A Harvard University Law professor stood at a podium last week and told the graduating class that their credentials were not their qualification. He did it without saying the sentence. He picked a hobbit instead.
The story most people will tell about Benjamin Sachs’s last lecture is that a professor surprised his audience by quoting Tolkien instead of Rawls. That is the charming version. The actual version is that a senior labor scholar at Harvard Law School chose, in front of the next generation of corporate attorneys, to hand them the smallest character in the trilogy as their model. He could have given them Aragorn. He gave them Frodo. The choice was the whole sermon.
Aragorn is the lawyer’s hero. He is the rightful king. His claim is hereditary, his blade is reforged, and his lineage is the qualification. He spends three books being recognized by everyone he meets as the person he was already going to be. The road bends to receive him. Elrond knows. Galadriel knows. The dead under the mountain know. By the time he reaches Minas Tirith, the city is essentially waiting for him to arrive and become what he already is. Aragorn is what happens when the institution and the person agree about who matters. The crown was always going to fit. The story is the slow unveiling of a fact the world already knew.
Frodo has none of that. He is small. He has no standing. He is not trained for the task. He was not selected by anyone with the authority to select him. He is, in a literal sense, the wrong size for the job. The Council of Elrond is full of warriors and wizards and elves who could carry the ring further and faster, and the ring goes to the hobbit because the hobbit is the only one in the room small enough that the ring does not yet know what to do with him. His qualification is that he is beneath notice.
This is the part Sachs picked. Not the king returning to claim what was always his. The unimpressive person walking into Mordor because no one with the proper credentials could be trusted to make it past the gate.
I wrote earlier this year about Faramir, who understood that the people we honor are usually not the people doing the work, and that the institutions handing out honors are often the same institutions making the work harder to do. Sachs’s speech is a quieter version of the same observation. He told a room full of people about to receive one of the most credentialing pieces of paper in the country that the credential would not save them. That the people who actually change anything are usually too small to be obvious picks. The institutions that issue qualifications were not built to hand them out to the people who will need to use them.
He did not say this directly. He said it through Frodo. But the labor scholar at the podium has a biography. Before Harvard, he worked at the Service Employees International Union. Before that, he was a lawyer at Make the Road by Walking, an organization in Brooklyn. When he told the Class of 2026 that they would have to “make the road” where one did not yet exist, that phrase was not a metaphor he reached for. That phrase was the name of his old job.
The two historical examples he gave were not lawyer stories, either. The Flint sit-down strikes were autoworkers shutting down GM by sitting on the factory floor. The Greensboro lunch counters were four first-year college students who, on a Sunday night, decided to sit down and order coffee. Neither of those movements was led by people with the proper qualifications. Both were led by people the institutions had decided were too small to matter, and both rewrote the law afterward, in retrospect, once the work was already done.
The thing about Aragorn is that the institutions are correct about him. He is who they say he is. The crown fits. The story confirms the credentials.
The thing about Frodo is that the institutions are wrong about him. The ring should have been carried by someone bigger, stronger, properly trained, with the right pedigree. It was carried by the person the institutions had no use for because the institutions were not built for the job that needed doing. Tolkien wrote a story in which the credentials and the qualifications come apart, and the world is saved by the gap between them.
He also wrote something the speech did not mention: that Frodo fails. At the crack of Mount Doom, with the ring in his hand and the work of three books standing on the next thirty seconds, Frodo claims the ring for himself. He does not destroy it. The whole quest, every mile of it, every friend lost along the way, ends with the small, unimpressive hero looking into the fire and choosing the wrong thing. The ring is only destroyed because Gollum bites the finger off his hand and falls into the lava with it.
Tolkien wrote a story in which the hobbit fails at the last possible moment, and the story still works, because the story was never about whether the hobbit would succeed. The story was about who was carrying the thing while it was being carried. The success was a byproduct. The carrying was the point.
The other thing the speech did not say, and could not have said in that room without losing the room entirely, is that Frodo did not carry the ring alone. Sam carried him. Sam, who is not in the title, who does not get the credential, who in the books is treated as a servant for most of the journey, is the one who picks Frodo up off the side of Mount Doom and carries him the rest of the way.
The hobbit who actually finishes the work is the one nobody at the Council was looking at when they were deciding who would carry the ring. The qualification in this story is not even Frodo. The qualification is the gardener nobody mentioned, the friend who came along because he was not invited to stay home, the person whose entire role in the institution was to be ignored by it.
Sachs did not mention Sam. He did not need to. The students in that room were going to spend their careers being the people who decided which Sams were allowed in the building.
Frodo was not in that room. That room was full of Harvard students. He told them the story anyway, because one day one of them might be asked to protect a Frodo, and he wanted them to recognize him when he came.
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