Attorney General Merrick B. Garland Delivers Commencement Address to the Harvard Classes of 2020 and 2021 Cambridge, MA ~ Sunday, May 29, 2022
Remarks as Delivered
Thank you, President Bacow, for this extraordinary honor. And for your kind, but overly generous introduction.
And thank you to my wife, Lynn, Harvard Class of 1982 (Applause), for listening to President Bacow’s introduction without laughing out loud at the overly generous parts.
It truly is an honor to be here today to offer my own “welcome back” to the patient and indomitable Classes of 2020 and 2021.
And it is an honor to be here with your families and loved ones to celebrate with you.
I know it must be a little strange to be back here: not as soon-to-be graduates anxious about the future, but as actual graduates – anxious about the future. (Laughter.)
It does relieve the pressure on me, though, knowing that today I am speaking at your 10-year reunion instead of your graduation. Yes, 2020 through 2021 was a long decade for all of us. (Laughter and Applause.)
And it is a great comfort to see all of you in your robes. You look like little judges. I feel right at home. (Laughter.)
I know that because of the pandemic, your experience was not entirely what you had expected. Life does not always turn out the way you expect. Trust me on that. (Laughter.)
But it is a great honor to recognize the extraordinary resilience you have shown. We are all very, very proud of you.
I also want to acknowledge an additional, impossible kind of resilience that your generation has been asked to weather.
As we gather today to celebrate this milestone in your life, we are also holding onto an enormous amount of grief because of yet another mass shooting at another school in our country.
An unspeakable act of violence has devastated families and an entire community in Uvalde, Texas. I know I speak for all of us here that our hearts are broken.
Before that horrific attack – and before the horrific attack in Laguna Woods and the horrific attack in Buffalo – I had decided I wanted to make this speech about public service. About what each of us owes to each other, and about what we all owe as residents of a democracy.
I still want to talk about public service today because these tragedies only underscore how urgent the call to public service for your generation truly is. And because of a promise I made when I first came to Harvard.
Standing on this stage today would have been a great surprise to the 17-year-old me who first set foot on this campus. In my mind, I am still the scholarship kid whose parents drove him all the way to Cambridge from Illinois in a car bulging with suitcases and excitement.
I had no idea what a Final Club was. (Laughter.) I assumed it was a group of students who got together to study for final exams. (Laughter.)
When I arrived at Harvard, I hoped to become a doctor because I saw it as the best way to help people directly.
I had a pre-med scholarship provided by a company in my hometown, which the University generously supplemented.
But despite many personal tutorials by my roommate and best friend, it eventually became clear that the pre-med prerequisites were not my forte. (Laughter.)
So, I went to my scholarship advisor to say I was switching fields and would have to give up the scholarship. I was sorry I had let him down, I said. Sorry that I did not know how I would be able to continue without the financial support.
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