By Mathias Risse, Harvard University
I. A Year Ago, and Now
A year ago, I wrote a piece for this space in the wake of Harvard's Commencement of 2025. I had just spent parts of two days (Class Day and the HKS graduation ceremony) under the tent at the Harvard Kennedy School watching what I called "a miniature replica of the global population" — students from dozens of countries gathering to receive degrees, their families alongside them from every corner of the world. I was struck then by a sense of precariousness. Might this be the last time this kind of microcosm of humanity would assemble in such a tent right between the Harvard Kennedy School and the Charles River?
The Trump administration had already begun its campaign against Harvard, and especially Harvard’s internationality drew its ire. HKS is Harvard’s most international school, with almost 60% of students coming from outside of the United States — and their continued presence was in doubt then. Moreover, the federal government had placed some $9 billion in funding under review. Demands had been issued for oversight of Harvard's hiring, admissions, and governance — demands that President Alan Garber had rightly rejected as "assertions of power, unmoored from the law." I wrote that piece with real uncertainty about what the year ahead would hold — about whether it would ever make sense again to describe the group assembled under that tent as a miniature replica of the world.
A year later, we got our answer — or at least a part of it. Again a miniature replica of the world did assemble under that tent. And based on the data for next year’s incoming class, it will be like this again, barring, of course, a reiteration of governmental interference. As of now, Harvard has weathered a campaign of federal pressure that has no precedent in the modern history of American higher education — that has no precedent in the sheer irrationality of an American government turning against a key component of its own intellectual infrastructure that has contributed so vitally to making the 20th century the “American century.” (Though of course bringing universities under their control is what would-be authoritarian regimes do — from that standpoint, there is nothing irrational here.)
On May 28, 2026, Harvard held its 375th Commencement, with comedian and proud alumnus Conan O'Brien as principal speaker. It was, by all accounts, a remarkable address: absurdist and wise, funny and pointed, self-deprecating and deeply serious in its own way. In what follows, I look back at this year — at what was done to this university, at how it responded, and at what it all means. I enlist O'Brien's commencement address as a lens, because it turns out that his themes of humility, community, narcissism, and resilience track the year Harvard has just lived through in ways that are illuminating and, at times, uncanny. All of this needs to be seen in the context of America’s 250th anniversary, and the critical midterms this year — midterms that are likely to decide the fate of America’s democracy, and that are also likely to settle whether the government will resume its attacks on higher education. But at this moment, my focus is on Harvard — and thus on the role of American higher education in all of this.
II. The Anatomy of an Assault
In the spring of 2025, the Trump administration launched what can only be described as a coordinated assault on Harvard using every available instrument of federal power. The immediate justification — stated repeatedly and with varying degrees of sincerity — was concern about antisemitism on campus following the protests that erupted after October 7, 2023. But as Harvard's president noted in April 2025, and as federal Judge Allison Burroughs would confirm in a scathing 84-page ruling that September, the government's actions used antisemitism as "a smokescreen for ideological retaliation." That was the judge's phrase, not mine.
What did this assault look like in practice? It began with the review of $9 billion in federal funding, including research grants to Harvard's affiliated hospitals. It escalated with the unilateral freeze of $2.2 billion in research grants on April 14, 2025 — the same day Harvard President Alan Garber publicly refused the government's demands for federal oversight of Harvard's governance. It extended to the revocation of Harvard's certification to host international students in May, an action Harvard immediately challenged in court and won, temporarily. It included presidential proclamations targeting Harvard's international students on national security grounds.
It involved explicit threats to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status. Congress obliged by raising the endowment tax from 1.4 to 8 percent — a measure that will cost Harvard an estimated $300 million annually beginning in 2027. The Defense Department withdrew support for professional military education programs, with Secretary Hegseth — the self-declared “Secretary of War,” a title no other country in the world still uses — accusing Harvard of sending officers back with "heads full of globalist and radical ideologies." (On Hegseth, see here and here.) And this past winter, the Justice Department sued Harvard for admissions data, and the Department of Education announced yet another investigation.
