I understand that J.K. Rowling’s commencement speech at Harvard caused a stir. While some students grew up reading Harry Potter and were delighted to hear her, others felt it was beneath the dignity of the school to have an author of (gasp!) children’s books speak to the future rulers of the free world.
I don’t think the content of her speech helped matters much.
“On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure.”
Oh boy. Not off to a good start. Well, maybe she can still keep it upbeat…
“..a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.”
By now you might be expecting one of those vaudevillian hooks to begin extending from offstage, but nothing of the sort happened. She went on to give an inspiring talk and indeed summarized the galvanizing effect of failure quite nicely:
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.”
See the video and transcript
Via the Disney and Steampunk Journal (aka BoingBoing)
June 10th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Wow, I didn’t realize this caused a stir. We’re not able to talk about failure anymore? I didn’t watch the entire speech, so maybe the tone was depressing, but it kinda sounds like she was telling the grads to go for it and not be afraid of failure.
(always the optimist)
June 10th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Hey, thanks for visiting, Kari.
Apparently, the controversy was prior to her speech. According to The Scotsman:
“WHEN it was announced last month that JK Rowling was to give Harvard University’s most important address of the year, she was dismissed as a “flash in the pan”.
However, any suggestion she was unwelcome was forgotten, as she received a standing ovation lasting one minute and 50 seconds…”