Conan O’Brien’s advice to Harvard grads is to forget Harvard as soon as they can
Conan O'Brien delivered a humorous yet reflective commencement speech at Harvard University, urging graduates to not let their prestigious education define them. He addressed the current political climate, criticizing the Trump administration's stance on empathy and international students. O'Brien's remarks came amid ongoing legal and financial pressures facing the university from the administration.
- ▪O'Brien joked about Harvard producing more Nobel laureates or white-collar criminals than any other institution.
- ▪He criticized the Trump administration's view that empathy is a weakness and defended international students.
- ▪The speech took place during a time of legal challenges for Harvard, including a lawsuit over antisemitism on campus.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 14 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Conan O’Brien Tells Harvard Grads to Let Harvard Become “the Least Important Thing” About Them — Consequence (of Sound)
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| Original publisher | Fortune |
| Canonical URL | https://fortune.com/2026/05/29/conan-obrien-harvard-forget-harvard-commencement-advice/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 29 May 2026 12:10:37 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-29T12:25:00.645Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-29T12:25:00.645Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | zeUpTLhJuX8C · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Comedian and television host Conan O’Brien entertained Harvard University graduates at their commencement Thursday, mixing offbeat humor and political jokes with more reflective commentary about empathy and humility at a time when the Ivy League school is in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.Recommended Video O’Brien, who graduated from Harvard in 1985 and led The Harvard Lampoon humor magazine, quipped that the university had produced “more Nobel laureates or white-collar criminals” than any other in the country.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.
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