Energy Secretary To Speak at Commencement

U.S. Secretary of Energy and Nobel laureate Steven Chu will be Harvard’s headline speaker at Commencement this year, University officials announced yesterday morning.

The announcement—which highlighted Chu’s role in promoting renewable energy and reducing carbon emissions both as a policymaker and as an academic—reinforced Harvard’s recent focus on sustainability and other environmental issues, which were identified as some of University President Drew G. Faust’s top commitments.

“Steven Chu is a brilliant scientist and an eloquent exponent of thoughtful, creative approaches to meeting the challenge of global climate change,” Faust said, adding that it would be a “pleasure” to hear Chu speak at the afternoon exercises on June 4.

The news was met with mixed reactions from the student body, as House e-mail lists erupted with conflicting opinions. Defenders of the speaker selection chastised those who grumbled that other universities managed to snag high-profile public figures, such as Hillary Clinton, who will be speaking at New York University’s Commencement.

“Compared to Commencement speakers in the past, the name recognition just isn’t there,” said Jumin Lee, a senior in Leverett House who described the pick as “kind of underwhelming.”

Lee and many students pointed to past Commencement notables, such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates in 2007.

“Energy is an important issue,” Lee said, “but I feel that a lot of students just aren’t excited about it.”

The lack of celebrity status aside, many students and faculty warmly welcomed the prospect of Chu’s appearance on campus this June.

“Choosing our current Energy Secretary as our Commencement speaker is a testament of how important energy and climate issues are in society today,” said Daniel P. Schrag, an environmental science and engineering professor who also heads the University’s Center for the Environment. “I think hearing his perspective on how [the nation’s] efforts are progressing will be fantastically important.”

The soft-spoken member of President Barack Obama’s team graduated from the University of Rochester in 1970 before receiving a Ph.D from the University of California at Berkeley. Chu would later go on to head the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and serve as a professor at Stanford and Berkeley.

Chu, who won a Nobel prize in 1997 for his work on cooling atoms with laser lights, comes from a family of academic high achievers—both parents attended M.I.T. and his brothers hold degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law School.

But an Ivy League education seemed to elude the once self-described academic black sheep of the family. Citing his “relatively lackluster A-average” grades as a reason for the rejection letters received in his senior year of high school, Chu later wrote, “I consoled myself that I would be an anonymous student, out of the shadow of my illustrious family.”

Several decades and a Nobel prize later, Chu will finally receive a Harvard degree—all Commencement speakers who are chosen by a four-member and tight-lipped committee recieve an honorary degree from the University at the ceremony.

—Staff writer Athena Y. Jiang can be reached at ajiang@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer June Q. Wu can be reached at junewu@fas.harvard.edu.