Nonprofit CEO John Rice Defends Diversity Efforts in HBS Class Day Speech

In a Harvard Business School Class Day address last Wednesday, John Rice, the founder and CEO of Management Leadership for Tomorrow, contended that diversity and inclusion remained important to leveling the playing field in business — and that the term had been unjustly stigmatized.

Rice — whose nonprofit aims to help minority college students access career opportunities — said that the HBS Class of 2025 is graduating in unprecedented times, with geopolitical, social, and educational norms being overturned.

“When Harvard is leading the resistance, you know the world is upside down,” Rice said. “Shoutout to Harvard.”

The line drew a roar of applause from the crowd of Harvard Business School students assembled to celebrate before they received their diplomas on Thursday.

Rice first developed his idea for creating Management Leadership for Tomorrow as a student at HBS after he noticed that many minority college students, even if they were aware of career opportunities in law and medicine, were not as informed about opportunities in business. MLT now provides mentorship programs that connect newly-minted college graduates with more than 200 organizations, including Goldman Sachs, Google, and Target.

At Wednesday’s address, Rice defended diversity efforts as essential to meritocracy, saying that arguments positioning the two as opposites ignored the fact that people do not start from a level playing field.

He said that active efforts to separate meritocracy and diversity efforts in the minds of the public have created a “simmering tension” in institutions including companies, law firms, and universities over the past 25 years.

“Extremists on the right pounced on this perception gap,” Rice said, “and launched a multi-pronged campaign to hijack the concept of meritocracy and convince us that any effort to advance opportunity for anyone who’s not a straight, white, Christian male is both anti-meritocratic and discriminates against those white males.”

“You’ve seen the tweets and heard the BS already — unfortunately even from HBS graduates who know better — insisting that a white woman or a person of color who stands to a position of power, by definition, did not get there on their right: they are a DEI hire,” he added.

Rice said that the belief that DEI and meritocracy are incompatible is false, as a meritocratic workplace is instead one where “everyone has genuine confidence that they belong.”

“Just apply the same high level of rigor to talent management that your organizations already require in every other part of your business,” Rice said. “That rigor includes taking steps that level the playing field, so you can have a meritocracy for everyone and these steps.”

The Class of 2025 student speaker, MBA recipient Chris Hood, called for his fellow HBS graduates to be open-minded in their approach to life outside of the classroom. Rather than assuming their privileged education grants them wisdom, Hood said, graduates should have the humility to understand that some of their success comes from chance — and the groundedness to think carefully about the effects of their actions.

“We’ll be asked to live in a messy world, more polarized, more complex, and less tolerant than our case studies often imply,” Hood said. “If you’re not careful, it’s easy to internalize your own specialness, and that’s when blind spots can start to talk.”

Hood recalled his experiences as a Marine Corps pilot. When a service member dies, Hood said, their comrades-in-arms remember them by passing down stories of how they lived — not their skills or successes, but their “character, retold with a little bit of embellishment.”

“Build a life that fully fills in the margins of your day with vibrance and grace,” Hood told graduates. “Let the stories they tell overflow with hilarious escapades. Let them laugh through tears as they say, ‘That one knew how to live.’ Let deep reflection and humility guide your choices. Fulfill those choices with all the color and courage you can muster.”

Hood’s speech drew a standing ovation.

—Staff writer Graham W. Lee can be reached at graham.lee@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @grahamwonlee.