Former United States Secretary of State John Kerry will deliver the Graduation Address to the Harvard Kennedy School Class of 2017 at 2 p.m. on May 24 at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), HKS Dean Douglas Elmendorf announced today.
Kerry is Yale University’s Distinguished Fellow for Global Affairs, where he is leading the Kerry Initiative on public policy innovation from foreign policy to climate change, as well as serving as the inaugural Visiting Distinguished Statesman at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served as the nation’s 68th Secretary of State, assuming office in February 2013.
During his tenure at the State Department, Kerry was a respected global leader on a wide range of international issues, including nuclear proliferation, the battle against radical extremism, climate change, and humanitarian crises. Kerry negotiated a unity government in Afghanistan to help keep the country from splintering apart. He became the first Secretary of State to meet with Iran’s foreign minister since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and he was the State Department’s negotiator and architect of the landmark 2015 agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear program. He also helped negotiate the 2016 Paris Agreement, an international climate change accord designed to significantly reduce global carbon emissions.
The address will be live-streamed on the HKS website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/live. Journalists interested in covering the address should contact the HKS Communications Office at 617-495-1115.
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