After graduating from Harvard, one student said, “Politicalized speech made people like me feel unwanted.”
The moment has come for universities and colleges to reveal their graduation speakers.
A recent Harvard graduate who made headlines for interrupting Attorney General Merrick Garland’s address has already stated her intention to repeat the stunt.
Emma Heussner, a native of Washington, DC who earned a master’s degree in psychology from Harvard. Last year, she didn’t attend her own graduation since the speaker was so boring.
She did nothing more than justify her decision with rationale. She said, “Conservatives are called the’silent majority,’ and look where that’s gotten us.” According to recent reports, “students and their parents are now fighting for regular curriculum in K-12 that doesn’t include sexual topics.”
What she really intended to say was something along the lines of, “As long as conservatives stay quiet, we’ll let the left’s agenda go as far as they want.”
Additionally, “universities should be places where students learn how to think, and where our beliefs are challenged,” as Heussner put it. Teachers should foster an environment where students feel comfortable sharing their opinions and listening to those of their classmates, even if they disagree.
Heussner added, “Standing up for myself and my beliefs by leaving Merrick Garland’s speech was a way for me to show respect for the time, money, and effort I put into getting my degree and for the people who helped me through school.”
In her defense, she said, “my friends and family who were cheering me on.”
She was asked about the reaction to her actions last year in an interview with Fox News Digital that aired over the weekend, and she said things like, “I got a lot of support from strangers on the internet.” Her words: “I’ve been so moved by the outpouring of support from people I’ve never met.”
After being prompted for an explanation, she said, “I think that’s partly because there aren’t many signs of intelligent life (i.e., conservatives at Ivy League schools) who make a statement by speaking out against the propaganda that is otherwise pushed on us as students.”
To be fair, Heussner did concede that his critics made some valid arguments. My loved ones took my decision to avoid Garland’s speech as a sign of arrogance and an inability to value his efforts.
She stated, “I think it was more important to spend my graduation with my family than to waste time sitting through a political speech that made students like myself feel unwelcome and complacent.”
According to her, Garland’s remarks and views from the prior year “didn’t represent me or what my academic career taught me to think independently [about].”
However, she did say that his statements “were ostracizing.”
After only 30 minutes of Merrick Garland’s address on himself at the Harvard commencement last year, she departed to tweet about it. This news was met with dismay by many.
She says the knowledge she did get was “pretty rich.”
In 2020, Heussner earned a master’s degree in psychology from Harvard University.
She has responded to inquiries about the lack of a graduation ceremony with statements like “But because of the pandemic, they weren’t able to give us a formal graduation.”
She continued by saying that the May 2022 Memorial Day weekend will now host the reunion for the classes of 2020 and 2021.
She insisted her parents attend her high school graduation since she was terrified of the event.
Tickets ran out at Harvard too quickly, she claimed, so her parents couldn’t be there.
In her stead, she explained that “they had to watch it” since the show was “broadcast” from somewhere else.
Heussner claims, “I sat there with my classmates for a while” in the blazing sunlight.
She goes on to state that the instructors and staff spoke only in Latin during the “graduation formalities,” which included the singing of songs and the delivery of speeches.
In her own words, “By the time Merrick Garland finally started talking, it was very much — I think he was trying to be inspiring and motivating, like, ‘You guys are responsible for making the world a better place,'” she said.
“But the way it was written,” she said, “it was almost like saying, ‘This country stinks, and you can fix it.'”
What she told Fox News Digital is as follows: For want of a better expression, it “didn’t make sense to me.”
All during her address, she reminded herself, “You’re the attorney general.” When she referred to “Garland,” she was referring to an image of him in her mind. The consequences of your actions as attorney general might be felt right away.
She went on to say, “So it was a very easy choice for me to leave and go see my parents instead.”
“They were there for me and helped me,” she explained, explaining why she did not follow Merrick Garland’s advise. When it came to taking orders, “I didn’t want to be told what to do by Merrick Garland, who talked a lot but didn’t really do what he was saying.”
For Garland, “it is a wonderful comfort to see you all in your robes,” he said to the Harvard class of 2016. You two never seem to be in a nice mood. Another possible interpretation is “I feel comfortable here.” (This led to a few giggles.)
A portion of his speech reads as follows: “When I was sitting where you are today, I had a lot of worry about.” This was Garland’s opening statement. I had always thought that the right to vote would always be protected in the United States, but I may be wrong.
Asked about the current situation, he answered, “violence and threats of violence are happening at the same time that people are trying to take away the right to vote, which hurts the rule of law on which our democracy is built.”
Can a year have passed and she still not have seen anybody else departing when Heussner did?
“We had been sitting in the hot sun for a while,” she said, “so unless the speaker was amazing, I could see why people might want to leave [a speech like that].”
In 2018, Heussner earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Arizona.
She returned to Harvard for an additional two years to get a second master’s degree, this time in psychology.
Fox News Digital quotes her from 2023: “I’m still working in social media as a digital account manager at a PR firm in Virginia.”
Recently, Heussner responded to a tweet asking about the mental health of today’s youth by saying, “One of the reasons why young people have so much trouble with mental health these days is that society has fallen away from God.” When members of Generation Z feel rejected by society, they go to “wokism” for moral direction.
At the time of this writing, she had over 14,000 followers on Twitter.