What We Want to Hear

Alan Greenspan, we have high expectations for you. This year, when you take the stage at our Commencement exercises, you will join a small and select group of famous and accomplished men and women who have addressed graduating Harvard students. In the past, they have made good use of the privilege: Secretary of State George C. Marshall, when he spoke in 1947, outlined what would become the Marshall Plan. We hope you follow his example. Your words are capable of making mountains move and markets fall, and we expect no less on June 10.

This year, though, simply making history will not be enough. A challenge from the trade school down the river has been issued, and it is up to you answer it. This year MIT has chosen Thomas L. Magliozzi and Raymond F. Magliozzi to speak at its graduation, two men you've probably never heard of. Neither, to be honest, had we. These two men are better known as Click and Clack, the Tappet brothers. respected Cambridge auto mechanics and MIT graduates. They are also co-hosts of Car Talk, a syndicated radio program broadcast from the offices of Dewey, Cheetham & Howe in Harvard Square (aka Car Talk Plaza).

MIT's choice seems to be a deliberate mockery of the ordinary criteria for choosing commencement speakers. Neither Click nor Clack is a Nobel laureate; neither is a major world leader; neither an august academic. Why, then has one of the world's greatest universities chosen them? Well, probably because both of them are something you, with all due respect, are not reputed to be: funny.

Here's the problem, Alan. What if MIT is right? What if these two grease-monkeys prove to be more entertaining, more insightful and more inspiring, than you? Whatever Tom and Ray say, it will not go down in the history books. But it could fill the goal of a commencement speech--to send graduating student into the world with purpose and inspiration--unusually well.

So you need to show us, and the world, that fame and power are the proper qualifications for commencement speakers after all. For the sake of our dangerously over-inflated collective ego, you need to show us that you really do have something to say relevant to our lives and relevant to the world we're entering. And, along the way, you need to make some jokes about cars.

Are you up to the task? We know you could reduce Wall Street to a smoldering heap of debris if you wanted to, but can you make us laugh? Rumor coming out of the Federal Reserve is that you have virtually abandoned your official duties to labor over drafts of your address, sending world markets into a precipitous tailspin. We appreciate the effort, and we hope on June 10 you'll feel it was all worth it.