“It was something arranged by an agent in New York and we went to a kind of cocktail party,” Anderson recalls by phone. “We were with Harvey Keitel, too. So it was me and Harvey and Michael Cera — a totally unexpected combination. But I loved him. For years I’ve kind of felt like: Why haven’t we already done something together?”
Nicholas Burns, a career diplomat who served as the U.S. ambassador to China from 2021 to 2025 and now teachers at the university, said “Harvard can’t be Harvard without its international students.”“There’s a lot of collective pride at the university about who we are and the decisions we’ve made, and obviously what we want to do is make sure that international students can return to Harvard, can stay at Harvard this summer and return in September,” Burns said, adding that it is important for American students to study alongside their international peers.
Garber didn’t directly touch on the Trump administration threats Thursday. But he did get a rousing applause when he referenced the university’s global reach, noting that it is “just as it should be.”Other speakers were more direct. Speaking in Latin, salutatorian Aidan Robert Scully delivered a speech laced with references to Trump policies.Yurong “Luanna” Jiang addresses classmates during commencement ceremonies at Harvard University, Thursday, May 29, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Yurong “Luanna” Jiang addresses classmates during commencement ceremonies at Harvard University, Thursday, May 29, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)“I say this: ... Neither powers nor princes can change the truth and deny that diversity is our strength,” Scully said.
It was a sentiment echoed by Yurong “Luanna” Jiang, a Chinese graduate who studied international development. She described growing up believing that the “world was becoming a small village” and finding a global community at Harvard. But she worries that world view is increasingly under threat.
“We’re starting to believe those who think differently, vote differently or pray differently, whether they are across the ocean or sitting right next to us, are not just wrong — we mistakenly see them as evil,” she said. “But it doesn’t have to be this way.”Murkowski was one of several Republicans who expressed concerns about Kennedy’s approach to the job throughout the hearings.
Like several Republicans, Rep. Chuck Fleischmann of Tennessee praised Kennedy for his work promoting healthy foods. But he raised concerns about whether the secretary has provided adequate evidence thatare bad for diets. Removing those food dyes would hurt the “many snack manufacturers” in his district, including the makers of M&M’s candy, he said.
Rep. Mike Simpson, a dentist from Idaho, said Kennedy’s plan tofor drinking water alarms him. The department’s press release on Tuesday, which announced the Food and Drug Administration plans to remove fluoride supplements for children from the market, wrongly claimed that fluoride “kills bacteria from the teeth,” Simpson noted. He explained to Kennedy that fluoride doesn’t kill bacteria in the mouth but instead makes tooth enamel more resistant to decay.