But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to transform our world; we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at twenty-one. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of real trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for prime minister.
I wish you all very good lives
So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
“As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.
About the Author
J. K. Rowling is the author of the bestselling Harry Potter series of seven books, published between 1997 and 2007, which have sold over 450 million copies worldwide, are distributed in more than 200 territories, are translated into 78 languages, and have been turned into eight blockbuster films. Her first novel for adult readers, The Casual Vacancy, was published in September 2012 and her first two crime novels, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, were published in 2013 and 2014 respectively.
As well as receiving an OBE for services to children’s literature, J. K. Rowling supports a number of causes through her charitable trust, Volant. She is also the founder and president of the children’s charity Lumos, which works to end the institutionalization of children globally and ensure all children grow up in a safe and caring environment.
I founded Lumos to help end the incredibly damaging practice of institutionalization. As many as eight million children are currently being raised in institutions worldwide.
The overwhelming majority are not orphans. A wealth of expert opinion agrees that institutionalization is extremely damaging to children’s mental and physical health and has a dire effect on their life outcomes.
It is my dream that within our lifetime the very idea of institutionalizing children will seem to belong to a cruel fictional world.