Date: 2008-06-05 19:02 Subject: JKR's speech at Harvard! (I was there...) Security: Public Tags: fandom

So, one of the great fun things about living in the Boston area is that cool stuff happens like J. K Rowling delivering the commencement address at Harvard. A friend who is a graduate student there arranged for us to have tickets to the "afternoon exercises" when JKR would speak (the "morning exercises" being the actual graduation ceremony that most parents and visitors are focused on).

Harvard would already be a great place to run a Hogwarts LARP (Sanders Theater would be perfect!) but never moreso than on a day when everyone is running around in their robes. Boston.com apparently ran an article today about 9 reasons why Harvard is like Hogwarts.

Harvard President Drew Faust remarked, in her "state of the university address," which preceded Rowling's speech, that "We have elms, but no Whomping Willow.... still, it falls to me as Muggle In Chief, before I turn the podium over to our esteemed guest, to mention that reading good books may be the closest we ever come to experiencing true magic."

She then went on a 45 minute long justification of the size of Harvard's endowment ($35 billion), which was preaching to the converted, but with Congress eyeing all that money as if it should be spent as wildly as the budget surplus that Bill Clinton left the US government with was when Bush took office... well, I can hardly blame her.

But then came Jo.

She first addressed the Harvard officers and alumni/ae who had invited her there to say "thank you," because in the many weeks of nausea and trepidation that led up to today's honor of delivering the address she had "lost a lot of weight." Much laughter. "A win-win situation." She said she was getting through by "squinting at all the red banners and convincing myself that I am at the world's largest Gryffindor reunion."
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