President Garber, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, faculty, fellow honorands, and most of all, new graduates—congratulations! What an incredibly gratifying moment this must be for you. And I know it’s a very proud moment for your families. So houw about we give a round a applause to your families your friensds your sibleings everyone whi os here
I don’t have to tell you this is also an unprecedented moment for Harvard University. In this institution’s 389-year existence, there has probably never been more attention focused on you than in these past months, weeks, and days. Honestly, in coming to your campus I feel very much like a medieval messenger who had to sneak through the encircling forces and slip into your besieged community.
So first, I bring my felicitations to the graduates; no recent events can diminish what each of you has accomplished here. Graduates, I also want you to know, you have the admiration and the good wishes of so many beyond Harvard. More people than you realize-- More people than you realize -are grateful to Harvard for the example it has set – by your willingness to look inward, to make painful and necessary changes but then ultimately, by your clarity in affirming and courageously defending the essential values of this university, and indeed of this nation.
A cascade of draconian government measures has already led to so much uncertainty, so much pain, and suffering in this country and across the globe—and more has been threatened. The outrage you must feel, the outrage so many feel, also must surely leads us to a new appreciation. Appreciation for the rule of law and due process, (applause) which till now we took for granted—because this is America after all! And appreciation for those committed to truth—veritas--at a time when the absence of truth has come to feel almost normal. We find new appreciation of actions that demonstrate thoughtfulness, decency, generosity, kindness, humility, and service to community. I’m not Catholic, but I was so moved and inspired, as I’m sure many of you were, to hear those very qualities used repeatedly in describing the character of an American and Peruvian citizen, Robert Francis Prevost. The portrayal of this American, now Pope Leo XIV, the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion people, felt like a light after a dark stretch of time.
Speaking about Catholicism, may I make a confession? When President Garber invited me to speak here, I was honored--of course, but I asked for time to think about it, Because believe me, I was well aware of the distinguished individuals who have spoken at this ceremony before. I felt you deserved to hear from a star, a legend, a Nobel prize winner, or perhaps, God knows, from the Pope himself. Maybe next year, President GArber?
But what made me eventually say yes to President Garber had everything to do with where we all find ourselves in 2025. When legal immigrants and others who are lawfully in this country including so many of your international students worry about being wrongly detained and even deported, perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from an immigrant like me. . . . (Raucous Applause) Someone who was born in Ethiopia when it was ruled by an autocratic Emperor; someone who then lived under the brutal military leader who overthrew the Emperor; someone who had at least one of his medical school classmates tortured and disappeared after being tortured, and who saw many other of his classmates join the guerilla force fighting against the military dictator; someone who eventually completed his medical training in India just when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, after facing Supreme Court judgements that she didn’t care for, declared a national emergency and jailed thousands of students and all her opponents. When in time she called for an election, citizens in the world’s largest democracy expressed their outrage by voting. She was ousted.
It is perhaps also fitting that you should hear from someone who never had a prayer of coming to Harvard or an American university of this caliber for my education. Yet, I want to tell you, I had an excellent education in America all the same. I can bear witness to the dedicated efforts of teachers at a range of colleges, and medical schools, and to talented physicians in county, rural and veterans hospitals where great patient care is delivered, many of whom are physicians like me, trained outside of America. We were recruited because American medical schools simply don’t graduate sufficient numbers of physicians to fill the country’s need. More than a quarter of the physicians in this country are foreign medical graduates, And many of those physicians ultimately settle in places that others might see as less desirable.
So, a part of what makes America great, if I may use the phrase, is that it allows an immigrant like me to blossom here, just as generations of other immigrants--and their children--have flourished and contributed in every walk of life, working to keep America great. America also allowed this immigrant to find his voice as a writer. The late novelist, E.L. Doctorow, someone I admire and I got to know, wrote, “It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year. Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?”
The greatness of America, the greatness of Harvard, is reflected in the fact that someone like me could be invited to speak to you. So thank you. I am honored to be addressing you.