I would sometimes joke that certain senior officials apparently met for cocktails in some hotel in DC to brainstorm what to do to Harvard next. Something like that might well have happened.
The financial fallout was immediate. A hiring moratorium. Layoffs. Emergency funds deployed to keep critical research alive. A university-wide salary freeze. A fifty-percent reduction in doctoral admissions at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. These are not abstractions. These are researchers whose work halted, graduate students whose fellowships evaporated, scientists whose labs scrambled to stay afloat. As statistics PhD graduate Johann Gaebler put it on Commencement day, "That's been something that's affected an enormous number of people, and it's really hurt the scientific process in the whole country."
And yet: Harvard held. It sued. It won. Judge Burroughs restored the grants. Courts blocked the presidential proclamation on international students. As of this year’s commencement, international student enrollment remained essentially unchanged from prior years. Harvard continued to operate, to teach, to research, to graduate, to be itself. This year’s graduation ceremony was, among other things, proof of that.
III. A Comedian's Clarity
Into this charged context walked Conan O'Brien — Harvard class of 1985, twice elected president of the Harvard Lampoon, Emmy Award-winning comedy writer and late-night television legend, and, as of May 28, 2026, holder of an honorary doctorate from the institution he credits with a great deal and teases without mercy. His address was received with enormous warmth and considerable laughter. But it also offered something I would call truth-telling through absurdity, and it deserves to be taken seriously.
O'Brien announced, to great delight, that he too was suing Harvard. His grievances: the "cast-iron bunk bed that greeted me upon arrival," which he described as "an instrument of divine cruelty"; his "less-than-spectacular undergraduate sex life"; and a dining hall dish combining government-issued cod and spaghetti in a manner apparently still haunting him four decades later. He itemized these claims with the procedural gravity of an actual litigant. Then he delivered the line that brought down the house: "I'm confident that my claims will have more merit than those filed by the President of the United States."
There is something clarifying about this kind of humor. O'Brien's mock lawsuit works as comedy because it mirrors the real lawsuit closely enough to expose its absurdity. The Trump administration's legal actions against Harvard — the March 2026 suit seeking to rescind restored grants, the Justice Department's demand for applicant-level admissions data, the cascading Title VI investigations — have the form of legitimate legal processes while being, as a group of 120 Jewish faculty members stated in an open letter this spring, "an authoritarian assault on institutions of higher education." By announcing a lawsuit over a cast-iron bunk bed with the same procedural seriousness as the President of the United States, O'Brien managed to say, without quite saying it, that the president's claims are not significantly more serious in their underlying justification.
Absurdism, wielded well, is a scalpel. Jeremy Weinstein, dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, also seemed to be taken by O’Brien’s approach to Trump’s lawsuits. He opened his speech at the afternoon ceremony at HKS by announcing that his own plans for the summer had to face crude adjustments now that an all hands-on-deck approach was required to respond to O’Brien’s lawsuit on its merits.
O’Brien’s riff on foreign students was equally sharp. "The current administration feels Harvard admits too many foreign students," O'Brien said. "And who knows, maybe they have a point. After all, what has any foreigner ever added to our American culture, with the possible exception of music, literature, art, cuisine, fashion, architecture, dance, scientific breakthroughs, and the core of our moral codes and ethical beliefs? If foreigners hadn't gummed up the works, right now we'd all be listening to delightful Calvinist reggae, eating savory Church of England ziti, and dancing the forbidden and sexually charged Lutheran lambada."
One can smile at this and move on. But I want to pause over it, because the argument O'Brien is making — the one underneath the laughter — is one I have been trying to make in more earnest tones for a year. In my essay last June, I wrote about MIT physicist Wolfgang Ketterle, who came to America because its universities assembled the best minds from diverse nations — "challenging and stimulating for everyone," as he put it, enabling "entirely new ways of thinking." I wrote about the $44 billion international students contribute to the American economy annually, about the two-thirds of graduate students in electrical engineering and computer science who were born outside the United States, about the simple fact that without the influx of international talent, "U.S. science would grind to a halt." O'Brien made the same case in thirty words and made everyone laugh while he did it. I will admit it: he said it better.
