The following is the full transcript of bestselling author, Stanford professor, and infectious disease doctor Abraham Verghese’s commencement address at Harvard’s 374th Commencement on May 29, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
A Time of Challenge and Resilience
ABRAHAM VERGHESE: President Garber, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, faculty, fellow honorands, and most of all, new graduates, congratulations! What an incredibly gratifying moment this must be for you, and I know it’s a very proud moment for your families. So how about we give a round of applause to your parents, your friends, your siblings, everyone who’s here.
I don’t have to tell you that this is also an unprecedented moment for Harvard University. In this institution’s almost four-century existence, there has probably never been more attention focused on you than in these last few months, weeks, days. Honestly, in coming to your campus, I feel very much like a medieval messenger who had to sneak through the encircling forces and slip into your besieged community.
So first, I bring you my felicitations to the graduates. No recent events can diminish what each of you has accomplished here. Graduates, I also want you to know you have the admiration and the good wishes of so many beyond Harvard. More people than you realize are grateful to Harvard for the example it has set. By your willingness to look inward, to make painful and necessary changes, but then ultimately by your clarity in affirming and courageously defending the essential values of this university and indeed of this nation.
A cascade of draconian government measures has already led to so much uncertainty, so much pain and suffering in this country and across the globe, and more has been threatened. The outrage you must feel, the outrage so many feel, also must surely lead us to a new appreciation. Appreciation for the rule of law and due process, which till now we took for granted because this is America, after all. And appreciation for those committed to truth, veritas, at a time when the absence of truth has come to feel almost normal.
We find new appreciation of actions that demonstrate thoughtfulness, decency, generosity, kindness, humility, and service to community. I’m not Catholic, but I was so moved and inspired, as I’m sure many of you were, to hear those very qualities, humility, generosity, used repeatedly in describing the character of an American and Peruvian citizen, Robert Francis Prevost. The portrayal of this American, now Pope Leo XIV, the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion people, felt like a light after a dark stretch of time.
An Immigrant’s Perspective
Speaking about Catholicism, may I make a confession? When President Garber invited me to speak here, I was honored, of course, but I asked for some time to think about it because, believe me, I was well aware of the distinguished individuals who have spoken at this ceremony before. I felt you deserved to hear from a star or a Nobel Prize winner, or perhaps, God knows, from the Pope himself. Maybe next year, President Garber.
But what made me eventually say yes to President Garber had everything to do with where we all find ourselves in 2025. When legal immigrants and others who are lawfully in this country, including so many of your international students, worry about being wrongly detained and even deported, perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from an immigrant like me.
Perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from someone who was born in Ethiopia when it was ruled by an emperor, someone who then lived under the harsh military leader who overthrew the emperor, someone who had at least one of his medical school classmates tortured and disappeared and who saw many other of his medical school classmates become guerrilla fighters fighting against the military dictator.
Perhaps it’s not so bad that you hear from someone like me who eventually completed his medical training in India just when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, after facing Supreme Court judgments that she didn’t care for, declared a national emergency and jailed thousands of students and all her opponents. When in time she called for an election, citizens in the world’s largest democracy expressed their outrage by voting. She was ousted.
America’s Promise and Potential
It is perhaps also fitting that you should hear from someone who never had a prayer of coming to Harvard or an American university of this caliber for my education. Yes, I want to tell you, I had an excellent education in America all the same. I can bear witness to the dedicated efforts of professors, teachers at colleges, medical schools across this country, county and rural hospitals, veterans’ hospitals where I’ve worked, places you may not have heard of, but where nevertheless great patient care is delivered by physicians, many of whom are like me, trained outside of America.
We were recruited here because American medical schools simply don’t graduate sufficient numbers of physicians to fill the country’s need. More than a quarter of the physicians in this country are foreign medical graduates. And many of those foreign physicians ultimately settle in places that others might not find as desirable.
So a part of what makes America great, if I may use that phrase, is that it allows an immigrant like me to blossom here, just as generations of other immigrants and their children have flourished and contributed in every walk of life, working to keep America great.
America also allowed this immigrant to find his voice as a writer. To quote the late novelist E.L. Doctorow, someone I admire and I got to know, he wrote, “It is the immigrant hordes who keep this country alive, the waves of them arriving year after year. Who believes in America more than the people who run down the gangplank and kiss the ground?”
The greatness of America, the greatness of Harvard, is reflected in the fact that someone like me could be invited to speak to you. So thank you, Harvard. Thank you, President Garber.
I am honored to be addressing you.
