Harvard commencement speaker 2014

You may opt out or contact us anytime. Wilde April 7, The expectation of graduates and their families is that a big-time speaker will be there to put the cherry on top of the sundae that was their college experience and all those tuition dollars. So expectations are high. This is a fantasy, and the commencement speaker may be a tradition that long ago outlived its usefulness.

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Content:

• Ex-NYC Mayor Bloomberg selected to speak at Harvard University's commencement in May
• Revisiting Duke’s commencement speakers from the last decade
• Could these be the best commencement speeches of 2014?
• Undergraduate Sarah Abushaar Speaks at Harvard Commencement 2014
• Harvard Commencement
• Mindy Kaling’s Pointless And Amazing Speech
• Commencement 2014

WATCH RELATED VIDEO: Afternoon Exercises - Harvard University Commencement 2014

Ex-NYC Mayor Bloomberg selected to speak at Harvard University's commencement in May

When I got to Wesleyan I thought I could get everything I needed out of the world on my own and by my own effort if I worked hard enough. I enrolled in six classes. Every day after class I would go to the practice rooms to play the piano. Then I would walk back to my single in Butt B to study for the afternoon.

In the evening I gave myself exactly an hour to run, stretch, and shower, and an hour for dinner. At the end of the night I would write a poem or edit an existing one until I liked how it did what it wanted. This routine was exhausting and exhilarating. I was learning a lot. My grades were flawless. I was lonely. If someone from a class expressed interest in talking with me I would suggest we meet for dinner: that was the only place for improvisatory talking and relationship in my schedule.

A few nights a week, dionysian revelers passed below my window scattering to or from the courtyard known as the Butthole. I watched their jubilant transits with a mixture of distain and longing. One Sunday morning midway through freshpeople fall I was meeting with a discussion group from my Philosophy class on Justice and Reason with Joe Rouse. To an observer, and even to the shopkeeper herself, it is impossible to know how much she acts from genuine reverence for ethics or from self-interest.

We entertained the question: does one ever act only out of moral feeling? Does the pleasure one gets from satisfying moral feeling count as self-interest? We were really trying to figure it out. Near the end of our discussion, Steve, one of the people in our group, got up apologetically, explaining that he was going to cook food with Middletown Food Not Bombs, an anarchist group in town that puts on a free community meal every Sunday on the sidewalk on the North end of Main Street.

Steve invited us to come with him, today or another Sunday, but in the context of all this talk of morals the invitation sounded like a challenge. I was put to work immediately. I sorted through blotched and sometimes mushy pears for a baked fruit crisp. Then it was chopping the woody ends off ever-so slightly limp asparagus and arranging it on trays for roasting.

How should I flavor it? Follow your heart! Dan at the soup pot would taste it every few minutes and whoop with pleasure.

Abe upon opening the oven to check the roasting potato rounds hummed enthusiastically at the smell. McLaine added celery powder to a stir-fry with gleefully enigmatic flourishes. Mica sang phrases from a gospel song as she prepared a basket of unused vegetables that were in excellent condition to give away. It was only later, in my room in Butt B attempting to catch up on my lost hours of study, that I remembered the Kantian challenge that had spurred me to go to Food Not Bombs in the first place.

Altogether accidentally, I had entered a community of work. I walked all the way down Long Lane past all the maple trees and the shuttered brick outbuildings of the defunct Long Lane School to the Long Lane Farm for their weekly community work day. Do you know how we rake our beds here at Long Lane?

But she taught be how, and after she taught me, I set to work. This struck me. Who was I to be teaching anyone, having just picked up a rake for the first time ten minutes ago? But by that simple act of asking me to teach a newcomer what I had just learned, Charlotte brought me into a community of shared knowledge and responsibility.

It made me feel like a wholer person. I told the newcomer he should show the next person who arrived how to rake. At first, my attitude of efficiency and goal-orientedness followed me in my work with Food Not Bombs and Long Lane Farm.

I always had to have a knife in my hand in the kitchen or a spade or rake at the farm: I could never be idle. I would not hang around the water spigot ethologizing the squirrels, or discussing the use of Ivan Illich by the Zapatistas. When invited to parties or potlucks at houses of people who worked at the Farm or Food Not Bombs I would habitually demure, retreating to my cell in Butt B to pick up with my routine. Sometime at the beginning of my junior year a new awareness dawned on me.

I realized then that I had always thought of my highest responsibility in this work being for the project, and its results in all their specificity—the unburned pot of rice, the most productive planting of arugula with the best yield, whereas now I saw my highest responsibility as being to the people in the communities around the Farm and Food Not Bombs—how we nourished one another other with food, with work, with talk.

