On my journey down my yellow brick road of life, I have listened to countless commencement speeches from high school to my postgraduate school. I have attended dozens of graduation celebrations at colleges where I taught and have given one myself.

And to be honest, I can’t remember anything that was said, and I wonder how many people recall my commencement address. So, students enjoy the excitement and all the pomp and circumstance of graduation, but that’s it.

That being said, this graduation time is different. It is a troubling time in America. We are facing the lawless antics of our TACO president. Harvard’s graduation ceremonies addressed Trump’s actions in general and in particular toward education. Trump has threatened to stop $3 billion in research grants to Harvard, along with halting $100 million in US contracts with the university and a litany of other measures to get Harvard to comply with his agenda.

Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, “Harvard's got to behave themselves. Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they're doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper.”

Additionally, our TACO president also wants to stop international students from attending Harvard, along with other universities and colleges. International students benefit from attending school in America. However, America benefits as well. More than 25% of Harvard’s student body consists of international students.

Dr. Abraham Verghese was the commencement speaker at Harvard this year. He said to the graduates, “...the decisions you will make in the future, under pressure, will say something about your character, while they also shape and transform you in unexpected ways.”

Haroon Hyder, a Harvard School of Public Health graduate, said, “We are all a nation of immigrants. We can't forget that.” Trump prefers white males who think like him. What we call America is a nation of immigrants. We all trace our ancestry to people who were immigrants. Native Americans were the first immigrants, and the rest of us arrived over the millennia.

However, I hope all Americans will also remember Yurong “Luanna” Jiang. Jiang worked on her internship last summer at the Prime Minister's office in Mongolia.

Over the past quarter century of teaching, the first thing I did as soon as I received my student roster for the semester was to review their names. The greater the number of students whose names I couldn’t pronounce, the happier I was. I’m used to pronouncing names from Europe. Hispanic and Middle Eastern names are relatively easy, even though some of those students would laugh at my pronunciation. At least, I tried to approximate their names. However, I was an utter failure with a handful of students from Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, and Thailand.

The more inclusive my classes were, the better the educational experience was for the class. The last class that I taught was an online class. At the beginning of each semester, I would give my students a list of dos and don'ts, which included not plagiarizing, turning in assignments on time, and addressing me as Dr., Mr., or Professor Campbell. All my classes used our first names. The students called me Al.

The last class I taught was the only exception, which was an online class. Nang Su Yati, my granddaughter, took that class and called me Papa Al, and I addressed her by her nickname, Ti Ti. Ti Ti lived in Myanmar at the time. Our government still calls her country Burma.

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This video is Dr. Abraham Verghese’s Harvard Commencement Address.

This video is the Harvard Commencement 2025