The America I Discovered Through Literature
As a child growing up in Ethiopia without television until my teens, my notion of America came from the many extraordinary Americans who served in the Peace Corps. Those individuals left an impression of a country that was decent, generous, compassionate, not just to its own citizens, but to other nations.
A more nuanced picture of America came from reading Ralph Ellison, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Hemingway, Mark Twain, and so many others in books that I checked out from the United States Information Services Library or the John F. Kennedy Library at my university in Addis Ababa. The novels conveyed a sense of an America that was far from perfect, but yet it seemed to me a nation striving to be so, striving to live up to the ideals expressed in its founding documents.
Novels can teach you powerful lessons about life in a way that’s very different from movies because a novel is a collaborative venture. The writer provides the words, the reader provides their imagination, and somewhere in middle space this fictional dream, this mental movie is created and it’s quite unique to each reader. In fact, my calling to medicine as a young teen came because of one novel, Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham, though the novel might not speak that way to anybody else.
To paraphrase Camus, fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives. When a novel speaks to you, it’s because it rings true. The idea that now in America, a book that might speak to a young reader, reveal his or her calling could be banned from their library by a school board or by government decree is beyond tragic.
I know we will find our way back to displaying those attributes of America I admired from afar, the America I have known and loved from over four decades of being here, and it depends on all of you.
Commencement Advice
Graduates, the commencement ritual obliges me to offer advice. Even though in 40 years of being a professor attending every graduation, I can remember very few things that were said. Nevertheless, it’s just part of the ritual, and so I already snuck in one piece of advice I don’t know if you noticed, and that is to read novels. It’s a trait of some of the best physicians and some of the best university leaders that I’ve met, including your president. I mean, your university president, an avid reader. And if you don’t read fiction, my considered medical opinion is that a part of your brain responsible for active imagination atrophies.
With that aside, I want to leave you with two other pieces of advice. By the way, I’m serious about that. I want to leave you with two other pieces of advice. One has to do with decisions and the other with time.
First, let me tell you about decisions. There’s a writing dictum or aphorism that I just love about how to create a fictional character on the page. And it goes like this. Character is determined by decisions taken under pressure. You can build a fictional character by describing their appearance, their manner of speaking, their dress, etc. But the moment a character really leaps off the page is when you put them under pressure and they’re forced to make a decision. Indeed, when one of my characters makes a decision that isn’t one that I picked for them at a moment of crisis, they’re usually right. And with that, they suddenly take on human flesh. They become incarnate. So I repeat, character is determined by decisions taken under pressure.
And I wanted to share an anecdote that I think epitomizes for me this link between decisions and character. In 1974, in my third year of medical school in Ethiopia, my clinical year, the military overthrew the emperor Haile Selassie. One of the first acts of the military leader, who became known as the Stalin of Africa, one of his first acts was to close the university and send the students to the countryside to educate the masses. This is almost a reflex of so-called strong men to attack the places where truth and reason prevail.
As an expatriate, I had little choice but to leave. Among my medical school classmates, who at that point went underground to join the guerrilla forces fighting against the Stalin of Africa, was a brilliant student named Meles Zenawi. I have yet to meet a student as brilliant as Meles. Meles obviously gave up his career path to medicine, became a guerrilla fighter, rose to become the leader of the rebel group, fighting for 17 years until his troops finally succeeded in displacing the military dictator.
He became prime minister for three terms and to quote President Clinton speaking about him, he was a new generation of African leader. One might disagree with many of his decisions, but in the village where Meles grew up, you could not tell his mother’s hut from the hut next to it. He never did anything to enrich himself.
I returned to Ethiopia for the first time two decades after I left on a magazine assignment to interview the new prime minister, Meles. We sat in his very modest prime minister’s office, a far cry from the gilded palace of his two predecessors, and we caught up. He talked about the tough decisions he had to make every day in a country that was ethnically divided, impoverished by a long civil war, and with the treasury looted by the former dictator.
He shared with me something that I’ll never forget. He said during the long years of the guerrilla war, his forces could only move freely at night, but they had to cross fields sewed with Cuban and Russian mines. They would be forced to ask for a volunteer from among them, from among their own, to walk through the minefield to try and find a safe crossing. And so he said to me, in this office I try to make sure that every decision I make is worthy of those comrades who gave their lives crossing those minefields so we could get to safety.
On the walls of Harvard Memorial Church are inscribed the names of students and faculty who gave their lives in various conflicts. It will take many, many more walls to honor Harvard alumni and faculty who’ve served this nation in every discipline, not just the military, and who have done so in brave, exemplary, and transformative ways.
In the past few weeks, in the face of immense pressure, Harvard, under President Garber’s steady leadership, has been very visible for taking decisions worthy of your university’s heritage, decisions that reveal and will shape this university’s character.
