections define who they are or make them lose faith in themselves. A “no,” she suggested, can act as a kind of guardrail, steering a person toward a “yes” they had never even imagined. For a class entering an uncertain job market and an unsettled world, it was an argument for persistence over perfectionism, and for staying in motion even when the first doors close.
Comedy With an Edge
Dratch did not let the audience off without a few sharper laughs. She noted that she was honored to address the graduating class in a year that also marks 50 years of female graduates at Dartmouth, then gently needled the institution for celebrating a milestone that some peer colleges had reached a century earlier. Dartmouth, she suggested with a grin, gets there eventually.
She also reprised her most famous Saturday Night Live character, the relentlessly pessimistic Debbie Downer, to comment on the state of the world the graduates are inheriting. In character, she riffed darkly on data centers and looming water wars, joking that the most practical college majors now might be foraging and hand-to-hand combat, a bit punctuated by a signature sad trombone played by a graduate, Noah Prescott. The humor landed because it acknowledged, rather than ignored, the anxieties many young people carry about their future.
Dratch closed with two earnest lessons beneath the jokes. She told the class to stay humble, and she reminded them that the bond they share as classmates is itself a resource. Drawing on the language of her improv roots, she described their Dartmouth peers as an ensemble, and she promised that the ensemble would always have their back. It was a fitting note for a comedian who has spent a career insisting that the best work is rarely done alone. Dartmouth has worked in recent years to strengthen exactly that sense of community and dialogue, including a $25 million gift to expand civil discourse programming on campus.
Protests and Other Voices on the Green
The ceremony was not without dissent. During the overcast proceedings, a group of about 13 protesters dressed in black walked silently around the Green, occasionally banging a gong. According to a press release, they were protesting what they described as Dartmouth’s increasing alignment with right-wing political positions, and they carried signs criticizing the college’s leadership and its handling of free speech and other issues. Geoffrey Gardner, 83, of Bradford, Vermont, one of the organizers, said in an interview that the college’s recent actions felt like an affront to community members. The protest echoed similar demonstrations at last year’s graduation and at a welcome-back event in the fall.
Other speakers struck notes of bravery and uncertainty. Valedictorian Ava Rosenbaum told her classmates that Dartmouth had taught them not to sit on the sidelines waiting for someone more qualified to step in, but to be the ones who take the risk and try. Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock used her own address to highlight the example set by the college’s first female graduates, and she encouraged the class to be willing to challenge what is considered normal. She pointed to the class of 1976, which she said left the institution better than it found it, and expressed hope that the graduates of 2026 would be remembered the same way half a century from now.
For a New Hampshire institution that draws students and attention from around the world, the day captured a familiar tension between celebration and scrutiny. Dartmouth remains one of the state’s signature engines of opportunity, and its graduates enter a region where the cost of building a life, from housing to childcare to college debt, remains a pressing concern. The broader story of higher education in the Granite State, including the rise of large online institutions like Southern New Hampshire University, continues to evolve. For one Sunday in Hanover, though, the message was simpler: keep going, stay humble, and trust the people beside you.
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For related coverage, see our reporting on USNH Trustees Eye Second Straight Tuition Hike at UNH.