IV. Narcissism and Its Discontents
O'Brien was not primarily at Harvard for Commencement 2026 to mock the Trump administration, however, and his speech would have been far less interesting if he had been. The deeper argument — the one he clearly cared most about — was about something more pervasive than any particular political moment, even as that moment gave it urgency. "We are living through a period of extreme narcissism," he told the graduates. "Our current leadership in Washington believes that empathy is a weakness, and that our nation stands supreme and alone. Add to that, everyone here today has a phone in their pocket that is algorithmically programmed to celebrate you and you alone by making you the protein-maxing hero of your own special journey."
The connection between the Trump administration's attacks on Harvard and the broader phenomenon of narcissism O'Brien identifies is, I think, more than rhetorical coincidence. The administration's campaign has been characterized throughout by a peculiar failure of empathy — an inability or unwillingness to understand what it is actually attacking, and what it stands to lose. The people making these decisions appear to have genuinely not grasped — or not cared — that the federal research partnership they were dismantling was one of the great engines of American prosperity and power in the postwar era. (The same narcissism is also at play in the spectacular failure of the war against Iran.)
The COVID vaccines that saved millions of lives — including, one might note, the lives of many Trump supporters — were products of that partnership: Harvard-affiliated labs working with federal funding under Operation Warp Speed, itself an achievement of the first Trump administration. To use the disruption of that partnership as a weapon in a culture war is not merely wrong. It is a form of spectacular self-harm born of narcissistic certainty that nothing will break that shouldn't break.
The belief that "our nation stands supreme and alone" — O'Brien's phrase — is the worldview that sees international students as a threat rather than a gift, foreign influence in American universities as contamination rather than enrichment, the global enterprise of knowledge-production as something that can be bullied into deference without consequences. But as I noted last year, and as this year's events have begun to confirm, there are consequences. Other countries have begun to recruit the students and researchers who found the American welcome unwelcoming. Germany, for one, stands ready to expand its role in global academic excellence. What I last year called the new phenomenon of brain drain — away from the United States — is already underway. The erosion of America's extraordinary soft power, built in significant part on its universities and the global communities they host, will take generations to repair if it is allowed to proceed.
O'Brien offered an antidote — not to the politics specifically, but to the underlying condition. "By de-emphasizing what makes us special — in your case, a prized degree — we can really find one another, not as an exercise in virtue, but as a path towards greater laughter, love, and real growth." The de-emphasis of superiority. The embrace of community. The recognition that achievement is partly the product of luck and circumstance — "the lucky poker hand" that too many mistake for their own brilliance.
These are not merely personal virtues. They are, in a real sense, the intellectual and moral preconditions for the kind of institution Harvard is and aspires to be: a place where, as I wrote last year, "brilliant and dedicated people from around the world encounter each other, across all fields and levels of seniority." A place whose strength derives precisely from the diversity and openness that the Trump administration has spent a year trying to destroy.
V. What Harvard's Resilience Actually Means
I want to be careful here, because I am not naturally given to institutional cheerleading, and Harvard's resilience over the past year should not be romanticized. The university suffered real damage. Research was disrupted. Researchers felt the chill of uncertainty. Doctoral programs were curtailed. Talented people endured months of genuine anxiety about whether they could remain in this country. The fifty-percent cut in doctoral admissions at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is not a minor administrative adjustment; it is a significant blow to the pipeline of future scholars, and the admirable donor-led effort to raise $100 million for PhD fellowships is a Band-Aid on a wound that should not have been inflicted in the first place.
