Conan O’Brien told Harvard’s 375th commencement on Thursday that graduates should resist vanity and carry themselves with humility and empathy, delivering a speech that landed at a moment when the university was still under extraordinary strain. Speaking in Cambridge, the comedian and Harvard Class of 1985 alumnus told the crowd that “we are living through a period of extreme narcissism.”
He went further, saying the nation’s leadership in Washington treats empathy as weakness and insists that the country stands “supreme and alone.” O’Brien’s message gave Harvard’s graduation its sharpest public note of the day: a call to leave campus not just credentialed, but decent. He told graduates that if they carry their victories lightly, kindness, originality, courage, humor and humanity have room to emerge.
That theme fit the room, and it also cut against it. Harvard seniors finishing on Thursday were sophomores when the campus was pulled into turmoil during the 2023-2024 school year after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, as pro-Palestinian protests spread and former president Claudine Gay resigned three months after the conflict intensified around her congressional testimony. By the time O’Brien spoke, Harvard was still dealing with the fallout from those fights, including a pressure campaign from the Trump administration that sought more control over university policy and left the school without access to billions in research funding after it refused to comply.
Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, used his own remarks to defend the institution, saying “truth without liberty is a fire without air” and arguing that the university’s cause and contributions to the common good remain vital. His defense came as international students worried their visas could be canceled during the dispute, a reminder that the conflict reached far beyond faculty offices and administrative buildings.
That unease was visible outside the ceremony as well. Harvard’s graduation exercises coincided with the sixth week of the longest strike in the history of the Harvard Graduate Student Union, and picketing stretched outside more than a dozen entrances to Harvard Yard. Sudipta Saha, the union’s former vice president, said, “Like commencement, striking is coming together,” capturing the odd split-screen of the day: a university celebrating achievement while graduate workers pressed a labor fight that had already outlasted every previous one at Harvard.
The commencement speech offered a cleaner message than the season surrounding it. Harvard could applaud its graduates and still not escape the political and institutional battles closing in around the campus, and the most important unresolved question now is how long those fights will keep shaping life at the university after the caps are thrown and the visitors go home.