As a child growing up in Ethiopia, without television until my teens, my notion of America came from the many extraordinary Americans who served in the Peace Corps. Those individuals left an impression of a country that was decent, generous, and compassionate, not just to its own citizens but to other nations. A more nuanced picture of America came from reading Ralph Ellison, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Hemingway, Mark Twain, and so many others, in books that I checked out from the US Information Services library or the John F Kennedy University library at my university in Addis Ababa. The novels conveyed a sense of an America that was far from perfect, but yet it seemed to me, a nation striving to be so. Striving to live up to the ideals expressed in its founding documents.
Novels can teach you powerful lessons about life in a manner quite different than a movie might teach you. That’s because a novel is a collaborative venture: the writer provides the words, the reader provides his or her imagination and a mental movie unfolds in the reader’s brain, a fictional dream quite unique to each reader. My calling to medicine as a young teen came because of one novel, Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham, though the novel might not speak to anybody else. To paraphrase Camus, fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives. When a novel speaks to you, it’s because it rings true. The idea that now in America, a book that might speak to a young reader—that might reveal his or her calling--could be banned from their library by a government or school board decree, is beyond tragic. I know we will find our way back to displaying those attributes of America I admired from afar, the America I have known and loved from over four decades of being here.
Graduates, the commencement ritual obliges me to offer advice, even though in forty-years as of being a professor attending every graduation, I remember so little of what was said. But advice is part of this ritual. I’ve already slipped in one piece of advice, and that is to read fiction. It’s a trait of some of the best physicians and leaders I have met, including your President, I mean your university’s President. And if you don’t read fiction, my considered medical opinion is that a part of your brain responsible for active imagination atrophies. But that aside.
I’ll leave you with two other pieces of advice: one has to do with decisions and the other with time. First let me tell you about Decisions. There’s a writing aphorism I just love, about how to create a fictional character, and it goes like this, Character is determined by decisions taken under pressure.
You can build a fictional character by describing their appearance, occupation, dress, manner of speaking, and so on. However, the moment a character really leaps off the page is when you put them under pressure, and they are forced to make a decision. Indeed, when one of my characters makes a decision that isn’t what I planned for them at a moment of crisis, they’re usually right, and with that, suddenly they take on human flesh, become incarnate.
I want to share an anecdote that epitomizes for me this link between decisions and character. In 1974, in my third year of medical school in Ethiopia, my clinical year, the military overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie. One of the first acts of the military leader was to close the university and send the students to the countryside to “educate the masses.” This is almost a reflex of so-called “strongmen,” to attack the places where truth and reason prevail. As an expatriate I had little choice but to leave. Among my medical school classmates who at that point went underground to join the guerilla forces fighting against the strongman of Africa was a brilliant student named Meles Zenawi. Meles gave up his career path to medicine, and rose to become the leader of the rebel group. After a seventeen-year armed struggle, his troops finally displaced the military dictator. Meles became Prime Minister of Ethiopia, and to quote President Clinton he was a “new generation of African leader.” One might disagree with many of his decisions, but in the village where Meles grew up, you couldn’t tell his mother’s hut from the one next to it. He never did anything to enrich himself.
I returned to Ethiopia for the first time two decades after I left on a magazine assignment to interview the new Prime Minister Meles. We sat in his very modest prime minister’s office--a far cry from the palace of his two predecessors—and caught up. He talked about the tough decisions he had to make every day in a country that was ethnically divided, impoverished by the long civil war, and with the treasury looted by the former dictator. He shared with me that during the long years of the guerilla war, his forces could only move freely at night, but they had to cross fields sowed with Cuban and Russian mines. They would be forced to ask for a volunteer from their own to walk through the minefield to try to find a safe crossing. Meles said something to me I never forgot: “In this office, I try to make sure that every decision I make is worthy of those comrades who gave their lives crossing those minefields so we could get to safety.”
On the walls of Harvard Memorial Church are inscribed the names of students and faculty who gave their lives in various conflicts. It will take many, many more walls to honor Harvard alumni and faculty who have served this nation in every discipline, not just the military, and who have done so in brave, exemplary, and transformative ways. In these past few weeks, in the face of immense pressure, Harvard, under President Garber’s steady leadership, has been very visible for taking decisions worthy of your university’s heritage, decisions that reveal and will shape this University’s character.
