Broadcast journalist Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday urged Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) graduates to take the next step of their careers outside of the United States.
“Go abroad and start your career,” CNN’s chief international correspondent said at the HKS Class Day ceremony. “I say that in many graduations, and I’m saying it today for a reason. Find your government work and your public service, while you need to, in other countries. The world needs you, and most certainly, America needs ambassadors like you.”
Amanpour cited her own international roots: Raised in Iran, she left the country after the Iranian revolution in 1979. In the United States, she joined CNN’s foreign desk and reported in war zones to cover the Iran-Iraq war and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, amongst her other work. “I was a foreign student here,” Amanpour said. “I'm still a foreigner….I made it, and it made me. I more than gave back, as all of you will, too.”
Amanpour began her address by reminiscing about her own time attending college at the University of Rhode Island—and recalling her friendship with John F. Kennedy Jr., who was then a student at Brown University.
“We shared a house, and now here I find myself addressing you all at the school named after his father, and I wonder sometimes what a great leader John, my friend, might have been. And boy, do we need great leaders,” she said.
Like several other speakers at Harvard Class Day ceremonies on Wednesday, Amanpour had sharp words for the Trump administration, comparing it to authoritarian regimes she has reported on throughout her career. She told graduates that they “will have to learn how to play cat and mouse with the current crackdowns and the current system.”
She also declared that “academics [and] education are on the front lines of the current struggle between the two halves of America” and noted that other countries would offer opportunities to faculty and students who have lost research funding amid sweeping federal cuts.
“As you know, we over there in Europe are happy to lay out the welcome mat for all of those here who are having their roles taken away,” she said. “We want your scientists, your researchers, your professionals, but we hope they get to come back here and start up their vital work, which is, after all, for the common good, not for individuals.”
Amanpour compared Harvard’s leaders to journalists who are covering the current administration amid crackdowns on access and threats from the executive branch.
“Everywhere we look—left, right, and center—we see democratic institutions, the distressing side of them bending. But guess who's not bending? We the press. You, Harvard academia,
some corporate owners of ours, maybe,” Amanpour said. “And they are coming after us, but you can still find plenty of excellent fact-based, evidence-driven, consequential, and even game-changing journalism right now in the 1984-Animal Farm vortex that we are caught up in.”
“Let's get on with it, while the glass is still half full,” she concluded.
