Under pressure from competitors and from government officials—including President Trump—who say that Harvard is too uniformly left-wing and too hostile to Jews and Israel, Harvard used this week’s graduation ceremonies to recognize some of its critics.
At Harvard’s main universitywide commencement ceremony on Thursday, May 28, a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal opinion section, Peggy Noonan, was one of five honorary degree recipients. A December 2023 column by Noonan, headlined, “What Universities Have Done to Themselves,” had criticized then-Harvard president Claudine Gay’s congressional testimony, concluding “The elites who run our elite colleges are killing their own status.”
On Wednesday May 27, 2026, Harvard Business School honored the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, with an alumni achievement award and invited him to speak to the graduating class. Romney, along with Joanna Jacobson, Seth Klarman, Bill Helman, and Mark Nunnelly, was a lead signer of a scathing October 2023 letter to Harvard leaders: “Jewish students have locked themselves in dorm rooms across your campuses afraid for their own safety. Despite these serious concerns, University leadership shockingly has been paralyzed.”
Harvard president Alan Garber, in his remarks at commencement, thanked the graduates for “responding to the legitimate concerns of our critics with principled action.” At best there are some signs that the description might start to be accurately applied to the university itself. Whether those actions are indeed principled or rather just largely cosmetic, belated responses to intense pressure remains to be seen, along with how far any such responses will go against entrenched internal resistance, left-wing bias, and inertia at Harvard.
Harvard is under threat of an ongoing $2.6 billion lawsuit from the federal government over antisemitism. One federal judge, Richard Stearns, found “Harvard failed its Jewish students,” and another federal judge, Allison Burroughs, found “It is clear, even based solely on Harvard’s own admissions, that Harvard has been plagued by antisemitism in recent years and could (and should) have done a better job of dealing with the issue … Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did.”
Past Harvard commencement ceremonies featured an honorary degree to a boycott Israel activist (2025) and in 2022 the opening prayer of Harvard commencement was offered “in the name of Jesus, my radical brother, the 1st-century freedom fighter who knew enslavement, at the hands of oppressors and occupiers,” while captions on the large video screens flashed “first century Palestine’s freedom fighter.”
This year, in contrast, the opening prayer was offered by the “chaplain of the day,” identified in the program simply as “Getzel Davis” but who is a rabbi and the director of Harvard’s presidential initiative on interfaith engagement. His remarks spoke of “in my own Jewish tradition.” The senior English address came from Noah Eckstein, who declared, “I am a proud Jew. I am also the proud grandson of a Christian, and the proud grandson of a Muslim.”
One of the most provocative pieces of wisdom of the day came via comedian Conan O’Brien, who also got an honorary doctorate and who gave a speech. Said O’Brien: “My grandfather, who everyone called ‘hoofer,’ and who had to drop out of the 7th grade to support his parents, was a traffic cop in Worcester, Massachusetts. And he had a saying, ‘take what you can get and ask for more.’ Very wise man.”
In that spirit, what more can critics ask from these universities in general and from Harvard in particular?
One step is to cease using graduation ceremonies to honor and praise anti-Israel activism. The Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported that at the Harvard College Class Day ceremony the day before the university-wide commencement, “Program marshals Jade M. Stanford ’26 and Kirthi Chigurupati ’26 presented the Richard Glover Ames Memorial Award — given each year to two ‘unsung heroes’ of the graduating class — to James K. ‘Jamie’ Durant ’26 and Alexandra Fernand ’26, honoring Durant’s pro-Palestine activism and the pair’s Phillips Brooks House Association work. … But the speech pivoted to Durant’s role as a co-founder of Jews for Palestine, an unrecognized pro-Palestine student group. Chigurupati said Durant faced discipline from the College for his activism and praised him for ‘willingly’ accepting punishment ‘for what he believed was right.’” How and why is this still happening?
Another step is to dial back the derision about the federal government’s litigation efforts. Under the circumstances, what’s called for is humility, not self-congratulatory bravado. O’Brien joked, “I am suing Harvard for my less than spectacular undergraduate sex life. For me, ‘having a three way’ meant adding a second mirror to my dorm. … Harvard, I’ll see your ass in court. Yes, I am confident that my claims will have more merit than those filed by the president of the United States.”
