The truest voice
Graduating seniors bid farewell to their Harvard years Wednesday, during Class Day ceremonies that featured light-hearted remembrances, sage advice about not taking advice, and a tongue-in-cheek idea for honoring the college experience. “When Harvard does come to mind, years from now in all of its 375-plus-year-old glory, we will be acknowledging that younger versions of ourselves now own this simultaneously beautiful, terrible, fun, depressing, fulfilling, and unbearable … home,” said Philip Gillen, one of the event’s two Ivy orators. “We must destroy Harvard, because this place belongs to us, and it should stay that way.” Former CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien, the day’s main speaker, used lessons from her own and her parents’ lives as she counseled students to follow their own paths. O’Brien is the daughter of a black Cuban mother and a white Australian father who in 1958 traveled from Maryland, where interracial marriage was illegal, to Washington, D.C., to wed, against...