Northeastern University - Commencement Speakers

Commencement Speakers

Over the years, several notable individuals have spoken at commencement:

  • Leverett A. Saltonstall- Governor of Massachusetts (1935)
  • Godfrey Lowell Cabot - American industrialist (1941)
  • Channing Pollock- American playwright (1942)
  • Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. - American statesman and noted historian (1943)
  • Igor Sikorsky - Ukrainian-American pioneer of aviation (1944)
  • Charles Sinclair Weeks - United States Secretary of Commerce (1948)
  • John F. Kennedy - U.S. Senator, future President of the United States (1956)
  • Edward M. Kennedy - U.S. Senator (1965,1977)
  • Coretta Scott King - Wife of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1971)
  • Edward J. King - Governor of Massachusetts (1980)
  • Jesse Jackson (1978)
  • Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. - Assistant to President John F. Kennedy (1981)
  • Tip O'Neill - Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (1982)
  • Michael S. Dukakis - Governor of Massachusetts, 1988 presidential Candidate (1984)
  • Bill Clinton - President of the United States (1993)
  • Mikhail S. Gorbachev - former President of the Soviet Union (1998)
  • Madeleine Albright - first woman United States Secretary of State (2000)
  • Bill Richardson - former U.S. Secretary of Energy, Governor of New Mexico (2001)
  • Christine Todd Whitman - Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (2003)
  • Jeffrey Immelt - CEO of General Electric, the second largest global company (2006)
  • Nicholas Negroponte - Founder of the One Laptop Per Child outreach program (2007)
  • Christopher Cox - Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman (2008)
  • Stephen Breyer - United States Supreme Court Justice (2008 - Law)
  • Kenneth Cole - Founder of Kenneth Cole Productions (2009)
  • Kenneth Chenault - CEO and chairman of American Express (2010)
  • Henri A. Termeer - Former CEO and chairman of Genzyme Corporation (2011)
  • Colin Powell - Former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (2012)

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Famous quotes containing the words commencement and/or speakers:

    After that came commencement day—that great day for which all other days were made. And it went. And that night I felt of myself all over, and to my astonishment, I found ‘twas the same old Rud. Not a single cubit added to my stature; not a hair’s breadth to my girth. If anything, on the contrary, I felt more lank and gaunt than common, much as if a load were off my stomach.
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    The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.’
    Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)