<p>I've always wondered how do colleges pick a guest speaker? I know that a year prior, Stephen Colbert gave a speech at Knox College, this year they will have Obama and at Yale (a few years back) they had Anderson Cooper. Do college students have a fair say in who they would like to speak at their graduation??</p>
<p>I don't know how they're picked, but there always tends to be some sort of protest on every campus once the speaker is announced.</p>
<p>yeah
mine was a senator speaking about magic</p>
<p>my school is trying to get the Queen of England this year. We'll see if it works out.</p>
<p>Speaking of the Royal Family, I heard that a couple of weeks ago, Prince Charles was in Harlem "shootin some hoops" - so to speak. Did that work out well? Any footage? Youtube?</p>
<p>it might depend on the school. We have Julia Louis-Dreyfus (elaine from seinfeld) speaking at commencement this year. A lot of students were complaining that she isn't the kind of person they want to hear a commencement speech from (ie politician or businessman, etc) so i assume that it was not student chosen.</p>
<p>I know at Knox student senate makes a list of desirable speakers in order of desirability and college officials send special report-invitational letter to number 1 on the list. I suppose if it does not work they go down on the list etc. So far Knox was able to obtain several number 1 in the last years, Obama, Colbert and now Bill Clinton is coming. Knox has great anti-slavery history and Lincoln- Douglas debate was there, as well as beeing one of the first schools to graduate women and black people. So it is not surprising that lots of politicians want their name to be associated with Knox college.</p>
<p>In 1972, Pete Seeger was our commencement speaker at Oberlin College, who spoke on the military budget (Vietnam), interspersing it with songs on his banjo which hung around his neck. Afterwards, since he preferred not to hobnob, he declined the faculty luncheon. My parents and I found him sitting alone under a tree in Tappan Square, so joined him and shared our picnic. Some other families settled in like little birds under the tree to chat with him. Best time ever.<br>
Last year, Oberlin had book author/newspaper columnist Tom Friedman.
I'm also fond of looking at who receives their honorary degrees, for example: Martin Luther King very early in his career. They're always ahead-of-the-curve, IMHO.</p>
<p>Middlebury has Bill Clinton as a commencement speaker this year. I know there were some students on the board/group that is in charge of finding a speaker, but I think it usually comes down to alumni connections and the favors a college can cash in when it comes to landing a big speaker. Some students will inevitably protest every decision, while others will be very happy. Nobody can really please everyone.</p>
<p>I found the article quite interesting. Take a look on your own of you want.</p>
<p>…Eminence is the one universal precondition to being a commencement speaker, and an implied (often explicit) theme of the speeches is, “Here lieth the path to success and happiness.” There are two problems with this formula. The first is that any narrative of success is bound to be at least a little bit dull. The second is that successful people are almost never able to pinpoint what it was that made them so. Take Warren Buffet. Here’s a guy who must get asked five times a day how he became the most successful investor of his era. His answers"Reinvest your profits," “Limit what you borrow,” etc.are no different from what any fool could tell you. Buffet isn’t being cagey. He doesn’t know. Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of experience that we learn from. We enjoy it; perhaps we even deserve it. But we don’t acquire wisdom from it.</p>
<p>Failure, on the other hand, is Harvard, Yale, and the University of Heidelberg rolled into one. We may not all possess the self-knowledge to absorb failure’s lessons, just as we may not all graduate with an education to go along with our diplomas. But people typically have a much easier time recounting, in often vivid detail, where they screwed up in life than they do explaining what they did right. Indeed, memoirs of spectacular failure have become a cottage industryso much so that authors are sometimes tempted to embellish their narratives to make their stories even grimmer than they really are. Stories about life’s wrong turns are sometimes exaggerated but seldom dull.</p>
<p>You want a commencement speaker who can really tell a group of college graduates how to live their lives? Consider selecting from the following alternate list…</p>
<p>[The</a> trouble with commencement speakers. - By Timothy Noah - Slate Magazine](<a href=“The trouble with commencement speakers.”>The trouble with commencement speakers.)</p>
<p>An online user said that Michael Vick should be on the list:</p>
<p>The lesson that he will teach the graduates?</p>
<p>“Don’t ever forget anyone who has hurt you. If someone kill your parents, your dogs, hate them forever because forgiveness is bad. No one deserve a second chance. You will never be a success in your life because you failed a semester or a class. You will not succeed because you are bond to live a miserable life because second chance does not exist in life. Screw every one who failed in their life” this is with a sarcastic tone.</p>
<p>Another one said" I agree with this writer…all the time (not sometimes) you see great speakers at any graduation or ceremonies, what happened to the others who failed to whatever those great speakers succeeded at? I was a failure, i’m not anymore. I don’t study until my brains pop, i just plain learn from my mistakes my failings.I don’t hold a degree in my hand i hold it in my pride. My life is more than enough now."</p>
<p>Hillary is doing NYU right? </p>
<p>I loved Obama at Notre Dame by the way.</p>
<p>Yes Hillary is doing NYU and Barnard</p>
<p>:eek: I didn’t know about Barnard. Sweet deal! I wonder who is doing Columbia?</p>
<p>Eric Holder will do Columbia,:</p>
<p>Jonathan Alter (Western Connecticut State)
Stephen Chu (Harvard)
Hillary Clinton (Barnard, NYU)|
Bill Clinton (Florida A&M)
Geena Davis (Bates)
Rahm Emanuel (George Washington)
Louise Erdrich (Dartmouth)
James Franco (UCLA)
Barney Frank (American)
Atul Gawande (Harvard School of Public Health)
David Gergen (Old Dominion)
Sanjay Gupta (University of Michigan Medical School)
Eric Holder (Columbia)
Gwen Ifill (Howard, Marymount, Georgetown)
Bobby Jindal (Loyola, Louisiana Tech, Grambling State University)
Anthony Kennedy (Stanford)
Matt Lauer (Harvard)
Michael Mukasey (University of North Carolina)
Barack Obama (Arizona State, Notre Dame, U.S. Naval Academy)
Michelle Obama (University of California-Merced)
Colin Powell (Franklin & Marshall)
Dan Rather (Michigan State)
Eric Schmidt (Carnegie Mellon and University of Pennsylvania*)
Elie Wiesel (Bucknell)
Oprah Winfrey (Duke)
Fareed Zakaria (Bates)</p>
<p>Governor Schwarzenegger- USC (haha, had to Google his name to make sure it’s right)</p>
<p>Jonathan Alter (Western Connecticut State)
Stephen Chu (Harvard)
Hillary Clinton (Barnard, NYU)|
Bill Clinton (Florida A&M)
Geena Davis (Bates)
Rahm Emanuel (George Washington)
Louise Erdrich (Dartmouth)
James Franco (UCLA)
Barney Frank (American)
Atul Gawande (Harvard School of Public Health)
David Gergen (Old Dominion)
Sanjay Gupta (University of Michigan Medical School)
Eric Holder (Columbia)
Gwen Ifill (Howard, Marymount, Georgetown)
Bobby Jindal (Loyola, Louisiana Tech, Grambling State University)
Anthony Kennedy (Stanford)
Matt Lauer (Harvard)
Michael Mukasey (University of North Carolina)
Barack Obama (Arizona State, Notre Dame, U.S. Naval Academy)
Michelle Obama (University of California-Merced)
Colin Powell (Franklin & Marshall)
Dan Rather (Michigan State)
Eric Schmidt (Carnegie Mellon and University of Pennsylvania*)
Arnold Schwarzenegger (University of Southern California)
Elie Wiesel (Bucknell)
Oprah Winfrey (Duke)
Fareed Zakaria (Bates)</p>
<p>Man I’m jealous. I want James Franco to give the commencement address at my graduation.</p>
<p>Nothing to do with my user name or spiderman (which I don’t care about) – that dude is just hilarious especially in Pineapple Express.</p>
<p>I want Vladimir Putin and the beautiful Yelena Viktorovna Tregubova when I will graduate</p>
<p>Ellen DeGeneres spoke at Tulane’s commencement! She is absolutely hilarious. CANNOT believe you guys missed her on your list of famous speakers.</p>
<p>I hope she comes to Rice in three years to speak for my commencement. Seriously, she is the bomb.</p>
<p>:eek: I want Ellen!!!</p>
<p>George W. Bush was the speaker at last fall’s graduation at Texas A&M. Not that he’s as cool as some of the others, but always interesting to say you were in the presence of a president/past-president.</p>