Students Bemoan Speaker Choices

As members of the class of 2006 look forward to being ushered into life after college by world leaders, journalists, or other public figures, both Harvard students and those at peer institutions have expressed disappointment with their schools’ choices of commencement and class day speakers.

One Harvard senior said he was unhappy with the choice of Jim Lehrer as this year’s Commencement Day speaker.

“[Jim Lehrer] is an insightful journalist...I only wish we had someone more inspirational,” said Todd Van Stolk-Riley ’06 of this year’s speaker selection.

Van Stolk-Riley added that he “would have preferred Bill Clinton.”

But Clinton has already accepted an offer to serve as Princeton University’s Class Day speaker.

According to the Daily Princetonian, Princeton had been working to bring Clinton to Class Day since the beginning of the school year.

At the University of Pennsylvania, where two-time academy award winning actress Jodie Foster will serve as commencement speaker this year, several students expressed discontent with the choice.

“Considering past speakers, we were under the impression it would be someone with a recognizable social commitment,” said UPenn Senior Class President Pierre Gooding.

At Yale, where graduates will hear a commencement speech from news anchor and Yale alumnus Anderson Cooper, one writer headlined a letter about Cooper’s selection to the Yale Daily News, “College fell short with speaker choice.”

And Stanford senior Paul S. Wright wrote in an e-mail of his school’s selection of news anchor Tom Brokaw, “I think the general consensus on campus is that it’ll be fine to have him as a commencement speaker. Nobody’s dancing and shouting in the streets or anything.”

“Had it been my decision, I would have been more biased to select someone...who had had more of an impact, if even a tangential one, on the academic scene,” Wright wrote.