The Elements of Style

Student orators take to the lectern in English, Latin, and high spirits

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

Lisa Marie Mignone's voice rings out and her arm sweeps the air for emphasis. She is dressed, a bit incongruously, in shorts and a T-shirt, certainly not the costume favored by Roman senators declaiming in the Forum, but on the other hand, none of those orators was female, so who's to say what a female Roman senator might have worn given the chance?

Mignone, in actuality, is almost as much of a trailblazer as she would have been if she had broken the gender barrier in the age of Augustus. She is only the second woman in Harvard Commencement history to deliver the Latin oration, at least as far as Richard Marius can remember. Marius, senior lecturer on English, has been coaching Commencement orators for the past 20 years.

"Give it more emphasis," he says. "That's a Ciceronian periodic sentence, so really just slam it out."

According to Marius, student orations have been part of Commencement since at least 1749, the date of the earliest student speech preserved in the Archives, but the tradition probably started long before that. In those pre-soundbite days before attention spans were downsized, every graduating senior got to speak, and the speeches stretched over three days.

Since around the time of World War II, however, the number has been trimmed to a representative three: the Latin oration, the undergraduate English oration, and the graduate English oration. Some noted Harvard alumni have delivered Commencement orations, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Roosevelt, W.E.B. Du Bois, Lawrence Tribe, and William Weld.

"It's the only part of the morning exercises where the graduates get to perform," says Marius. "It's the only part where the parents can hear someone tell them what the Harvard experience is like."

Marius not only coaches the orators, he also chairs the committee that selects the final three, a process rarely characterized by unanimity.

"We have long and thunderous debates over content versus delivery. I always say, give me content and I will provide delivery."

Watching Marius work with the three orators, it is obvious that his task is different for each one. Mignone, a classics concentrator who has consciously modeled her speech on the stately rhetoric of the great Roman orator Cicero, needs help expanding her voice and gestures to match the grandeur of her writing.

Marius stops her as she comes to the part of her oration in which she criticizes the randomization of undergraduate House assignments.

"You ought to really call out those house names. Pause a beat before each one and really belt them out!" exclaims Marius.

With undergraduate English orator David Brunton, on the other hand, Marius faces a different challenge. Brunton's speech is a straightforward personal narrative about growing up in a nearly all-white town in Washington state and then forming a close friendship with a black student in his freshman year. The friendship led him to join the Kuumba Singers and to become a regular at the black table in the dining hall. It was only when Brunton played the part of a racist cop in a production of his friend's play that he discovered something shocking within himself -- that under the right circumstances, he, too, had the capacity to hate.

"OK, that's a wonderful speech," Marius tells him after hearing Brunton read through it the first time. "But you need to pick up the tone a little without losing the sincerity. The tone is flat. It varies only by about three notes. But I don't want you to orate or be artificial because that would just kill it."

Law School student William Griffin, the graduate English orator, also speaks from the heart about personal experiences, but his talk is very different from Brunton's. While Brunton describes an odyssey of self-discovery, moving ever further from the sheltered environment in which he began, Griffin speaks of home truths and the need to remember them in a new and disorienting locale.

"Don't forget who you are, because it's who you are that got you where you are," Griffin's grandfather told him before he left for Harvard. His speech elaborates on the need to preserve one's identity and individuality under the imprimatur of Harvard's powerful brand name.

With Griffin, who has already memorized his speech, in addition to punching it up with plenty of gestures and vocal inflections, Marius's task is largely fine-tuning.

"You want to come down on the word 'Texas,' The word gets a little lost there," Marius says, referring to a sentence in which Griffin tells where he's from. "You could get a laugh with that line. There's something funny about Texas the way there used to be something funny about Brooklyn."

Toward the end of the speech, he advises Griffin to substitute the phrase "let us hope" for "hopefully."

"It's like splitting infinitives. Some people just can't tolerate that word. I think you'd better do it for all those Harvard sticklers who are going to be out in the audience."

Just as the students' speaking styles are different, so are their reasons for aspiring to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

In contrast to the majority of Latin orators, whose approach is to couch a standup routine in the language of Marcus Aurelius, Mignone hopes to strike a blow for feminism. After skewering the unpopular practice of randomization, she goes on to celebrate the achievements of Radcliffe women, noting that 1998 marks the 25th anniversary of women in the Harvard Yard dorms. She also mentions Harvard's first woman student body president and applauds the women's basketball team for exterminating the "Giants of Stanford."

"Ever since I learned there was a Latin oration, I wanted to give it," she says. "Most of all, it's something I'm doing for my family. My grandmother was a Latin teacher and she helped me through a lot of my high school Latin assignments, and my father, who was born in Italy, always gave us a strong sense of our background. He died two years ago."

The seed of Brunton's ambition was also planted in his freshman year, but its growth has been quite different. As a "star-struck" freshman, Brunton stepped up to the mike after the convocation ceremony and intoned a few words of off-the-cuff wisdom to a deserted Tercentenary Theatre.

"I thought to myself, hey, this would be pretty cool. I just hadn't envisioned it on quite the grand scale of Commencement."

The road to the Commencement podium hasn't been a smooth one, however. Brunton was forced to withdraw at the end of sophomore year after failing two courses. A buddy in the Kuumba Singers upbraided him: "God did not bring you to Harvard so you could fall on your face," he said.

Brunton took the advice to heart. Returning after a year, he went on to graduate with honors as well as being chosen as a Commencement orator.

Griffin says that he has "always been into speech-giving" and was active in undergraduate debating at Dartmouth. He was inspired to be a Commencement orator when he looked at a list of the prestigious names who have ascended the podium in the past.

"I was inspired by others who gave Commencement orations, and I wanted to join that list, to imitate them not just as a speaker, but in life."

By the time the three speakers make their way to the platform and look out over the sea of expectant faces, they will have been well-prepared for their moment of glory. Words, cadences, pauses, laugh-lines, gestures, all will be committed to memory. No doubt they'll be nervous, but they won't be alone.

"I always sweat BBs coming up to it," says Marius. "I keep thinking, this will be the year that somebody stumbles and has to be prompted, but if that happens, I'm there to help."