Conan O’Brien tells Harvard graduates to play down their $250K Ivy League degree—and instead embrace being humble and ‘bad at things’ |
Conan O’Brien tells Harvard graduates to play down their $250K Ivy League degree—and instead embrace being humble and ‘bad at things’
After spending $250,000 in tuition—and four years of their time—on their degree, Harvard graduates might want to be loud and proud about their Ivy League achievement. But in his commencement address to graduates, comedian Conan O’Brien had an unusual warning: don’t let your degree define you.
“My wish for you is not that Harvard becomes the last thing people know about you,” O’Brien said during the university’s commencement ceremony on Thursday. “But instead that Harvard becomes the least important thing people know about you.”
The 63-year-old comedian, who studied history and literature at Harvard before graduating in 1985, acknowledged the irony of delivering that advice. After all, the university had just awarded him an honorary doctorate—something he joked he “didn’t really earn.”
“Big surprise,” O’Brien quipped. “I have a giant ego!”
Still, his message carried a deeper point. Early in his comedy career, being primarily known as a Harvard graduate came with stereotypes that worked against him.
“People thought the name of my show would be ‘Late Night with He Thinks He’s Better Than You,’ which I would have gone with but it didn’t fit on a shirt,” he said, adding that the experience taught him the danger of letting a single achievement define your success—especially at a time when isolation and division feel more common than ever.
“By de-emphasizing what makes us special—in your case, a prized degree—we can really find one another,” O’Brien said to graduates. “Not as an exercise in virtue but as........