Harvard has also made a number of internal changes in the spirit of what the Trump government has asked of it. Closest to home, as far as human rights work at Harvard is concerned, is that, in the middle of the academic year that now comes to an end, the dean of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Andrea Baccarelli, unceremoniously removed Mary Bassett from her directorship of that school’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. This was a move that, in any normal order of things, would have been made very differently, and certainly not in the middle of an academic year. Dean Baccarelli can only blame himself for the common perception that this removal is a result of this center’s focus on public-health issues arising for Palestinians — clearly one legitimate subject for a center focused on human rights and public health. No doubt, such internal measures taken at Harvard either to accommodate Trump or to adjust to new realities in the United States will leave scars that might outlast anyone currently in office. Changes that are ongoing as we speak remain to be judged, and that judgment may not be entirely favorable.
And yet the resilience is real, it matters, and it has resonated around the country and indeed around the world — and on the occasion of Commencement 2026, this is what deserves emphasis. Harvard did not capitulate, and as a result, it seems to me, Harvard’s soft power around the world currently is considerable — which is not true of the soft power of the United States under Donald Trump’s leadership. (Tourism to the US declined considerably in 2025, due to a perception of the country as an unfriendly place.) President Garber's April 14, 2025, letter — written on the same day the government froze $2.2 billion in grants — was a principled refusal to accept federal control of what he called "what we teach, whom we admit and hire, and how we conduct our research." That refusal had a cost, and Harvard has paid it — and it might have to pay much more. But it also demonstrated something important about what universities are and must be: the commitment to intellectual independence as a condition of meaningful inquiry. As Garber told the Commencement crowd on May 28, 2026, "truth without liberty is a fire without air."
O'Brien offered a parallel account of resilience drawn from his own career. "I have had to course-correct so many times in my career that my path is a crazed tangle of zigs and zags," he told the graduates. "I famously lost a job that meant the world to me." He means his departure from the Tonight Show in 2010, a public and painful episode. "And then years later, I saw the entire format of late-night television — something I had dedicated my career to — start to evaporate. So, at the suggestion of a very smart friend, I started a podcast." The result was something he now loves as much as, or more than, his late-night work. He credits the pivot to community — to collaborators, guests, and a willingness to be humble enough to change direction — rather than to stubbornness or pride.
Harvard's year has been something like this: a year of forced pivots, of confronting the precariousness of arrangements that seemed permanent, of discovering what is genuinely indispensable. The University has done overdue work on antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias — implementing University report recommendations, creating new courses related to Jewish culture and history, clarifying rules around protest and dissent, renaming and refocusing its DEI offices to emphasize pluralism. It has developed contingency plans for international students that fortunately did not need to be fully deployed. It has built donor coalitions to supplement lost federal funding. It has, in short, metabolized the crisis — to borrow O'Brien's word for what one should do with one's achievements — and continued to function.
VI. Humility as Institutional Virtue
The thread running through O'Brien's speech — the one I keep returning to — is humility. Not humility as self-abasement or false modesty, but humility as an accurate accounting of one's situation: the recognition that success arises from community and circumstance, that the degree — however hard-earned — is the beginning of education, not its end. "Your real education starts now," O'Brien told the graduates, “with friends you've made and friends you get to meet, with stunning successes and miserable defeats, and with a humble acceptance that your greatness comes from the mess around you, not despite it." (On this occasion, David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Commencement Speech at Kenyon College — entitled This is Water — is also very much worth revisiting.)
I want to suggest that this is also a message for Harvard as an institution. I have written before — sometimes in tones more critical than comfortable for those who like their Harvard reflected only in a flattering light — that an accumulation of wealth, talent, and influence like Harvard's is justified only if utilized to make things better, especially for people who could never attend such a place. Harvard has two sides that have coexisted since its founding in 1636: the preservation of privilege and the incubation of genuinely new ideas. The attacks of the past year have, strangely, clarified which of those sides is worth defending. It is not the endowment, not the brand, not the alumni network, not the name recognition. It is the thing that makes all of those possible and that cannot ultimately be purchased or coerced: the genuine, unglamorous, painstaking work of inquiry carried out by committed people, in community with one another, across national and cultural boundaries, in pursuit of understanding.