The work at Food Not Bombs and Long Lane Farm was not for the sake of some successful outcome or goal met but for the sake of people. For the first time I began to understand community. Recently some friends of mine and I planted a mulberry tree in the CFA courtyard in a ritual with singing and dancing, at the end of a class on Dance as Culture, with Nicole Stanton. During the ritual I was surprised to experience the presence of the big trees reaching and swaying over and behind me, the spreading grass around my feet, the cold smooth dirt on my hands as I filled in the soil around the new sapling, the body of the new sapling, and the circle of people rocking and stomping in song around me.

Just yesterday, walking through the CFA, I saw the mulberry sapling far off and walked to it. I stood for ten minutes or so singing to it softly,. This is the larger community of others we can recognize, nourish, and honor: the trees, the waters, the grasses, the soils, the winds. Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet and intellectual, says that the path to the utopia is the utopia. Long Lane Farm feeds local families, deer, students, bacteria, and others, and so creates and nourishes their relationships with each other, their ability to create a community together.

Such work and such community are also possible in the real world, where we are supposedly going in two days. The kinds of production, agricultural and otherwise, that only aim to serve the interests of infinitesimally few human beings while exploiting and poisoning the rest have a powerful air of normality, necessity, and inevitability.

But the secret is that the many oppressions capitalism organizes wither every moment when we create communities of eating, working, residing, healing, learning, and dancing that meet each one where they are, are sufficient to the becoming of each, and reflect the becoming of the others.

The many oppressions capitalism organizes wither every moment when we make relationships of care and justice amongst ourselves in spite of the bureaucracies of business, government, and education that tempt us to think only of ourselves and our achievements.

As we do this, so much depends that we learn to depend on each other. Just this month, I remembered how much I loved making documentary films at the tail end of high school, how I had visions of interviewing people and capturing those fleeting moments. For me, carving out a niche meant remembering where I started, and perhaps I was right at the beginning.

If you saw me freshman year, power walking between biology classes, queen of the masochists, on my desperate quest for medical school, you would understand the capacity of people to live accidentally and through a life of tunnel vision.

Somehow my one-track-minded medical school goal served as an automatic excuse for cutting life-changing conversations short, for turning down adventures and dropping classes on which I could have unleashed my full creative potential and heaven forbid tweaked my life plan. From an early age I frequently mapped out my life, stayed up until two in the morning as a twelve year old debating whether or not I should be a psychology professor later in life before retiring.

Is there a balance here? The fear that accompanied having so many choices at Wesleyan woke me up to where I was blindly headed before: a life lived on autopilot. New worlds were opening up to me when I opened up to learning.

True learning is painful when you find your own fears and sorrows explained to you by books, previously your sources of refuge, advice, and hope for dealing with the pain of the world. I realized that learning deeply and vulnerably means respecting the complexity of the world and the nuances of human life, but this cannot be completely understood through the sometimes suffocating lens of hyper-rationality and objective logic- you have to find a way to feel the past, to feel what humans have created and what they have tried and how they have failed.

I can make documentary films about holistic health and medical discoveries. We have a choice in how we forge alliances, whether we choose humanity and empathy or money or both, and we have more power than we realize. We can choose to notice how theories of discrimination play out in our daily lives and choose to confront people on an honest and compassionate human level about how they are hurting us or others.

We can treat each other with respect and the empathy we deserve, the empathy that helps us move forward. Where do our dreams come from? Are they given to us, or do we make them, incorporating our experiences into a vision we have for ourselves day by day? We have felt the fluctuations of four years, and we owe it to ourselves to pay attention to how we are changing and what is happening around us.

We can honor the potential in ourselves and the wisdom we glean from the spirits of others, whether they wake up early in the morning to volunteer or head to practice, stop to lend an ear to a friend at any time of day, or stay up all night poring over a project.

I believe that many of us can and will carve out our own dreams, whether that involves growing a startup that increases employment opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa, becoming an accomplished songwriter and playwright, or being a socially-conscious anarchist farmer.

All of the great people who have ever lived were once human, once doubting, going off course and once changing directions.

We must stay open- to opportunities, to change and self-reflection, and to each other. Thank you, class of Thank you all for inviting me to speak today. Plenty about college — plenty about starting college, or about being in college — not so much about finishing it. Part of the problem is a problem of originality. And it is a beginning in addition to an ending; and you will go places; and I hope you do lean in, in whatever way is most meaningful to you; and you should wear sunscreen; and we are very, very proud of you.

The things people say in and around graduation ceremonies get said over and over because there is a real truth to them. But also, none of it feels entirely adequate to me right now.

