Failures of Kindness

Failures of Kindness is the convocation address the American writer George Saunders delivered to Syracuse University's graduating class in May 2013. Built around his memory of failing to be kind to a bullied classmate, it argues that kindness matters more than achievement, and is studied in HSC English Studies through Texts and Human Experiences.

Failures of Kindness is the convocation address George Saunders delivered to the graduating class of Syracuse University in May 2013. A convocation speech is a public ritual with a fixed job, to send graduates into the world with congratulation and grand encouragement, and Saunders quietly refuses that script. Instead of telling the graduates how much they have achieved, he tells them, with disarming honesty, about a failure of his own from decades earlier, and builds the whole speech around the humblest possible piece of advice: be kinder.

At the centre of the speech is a memory from seventh grade of a girl Saunders calls Ellen, a shy new student in "blue cat's-eye glasses" who was teased at his school, and to whom he was not cruel but was not kind either. Then, without warning, "One day she was there, next day she wasn't." Out of that single ordinary memory Saunders draws his thesis, that what he regrets most are not his big mistakes but his "failures of kindness", diagnoses the obstacle as a selfishness built into everyone, and ends on the hope of moral growth and the "luminous part of you" that kindness enlarges.

The speech had a life far beyond the ceremony: a transcript posted to the New York Times website was shared over a million times, and it was published as a short gift book, Congratulations, by the way, in 2014. A speech addressed to a few hundred graduates became a text strangers read as being about their own lives - the individual occasion turned out to hold a collective experience.

The founding human experience of the speech is the ache of remembered unkindness. Saunders' thesis arrives as a plain, considered verdict on his own life: "What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness." What he indicts is not cruelty but mildness - "Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded ... sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.", the clipped adverbs enacting the smallness of a half-response no one is punished for and no one forgets.

Ellen is built with deliberate restraint. She is introduced with a bare declarative, "ELLEN was small, shy.", the taunt she suffers is left unglossed, "Your hair taste good?", and her disappearance is flattened into perfect symmetry: "One day she was there, next day she wasn't." Because the door closes without warning, the debt can never be repaid, only carried, and the speech's claims about regret are earned from a real cost rather than invented for the occasion.

Saunders then widens confession into diagnosis. Asked why kindness is so hard, he names a shared condition rather than a personal flaw: "There's a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness". The phrase "each of us" is the mechanism that links one vanished girl to every listener, refusing to let the speaker off the hook and refusing to let the audience feel superior.

The close converts vulnerability into instruction. Having conceded "Because kindness, it turns out, is hard", Saunders offers the graduates an imperative humble enough to be usable, "err in the direction of kindness", presses them with the urgent asyndeton "Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.", and promises that "your self will diminish and you will grow in love". The sign-off, "Congratulations, by the way.", demotes the ceremony's central gesture to an afterthought, confirming that kindness, not achievement, was always the real subject.

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• My Father's Axe
• May Your Pen Grace the Page
• Sometimes Gladness
• Dear Mrs Dunkley
• The Pedestrian
• All HSC English resources