Graduates, the decisions you make in the future, when under pressure, will say something about your character, while they will also shape and transform you in unexpected ways. Make your decisions worthy of those who supported, nurtured, and sacrificed for you. Your parents, your partners, your family, your ancestors. Make the decisions worthy of this great university and the hardship it must endure going forward as it works to preserve the value of what you accomplished here.
The Value of Time
The second piece of advice I want to convey has to do with time. I trained in my specialty of infectious diseases here at the old Boston City Hospital, now the Boston Medical Center. I was here from 1983 to 85, just as AIDS, a disease of unknown cause, was appearing in large American cities, in our hospital wards, very much so in Boston City Hospital, elsewhere. And yet, only at the end of two years of training was the cause of AIDS discovered, a virus we now call HIV.
Just as I was moving to a small town in Tennessee, population 50,000, moving to a young medical school, since AIDS was considered to be largely an urban condition, an urban disease, I was shocked in that small town to soon be seeing many more patients with HIV than anyone predicted for a population that size.
The explanation for this, for these high numbers, turned out to be true of many other small towns in America. My patients were mostly gay men in their 30s and 40s, around my age at the time, and they were hometown boys who had left the town often after high school, just as so many had left in pursuit of jobs, education. But they were also leaving because they were gay and didn’t want to live that lifestyle under the close scrutiny of their relatives and friends in the town.
They settled in the big cities, found themselves, but tragically, years and decades into their stay, the virus found them, and they were now returning to their hometowns, to their families, typically because their partners had died and now they were getting ill.
Given the prevailing sentiments against gay people in small towns in the rural South, I found myself pleasantly surprised to find my patients were so well received by their families. They were cared for lovingly to the end. You see, love trumps all bigotry. Love trumps ideology.
When it’s your child, when it’s your family member who’s affected, all that stuff just flies out the window.
Now, effective treatment for HIV was still some years away, and so for me, personally as a physician, it was heartbreaking to get to know these young men, primarily so well, and watch them gradually decline and die. These brave men taught me so much about quiet courage and about manhood, not the caricature of manliness, the posturing that has become so fashionable lately. They taught me, most importantly, about the value of time.
You see, in their last days, they often wrestled with one question, what has been the meaning of my life? And thankfully, most of them, when they asked that question, what has been the meaning of my compressed life, most of them found the answer, and the answers were similar. They found that meaning at the end of their life, at the end of a shortened life, did not reside in fame, power, reputation, acquisitions, good looks. Instead, they found that meaning in their lives ultimately resided in the successful relationships that they had forged in a lifetime, particularly with parents, particularly with your family.
Now, in my own country, when my first book describing this small-town AIDS paradigm of migration came out, a reader, a mother whose son had just succumbed to AIDS, wrote to me, and she shared with me a letter that her son had written before he died and arranged for his mother to get a month after he died, when he hoped that her acute grief would have subsided. She gave me permission to use it, and I have used it unapologetically in other forms, but perhaps none as important as today, because his message bears repeating.
It’s also fitting that this advice that you’re about to hear about time should come from someone beyond time. It should come not from me, but from those we all serve, and from someone who died when he was closer to your age than my age now.
Letter from Son to Mother
Dear Mom,
This last part of my life could have been very unpleasant, but it wasn’t. In fact, in many ways, this has been the best part of my life. I’ve got to know my family again, a chance that very few people have or take advantage of. I enjoyed a life full of adventure and travel, and I loved every moment of it, but I probably never would have slowed down enough to really appreciate all of you if it hadn’t been for my illness. That’s the silver lining in this very dark cloud.
I’ve had so full and satisfying a life that it seems almost tacky for me to express any regrets. Nevertheless, there are some things I wish I could have done. Number one, I’d love to have been mayor of Key West. And then he goes on with a laundry list of things I’m not going to read to you. I’ll skip that, and he says, But when you get right down to it, Mother, I would have to live several hundred years to fulfill all the dreams I’ve had. I’ve done pretty well with the time allotted to me, and so I have no regrets.
I feel sorry for people who die at whatever age, who haven’t had the chance in life to fulfill some of their dreams. That’s the real tragedy. Mom, if anyone ever asks you if I went to heaven, tell them this, I just came from there. No place could conceivably be as wonderful as where I’ve spent these last 30 years. I’ll miss it. I’ll miss you, Mother. I’m so glad we made good use of this time to get to know each other again.
Final Words of Wisdom
Graduates, you received and participated in an extraordinary education here at Harvard. As alumni, be its strength, be its support. Cherish this special day. And above all, make good use of your time. I wish you the very best. Thank you.