The Latin salutatorian at last year's Commencement declared — in Latin, with translation on the screen — that "neither powers nor princes can change the truth and deny that diversity is our strength." The Trump administration spent a year trying to prove that powers and princes can do precisely that. So far they have not succeeded. Not because Harvard is invulnerable — this year demonstrated quite vividly that it is not — but because what they were attacking is something they cannot ultimately reach: the commitment, shared by the institution and the people within it, to inquiry pursued freely, in community, across difference.
O'Brien accepted his honorary doctorate on behalf of his late grandfather, a Worcester traffic officer whose formal education ended in seventh grade. It was a small gesture, but a telling one: a reminder that this place's purpose is larger than its prestige, that it exists — at its best — not to certify the already-privileged but to be a gift to the world.
VII. Looking Forward
As I reflect on O'Brien's speech, I find myself thinking again about the tent at HKS — the one I described as a miniature replica of the global population in my essay of a year ago. I am indeed glad to report that the tent was full again this spring — full with people from around the world, much the same way as it was last year. International student enrollment held. Graduates came from around the world, many of them after sustained periods of waiting to be able to enter the country. (And just two weeks ago, a student in one of my executive education programs told me that he was subjected to extra scrutiny upon disclosing that he was attending a Harvard program.) The microcosm of humanity reconvened, and degrees were conferred in Harvard Yard as they have been for nearly four centuries. HKS has announced an American Service fellowship, and seemingly partly in response to this, domestic applications at HKS have gone up dramatically this year. And a commitment to the United States and a commitment to the world do not have to stand in any kind of conflict if understood properly. (See here and here or here.)
But the uncertainties have not dissolved; they have merely shifted form. The government's March 2026 lawsuit seeking to rescind all federal funding awaits a hearing. The appeal of the injunction protecting Harvard's visa certification for international students is still pending, with oral arguments expected later this year. The endowment tax increase will begin to bite in 2027. The long-term effects on the federal research partnership — on the pipeline of young scientists, on the confidence of international scholars contemplating American universities — will take years to fully manifest. A group of 120 Jewish faculty members was right to describe the government's ongoing lawsuit as an exploitation of legitimate concerns about antisemitism to justify something that "can only be described as an authoritarian assault on institutions of higher education." Courts have pushed back, and pushed back well. But courts cannot fully repair what political will has chosen to damage.
Still, Commencement 2026 felt like something. O'Brien's ultimate wish for the graduates — that they live lives in which Harvard becomes "the least important thing people know about you" — is a beautiful formulation for individuals setting out into the world. (On how disorienting a world this is, see here and here.) For Harvard as an institution, I would frame the parallel hope somewhat differently. What I hope this year has produced is a university that has learned — in the way one learns from what O'Brien called "stunning successes and miserable defeats" — what it is genuinely for, and why that matters to people who will never attend it, who will never visit Cambridge, who will never hear a commencement address.
The COVID vaccine that reached a grandmother in rural Alabama, the climate research that helps a coastal community in Bangladesh plan for rising seas, the understanding of governance that an HKS graduate brings to an underfunded municipality in sub-Saharan Africa — these are what justify the institution. These are what the Trump administration, in its narcissistic certainty, either failed to understand or chose to disregard.
Conan O'Brien told this year's graduates: "I honestly believe that community, spontaneity, and a real commitment to humility have helped me build a rich life that means much more to me than any diploma." Harvard, at its best, is a place where that kind of richness is cultivated at scale, across difference, for the world. The past year tested whether Harvard would sacrifice that richness to preserve its comfort, or sacrifice its comfort to preserve that richness. The answer, imperfect and ongoing as it is, appears to be the latter.
On a day when absurdism and wisdom arrived together in a crimson gown, that was not a small thing to witness.