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. Make your decisions worthy of those who supported, nurtured, and sacrificed for you: your parents, partners, your family, your ancestors. Make your decisions worthy of the opportunities this great university opened up to you, AS it works to preserve the value of what you accomplished here and the values it stands for.
My second piece of advice has to do with time. I trained in my specialty of infectious diseases here, at the old Boston City Hospital, now the Boston Medical Center, between 1983 to 1985, just as AIDS, a disease of unknown cause, was appearing in large American cities like Boston. The virus causing AIDS, was only discovered the end of my two years of training here, just as I was moving to a small university town, population 50,000 in Tennessee, to a young medical school. AIDS was considered an urban disease, so I was shocked when in this small town I began seeing many more patients with HIV than predicted. The explanation for these numbers turned out to be true of many other small-towns in America: These were hometown boys who had left after high school, left for jobs or for education. But they also left because they were gay and didn’t want to live that lifestyle under the close scrutiny of their friends and relatives in the town. They settled in big cities and found themselves, but tragically years and decades into their stay, the virus found them. They were now returning to their hometowns, to their families, typically because their partners had died and now, they were getting ill. Given the prevailing sentiments against gay people in small towns in the rural south, I was pleasantly surprised to find my patients so well received by their families and cared for lovingly to the end. Love trumps all bigotry, love trumps ideology when it is your child, your family member that is affected, all that stuff flies out the window.
Effective treatment for HIV was still years away. It was heartbreaking for me get to know my patients so well, these men who were mostly in their thirties and forties--my age at the time—only to watch them gradually decline and succumb. These brave men taught me so much about courage. They taught me about manhood—not the caricature of manliness, not the posturing that has become so fashionable lately—but the manliness that allowed them to be compassionate, generous, and steadfast even in the depths of their suffering.
But the most precious lesson they taught me was about time.
You see, in their last days they often wrestled with one question: what had been the meaning of their lives? Thankfully, most of them found the answer and their answers were similar. They found that meaning at the end of a shortened life did not reside in fame, power, reputation, acquisitions, or good looks. Instead they found that meaning in their lives ultimately resided in the successful relationships that they had forged in a lifetime, particularly with parents. particularly with family
I wrote about my experience in a memoir-- my first book--titled My Own Country. Soon after I heard from a mother whose son had succumbed to AIDS. She shared with me a letter from her son that he had written just before he died, and that he arranged for his mother to get a month after he died. She gave me permission to use it, and I have unapologetically shared this letter in other forums, perhaps none as important as today, because his message bears repeating. It’s also fitting that this advice you are about to hear to you about time should come from someone beyond time, and, and from someone who died when he was closer to your age than my age now. So here goes, a letter from son to mother.
Dear Mom, This last part of my life could have been very unpleasant, but it wasn’t! In fact, in many ways, this has been the best part of my life.
I’ve had the opportunity to get to know my family again, a chance very few people have or take advantage of.
I’ve enjoyed a life full of adventure & travel and I loved every moment of it. But I probably never would have slowed up enough to really appreciate all of you if it hadn’t been for my illness. That’s the silver lining in this very dark cloud.
I’ve had such a wonderful life that it seems almost tacky for me to express any regrets. Nevertheless, there are some things I wish I could have done.
1. I’d like to have been mayor of Key West. (and there follows a laundry list of things I’m not going to read to you)
When you get right down to it, Mother, I’d have to live several hundred years to fulfill all my dreams. I’ve done pretty well with the time allotted me, so I have no regrets. I feel sorry for people who die (at whatever age) who haven’t had the chance in life to fulfill some of their dreams, as I have. That's the real tragedy.
If anyone ever asks you if I went to heaven, tell them this: I just came from there. No place could conceivably be as wonderful as where I’ve spent these last 30 years. I’ll miss it. I’ll miss you mother. I’m so glad we made good use of this time to get to know each other again.
Graduates, you received and participated in an extraordinary education here at Harvard. Now as alumni, be its strength, be its support as it moves forward into the future. Cherish this special day. And above all, make good use of your time. I wish you the very best.
