Here's to You, Mary Robinson

Recent events in Northern Ireland have made Mary Robinson a particularly interesting and relevant graduation speaker, assuaging the concerns that many Harvard seniors had when the announcement of her oration was made.

Two years ago, when National Institutes of Health director and Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus was picked to be Harvard's commencement speaker, many members of the Class of 1996 asked why their speaker couldn't be someone better known, like Vaclav Havel, the 1995 speaker, or Al Gore '69, who spoke in 1994.

Last week, the University announced that Mary Robinson, United Nations high commissioner for human rights and the former Irish president, will be the speaker at the 347th Commencement this June. Many students, especially those with limited interest in foreign affairs, may now be asking the same question: Is Robinson good enough?

It is a crude question, one that requires weighing the value of one name against another. Yet it is also an honest one. No matter our class year, it's a blow to our egos when we see that Bill Clinton is speaking at Ball State, Bill Gates at Brandeis, Bill Cosby at Berkeley. We read the accounts of these speeches in The New York Times or see clips on CNN and ask, why not at Harvard? Given the extent to which we have been trained to expect only the best from Harvard--the most important professors, the biggest library system, the most famous name--it is all too easy to expect the best in terms of Commencement speakers.

Yet the biggest name does not, of course, mean the best speaker. Students should eagerly await hearing what Robinson has to say. Robinson was elected in 1990 as Ireland's first female head of state, and exercised progressive leadership in that country for seven years. She addressed controversial issues others had avoided--poverty, women's rights and racism. She is known as both an intellectual politician and an eloquent and engaging speaker. She even has an L.L.M.degree from Harvard. Interesting, important, inspirational--Robinson is indeed an excellent choice to address the graduating senior class.

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