Especially the one about independence. And anyhow, I think independence has its limits. The Now You Are Independent train is coming for you all whether you want it or not. So instead, I want to talk to you today about cultivating de pendence, which sounds much less glamorous, and much less fit for shoving you off into the post-Wesleyan world, but is also, I think, just about the best advice I can give you.

Seriously, how many times have we all seen the video of Jay and Solange in the elevator? And why do we believe anyone else is interested? That is independence I can get behind. You do you, I do me.

Do you. Make your way. Blaze your trail. Follow your dream.

Revisiting Duke’s commencement speakers from the last decade

Jump to navigation. Speakers' names appear in italics. None Parker, Hon. Herbert W. James B. None Jun 19 Parker, Herbert W. James J.

Could these be the best commencement speeches of 2014?

Midwestern State University graduate Dr. Beck Weathers will deliver the commencement address at Midwestern State University's graduation ceremony at 10 a. Approximately students are candidates to earn their degrees this December. Weathers was a member of a expedition to Mount Everest that was hit with a severe snowstorm. Eight died and others were severely injured. Unconscious, Weathers was left in the snow and presumed dead, but he regained consciousness and made his way to a camp. Weathers suffered frostbite that resulted in the loss of his right hand, part of his left hand, and his nose. The book was published in His story of survival after being presumed dead taught him to value his family and the gift of having a second chance. His inspirational message of hope in the face of insurmountable odds has made him a popular speaker around the world.

Undergraduate Sarah Abushaar Speaks at Harvard Commencement 2014

Every year, colleges in United States invite notable people to their graduation ceremony to give a speech to newly graduating students. It's an opportunity for the speakers to give a last lesson and share their experience and advice to the students who will follow their own path through their personal and professional lives. Every year, people from various backgrounds are invited to deliver inspiring speeches to graduating students: politicians, business, media, sports, philantropists Steve Job's commencement address at Stanford University in is probably the most well-known of them. Steve Ballmer, recently retired from Microsoft and newly owner of the LA Clippers , was energetic as usual and said to University of Washington's students : « I have two thoughts for you : One.

Harvard Commencement

Home Harvard Commencement. Harvard Commencement. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave the commencement address at Harvard University on Thursday, closing his speech by sharing a Jewish prayer called the "Mi Shebeirach," which he said he recites whenever he faces a big challenge and which he sings to his daughter, thinking of her future, when he tucks her in at night. Even global changes start small - with people like us," the Facebook CEO said. Speaking to young graduates, the year-old billionaire had plenty of interesting things to say about purpose and community.

Mindy Kaling’s Pointless And Amazing Speech

During Saint Anselm College's st commencement exercises on Saturday, May 17, commencement speaker Bob Schieffer addressed members of the class of , and Dr. Steven DiSalvo presided over his first commencement as president. DiSalvo thanked the class for making his first year at Saint Anselm a special one, and reminded the graduands that no matter where their journeys take them, they are always welcome on campus. He advised graduates, "While the world around us may move at a rapid speed, I urge you to remember all of those Saint Anselm hours, and find time to cultivate those habits that made your time with us so special. Bob Schieffer, the award-winning journalist who was the anchor and moderator of the CBS News' Sunday broadcast, "Face the Nation," recalled his many visits to New Hampshire, starting during the presidential primary season. He has covered nine primaries in the state, and last visited Saint Anselm College in A grads to challenge themselves, others " N. Union Leader.

Commencement 2014

Sarah Abushaar's inspiring speech is being shared all over the social media scene in the Arab world. Her passionate, and incredibly eloquent, speech is a testament that dreams can be achieved, however farfetched they may seem to be. Your email address will not be published.

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Image Gallery. Since being elected in , Schneiderman has fought to hold financial institutions accountable for misconduct and return credibility to financial markets. He has since reached groundbreaking agreements with Thomson Reuters and BlackRock to discontinue practices that provide unfair advantages to certain investors, and continues to monitor this industry. The attorney general has also worked to implement innovative criminal justice policies. S Initiative, a global coalition urging smartphone manufacturers and carriers to implement technologies to deter the rising epidemic of violent thefts. In addition, Schneiderman collaborated with gun show operators across the state to develop model procedures to ensure that no one can buy a firearm at a gun show in New York without passing a background check.

Bloomberg implored Harvard University graduates Thursday to ardently defend the rights of others, citing what he described as growing intolerance for different religions, political ideas, and even college commencement speakers. Bloomberg also condemned how, he said, college campuses seem to increasingly profess only liberal viewpoints and refuse to listen to conservative ideas. He said he was disturbed by how numerous commencement speakers either had invitations rescinded or decided themselves to cancel appearances amid protests over their views or actions.