Business leader Ken Frazier urges members of the Class of 2026 to consider how they can serve others
Decades from now, Ken Frazier told the graduates, no one will ask you your GPA, but they will ask “whether you used your gifts not merely to advance yourself, but to lift others.” Photo: Alonso Nichols
Becoming an adult requires thinking about your deeper purpose, beyond simply earning a degree or landing a job, speaker Ken Frazier said at the 170th Tufts University commencement.
“Growing up is taking ownership of the question: What am I here to give? Not what can I get, not who will it impress, not what will be safe—but what am I uniquely positioned to contribute to this world?” he told the 3,662 graduates and their families and friends gathered under a sunny sky on the Academic Quad.
Frazier, chairman of General Catalyst’s Health Assurance initiatives and former president, CEO, and executive chairman of Merck, urged the graduates to think about who and what they are serving as they take the next steps in their lives and careers.
“Decades from now, no one will ask you your GPA. They will not ask your starting salary, or what title was printed on your first business card,” he said. “They will ask—and you will ask yourself, in the quiet hours—whether you served. Whether you showed up. Whether you used your gifts not merely to advance yourself, but to lift others.”
Photo: Alonso Nichols
Frazier described how he developed his own moral compass in life, starting out as a child in the inner city of Philadelphia whose parents valued education and faith. Beginning in elementary school, he rode a bus to a different, better school in another neighborhood, an experience he recalled objecting to at the time, but which he credited with helping to set him on the path to Harvard Law School.
As a lawyer, one of his most satisfying experiences was helping to exonerate a man who spent 19 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit, Frazier said. But he also found a deep sense of purpose at Merck, where he could contribute to saving millions of lives.
“More than the financial results—more than the headlines—what drove every decision I made during my tenure as CEO was a single belief: that business exists to deliver value to society, not just to shareholders,” he said. Through his leadership, he aimed to help ensure that medicines and vaccines could reach “people who had been written off by the global market.”
Ken Frazier encouraged the graduates to trust their personal judgment and intuition over outside influences. Video: Anna Miller
Now, in a world being reshaped by artificial intelligence and other technologies, he assured graduates that their judgment and leadership will be needed to serve the common good. “Your task is to be the human in the room who insists on asking: Who are we leaving out?” he said. “Whose voice is not in this dataset? Who does this efficiency serve, and who does it harm?”
Tufts University President Sunil Kumar addressed similar themes in his remarks, urging the graduates to evaluate information critically. As an example, he read a short passage considering the question, “Can beauty help determine truth?”
“Sounds pretty highfalutin and good, doesn’t it?” he asked, before revealing that the text was generated by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1.
Photo: Paul Rutherford
Assessing whether such a text reflects a “genuine, original view or simply a collection of words strung together to maximize the likelihood of acceptance” is one of the challenges that Kumar finds “both terrifying and exhilarating” as AI-generated content becomes more pervasive. But he told his listeners, “I suspect that you will be less impressed if you read [the passage] again critically.”
On a second reading, it becomes clear that “the passage is way off,” he said—in part because it tries to answer the question in the most literal sense. “As humans, we would interpret the question itself differently,” he added. “Common sense, our intuitive model of the world, however flawed, would kick in.”
While evaluating information and its sources can be difficult, Kumar said he firmly believed that Tufts graduates are up to the task and will be thoughtful about the potential costs and benefits of emerging technologies.
That confidence is based on how Tufts alumni live in accordance with their values and principles, he said. “When you act as a Jumbo … you know that it is not enough to do well for yourself; it is necessary to do good for others and to take care of the Herd.”
Tufts President Sunil Kumar addresses the Class of 2026. Photo: Alonso Nichols
Under Frazier’s leadership, Merck delivered innovative lifesaving medicines and vaccines. Currently, he guides strategy for General Catalyst’s Health Assurance initiatives, focusing on partnerships with healthcare companies and the pharmaceutical industry.
Throughout his career, Frazier has committed himself to organizations dedicated to leading social change and promoting equity. He serves on the boards of numerous organizations and holds several chairmanships, including as co-founder and co-chair of OneTen, a coalition of groups committed to upskilling, hiring, and promoting people without four-year degrees into family-sustaining jobs. He is married to Tufts alumna Andréa Wilkerson Frazier, J78.
Ken Frazier was one of three individuals receiving honorary degrees at the morning ceremony, which was followed by convocations for individual schools and for departments in Arts, Sciences, and Engineering. He received an honorary Doctor of Business Administration degree, while Terri Lyne Carrington, award-winning musician, producer, and educator, received an honorary Doctor of Music degree and David Walt, scientist, educator, and entrepreneur, received an honorary Doctor of Science degree. Walt previously taught at Tufts for 35 years, rising to the rank of University Professor.