A third step is to understand that viewpoint diversity and escaping stifling ideological conformity is more meaningful if it applies not only to embracing Reagan speechwriters like Noonan a half-century later, or to 2012 Republican presidential candidates like Romney 14 years later, but to including on campus and in the mix some supporters of the current president, who 77 million Americans, or roughly half of the electorate that turned out, backed in 2024. Hosting or even honoring anti-Trump Republicans like Romney or Noonan is one thing; where are the honors for those such as Rep. Elise Stefanik or Rep. Virginia Foxx, supporters of Trump, who exposed the rot and Jew-hate at Harvard and other universities?
“We are living through a period of extreme narcissism. Our current leadership in Washington believes that empathy is a weakness and that our nation stands supreme and alone,” O’Brien said. Where’s the empathy among the Harvard crowd for the Trump voters who lost manufacturing jobs to China trade agreements championed by Harvard economists, or whose wages were depressed and schools and cities disrupted by open-borders immigration policies? Where’s the empathy for the 42,000 protesters killed by Iran? Where’s the empathy for the Jewish students locked in dorm rooms for their own safety while Harvard faculty write open letters about how they, personally, have never experienced any antisemitism and the Harvard central administration denounces the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts as the retaliatory edge of incipient authoritarianism? Or, as the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, Matthew Potts, who preaches from Harvard’s owned and operated Memorial Church put it in his benediction at the commencement, “dangers to the republic.”
Among those dangers to the republic is that, as Harvard honorary degree recipient Noonan put it in that excellent 2023 column, “The elites who run our elite colleges are killing their own status.” Noonan was praised in the Harvard commencement ceremony for her “patriotic grace,” “civility,” “integrity,” “dignity,” and “patriotism,” as well as her role in Reagan’s 1984 speech at Normandy marking the 40th anniversary of the World War II battle: “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.” Nineteen Harvard graduating seniors were commissioned this week as second lieutenants and ensigns into the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Space Force. The article about them in the university’s Gazette mentions the Civil War and the Korean War.
At this moment U.S. troops are engaged against Iran, and Harvard men and at least one woman are right in the middle of it. The secretary of the Navy, Hung Cao, and the joint regional commander, Central Command’s Admiral Brad Cooper, both studied at Harvard. So did the secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Brian Mast, and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tom Cotton. Jared Kushner, Harvard class of 2003, is negotiating the ceasefire. Caroline Glick, another Harvard graduate, is advising Prime Minister Netanyahu on it. It’d be overstating it to call them and their soldiers today’s boys of Pointe du Hoc, yet the current conflict, still under way, has seen tremendous feats of bravery—think of the rescue mission that brought the F-15E aviators out of Isfahan province—that have yet to be appreciated or honored fully.
I’m all for universities focusing on research and teaching rather than politics. And it’s understandable for a university to be concerned with its own “academic freedom” above the freedoms of the 42,000 protesters who were killed in faraway Iran earlier this year. Commencements are planned long in advance, and this U.S. phase of the Iran conflict only got going in earnest on February 28, 2026. If it ends successfully in American victory, like Noonan and Reagan’s Cold War, perhaps Harvard will embrace the role of its graduates in preventing an Iranian nuclear bomb, restoring freedom of the seas, and combating terrorism. If it seems unlikely to happen anytime soon—well, Noonan’s 2023 column went on, relying on Fareed Zakaria, about how “the American public has been losing faith in these universities for good reason” and “A white man studying the American presidency does not have a prayer of getting tenure at a major history department in America today” and “Having coddled so many student groups for so long, university administrators found themselves squirming, unable to explain why certain groups (Jews, Asians) don’t seem to count in these conversations.”
Who’d have thunk that three years later she’d be walking through Harvard Yard in a crimson robe?
It was a somewhat encouraging day for Harvard, but as O’Brien’s grandfather the Worcester traffic cop put it, “take what you can get and ask for more.” Wise man, for sure.