Harvard Picks Dropout Mark Zuckerberg As 2017 Graduation Speaker
Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t a model student at Harvard – he ditched school as a sophomore to work on Facebook and before that got dragged before a university disciplinary board for making a Web site where undergrads could rate each others’s looks.
But nothing succeeds like success, and the social network founder will return to the Yard this May to deliver this year’s commencement address.
“Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership has profoundly altered the nature of social engagement worldwide. Few inventions in modern times can rival Facebook in its far-reaching impact on how people around the globe interact with one another,” University President Drew Faust said, explaining the selection in comments to The Harvard Gazette.
The school in Cambridge tends to be a draw for marquee speakers – last May it was Steven Spielberg who spoke to graduates. And Zuckerberg isn’t the first dropout to address the assembly – that honor belongs to another tech billionaire, Bill Gates.
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO