“I think we could have done better,” shrugged computer science major Kevin Bombino. He says Rowling lacks the gravitas a Harvard commencement speaker should have.
“You know, we’re Harvard. We’re like the most prominent national institution. And I think we should be entitled to ”¦ we should be able to get anyone. And in my opinion, we’re settling here.”
Rowling was chosen by Harvard’s alumni. University President Drew Gilpin Faust applauded her selection, saying, “No one in our time has done more to inspire young people to ”¦ read.”
Rowling follows a long line of heavies who’ve spoken at Harvard’s commencement. In 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall used the platform to detail his “Marshall Plan” to rebuild Europe after World War II.
Since then, speakers have included such luminaries as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, other heads of state, Nobel Prize winners, and scholars.
“It’s definitely the ‘A’ list, and I wouldn’t ever associate J.K. Rowling with the people on that list,” says senior Andy Vaz.
Most Harvard grads are twinkies. They get out of school thinking their (X) doesn’t smell and proceed to screw up our economy and all other sorts of national interests. And most of ’em couldn’t carry on an interesting conversation with Rowlings if their life depended on it.
Hubris, thou art Harvard,
AP+
Why is Bill Gates more significant than Rowling? Did he say anything more useful than Rowling, who spoke of the power of imagination. Sure, Gates gave us a new medium for expressing ourselves, but Rowling gave us content – she said something wonderful.
By the way, according to my nephew, a Harvard grad as stuck up as any quoted here, told me that Microsoft and Bill Gates are frowned on at Harvard, as are most successful business ventures. It was a fun 4 years tweaking his nose, although he learned fairly quickly to avoid the subject. 🙂
Being a Cornell man, please forgive me for saying that a very, very important industrial giant who had been a member of my fraternity told us one night over a few drinks that he would never hire a Harvard man for exactly what Anglican Paplist said above and he used exactly the same words. Just because they graduated from Harvard, they felt the world owed them a high position in any company they honored by working for them.
“You know, we’re Harvard. We’re like the most prominent national institution. And I think we should be entitled to … we should be able to get anyone. And in my opinion, we’re settling here.”
You know, I went to a miserable little college by Saint Louis and if my education were as marginal as the above speaker I would have demanded my money back. You know.
Don
Listen & watch her address here: http://video.the-leaky-cauldron.org/video/1027#share
I have had my spouse and 15 year old daughter both listen and we all agree – This is the type of speech we want to hear at graduation!
Humor, humility, and depth …. J.K. delivers it all.
WOW! How arrogant!
FWIW, Bill Gates has made some very thoughtful commencement speeches.
Typical NPR hit piece. The video link from D Hamilton (in #5 above) shows that the Harvard audience gave J. K. Rowling a [i]standing ovation[/i] both before and after (for three minutes!) her address. I’m sure that if Kevin Bombino and Andy Vaz kept to their seats, they were too small of a group for the camera to capture them. When will NPR learn that we’re interested in [i]what happened[/i], not in what their talking heads [i]would like to think[/i] happened?
“Typical NPR hit piece”
Well, it does leave Bombino and Vaz looking bad and Rowling looking good.
Consider the lead paragraph:
“If her books’ sales are any indicator, there are probably hundreds of millions of Harry Potter fans round the world who’d give anything for a chance to hear from the books’ author, J.K. Rowling. And hundreds of them turned out at Harvard University’s commencement Thursday, where Rowling was the featured speaker.”
After letting the whiny duo have their say, the story continues:
“With humor, and poise, Rowling went on to speak of the challenges she has overcome on the way to her success, and she extolled the power of imagination to help right wrongs around the world.”
The story concludes with several quotations suggesting that the whiners need to grow up.
DonGander like, y’know, [i]so[/i] hits the nail on the head. (Well said, Don! Thanks for your post and for the chuckle you gave me.) Mr. Bombino strikes me as an example of the plank/mote-in-the-eye problem.
Nice to see the Harvad graduates don’t suffer from low self-esteem.
I’m not a fan of Ms. Rowling, but the self-importance of the graduates quoted here is insufferable.
Irenaeus (#9), you are right to correct me. I reacted too quickly to the quotes from the “whiny duo” and stopped reading the article. My apologies to NPR—even though they didn’t see fit to mention the 3-minute standing ovation.
The 3-minute standing ovation Rowling received should remind us that Bombino and Vaz (a/k/a Bambino and VacÃo) may not typify Harvard students.
Watching the video (link in #5 above) shows that Rowlings’ audience was very receptive and appreciative — she actually got a lot of good laughs. I suspect that this will have been one of Harvard’s more enjoyable as well as memorable commencement addresses.
Let’s see if I understand this… was it Rowling’s speech that got your noses out of joint– Don, AP+, Oldman, ODC– or the fact that fewer than 100% of the graduating seniors approved of having her as the Class Day speaker?
Either way, your reactions seem a disproportionately strong, for a minor story.
I was there last Thursday. I liked the speech. It was short, memorable, and unpretentious.
Chuck Bradshaw
(I’d tell you where I went to college, but that would only confirm your suspicions that I’m a stuck-up, hubristic twinkie with an overgrown sense that the world owes me a living.)
Her speech was a mass of bromides and cliches. I waste no love on Harvard, but the Crimson have every reason to complain. Her speech was intellectual pablum. Go back and read it again, then tell me what there was new or original in anything she said. She wrote two or three good children’s books which pushed her authorial skills to their limit. She then wrote three more that, in a literary sense, grew incrementally less competent. She is merely rich and popular, the worst and commonest recommendation America has for the title of The Master of Those Who Know and belongs to the same royalty as the man who invented the Frisbee, a man a rich as she is and even more frequently in the hands of the people. Shame on Harvard. LM
Larry – better than reading the speech, listen to it as it was delivered. The difference transforms the work from an essay into a spoken performance.
Also, the total number in her Harry Potter series is seven, and the seventh stands up to any of C. S. Lewis’s “children’s books” as does her first & fifth. On the whole, I am sure J. K. Rowling is not merely rich and popular as you are not merely sarcastic and condescending.