Harvard's 373rd Commencement
Reporting contributed by Victoria T. Li and William N. Brown
Editor’s Note: The last of the Salient team left campus this week, but we will resume regular publishing in the fall. Meanwhile, find us on social media to stay posted on what’s crossing our desks. Thanks for an exciting year!
Yesterday morning, graduates and their families packed into Tercentenary Theater to celebrate the Class of 2024. Harvard’s 373rd commencement, threatened until recently by the pro-Palestinian occupation of Harvard Yard, unsurprisingly went off-script.
Interim President Garber began the commencement ceremony by announcing, with appreciable understatement, that “some. . . may choose to take the liberty of expressing themselves to draw attention to events unfolding in the wider world.” Garber suggested that they do so “with their community and this occasion in mind.” Audience members were then asked to observe a moment of silence, its purpose deliberately kept vague.
Two students were invited to represent their classmates by delivering English orations: Shruthi Kumar of the College and Robert L. Clinton IV of the Law School. As read, Kumar's speech bore little relation to its title, “The Power of Not Knowing.” Rather than calling for epistemic humility and the practice of listening, as in the speech prepared and published in the Harvard Magazine, Kumar demanded immediate redress for her suspended classmates, while occasionally swerving back to encourage the audience to “engage with the nuances” or to declare that “not knowing is an ethical stance.”
Robert L. Clinton IV echoed Kumar in his speech “On Being Good,” in which he cited a litany of evils that the class of 2024 was to have witnessed: “women having their reproductive rights stripped from them,” climate refugees, “trans and queer people forced to hide who they are,” and “citizens whose only mistake was being born poor in countries like America that criminalize poverty,” among others. The punishment of student protesters was only one more sad stanza of the old song of injustice; it was, according to Clinton, “not very good.” Being good required, according to Clinton, eschewing all “ego” and “moral superiority”; fortunately, however, it did not seem to require a sense of irony.
During the conferral of degrees, several hundred of the thousands of assembled students left the ceremonies, joined by a group of faculty members. The group waved Palestinian flags and chanted “let them walk” and “free Palestine” as they left. An alternative ceremony —the “People’s Commencement”—was held at a local church for students suspended for their role in the encampment.
Journalist Maria Ressa, who delivered the keynote address at the invitation of ex-President Claudine Gay, warned the audience that “tech bros were controlling the world”: the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk threatened, according to Ressa, to destabilize the facts, truth, trust, and the “rules-based international order” for personal gain. Because “the fascists are coming,” students were expected to reassert the rules of an older information economy, one in which the “enshittification” of communication could not prevail. Though Ressa gestured to notions of “togetherness” and community, she closed her speech with a clear and confrontational message: “welcome to the battlefield.”
Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, a Harvard chaplain and the president of Harvard Chabad, confronted Ressa for commenting that she was labeled “antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money.” When she refused to clarify the statement, Rabbi Zarchi walked off the stage. Ressa’s implication that supporters of Israel seek “power and money” did not seem to bother the other commencement participants.
The tenor of Harvard’s Commencement would not have been unexpected to attendees of Tuesday’s Phi Beta Kappa exercises, in which President Emerita Drew Faust scoffed at critiques of higher education, denied the existence of any liberal bias in universities, and suggested that Republicans had manufactured an erroneous crisis of faith in the value of college. Defending President Claudine Gay, Faust exhorted Harvard’s leadership to ignore outside criticism altogether: academic freedom, she insisted, would otherwise suffer.
We at the Salient congratulate Harvard’s Class of 2024 for being inducted into a long and noble tradition. We trust that Harvard, however much neglected by its stewards and spurned by its own beneficiaries, will have the power to inspire its students to callings far higher than the “battlefield” of progressive politics long after our own graduation: until, say, “the stock of the Puritans die.”
A recording of yesterday’s ceremony is available here.
This is somewhat understated, but unlike most of the obfuscating language swamping Harvard these days, the utter disgrace of the university does come through here. I admire those who want to see Harvard right itself, but I am skeptical it is possible. The calls I see for "institutional neutrality," for example, are way too little too late. Much more than institutional neutrality is needed. An entire administrative structure and its ideology are in place, and these must be uprooted. In the meantime, and as a start, actions like those of Rabbi Zarchi are what we need much, much more of.
What a circus 🤡 🤡🤡