America is Great Because it Allows Immigrants to Blossom Says Abraham Verghese in Harvard Speech
Abraham Verghese says, at Harvard Commencement speech, that graduates may want to hear from an immigrant like him
May 30. 2025
Harvard deserves support and praise for “affirming and courageously defending the essential values of this university, and indeed of this nation,” Abraham Verghese said yesterday in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He was speaking at the 374th Commencement, which marked the graduation of 9,434 students from all of Harvard's schools, including the College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Business, Law, Medical and other professional schools. There were around 30,000 people in attendance, including parents, relatives, and friends of the graduating students.
Verghese, 70-years-old, is a professor of Medicine at Stanford University. He is the author of best-selling fiction and non-fiction books and his work has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, and The New York Times, among others publications.
In his speech, Verghese also “praised Harvard President Alan Garber for resisting Trump administration demands…even as dramatic funding cuts imperil the University’s ability to carry out its research mission,” noted the Harvard Gazette.
“A cascade of draconian government measures has already led to so much uncertainty, so much pain, and suffering in this country and across the globe—and more has been threatened,” Verghese added.
In April, Donald Trump’s administration demanded that Harvard cease all diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, modify hiring and agree to audits to ensure viewpoints include conservative ideology, provide disciplinary and other records on foreign students, and address antisemitism on campus.
U.S. government agencies have threatened that, if Harvard fails to make the changes by August, it will be unable to enroll foreign students. its tax-exempt status will be revoked, and it will lose $2.2 billion in multi-year federal grants and $1 billion in healthcare research funding.
“I felt you deserved to hear from a star, a legend, a Nobel prize winner, or perhaps, God knows, from the Pope himself,” Verghese stated. “Maybe next year…” Verghese was thus poking “fun at students who sought a more recognizable name after he was announced as the Commencement speaker,” the Harvard Crimson reported.
In February, Garber announced in a statement that Verghese was selected because “He has pursued excellence across disciplines with an intensity surpassed only by his humanity, which shines brilliantly through his works of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as his work as a clinician and teacher…I cannot imagine a better individual to inspire the members of our Class of 2025 as they contemplate their futures.”
But some graduating students said they were hoping for a more high-profile speaker, one with “more name recognition.” A post on Sidechat, which criticized the selection of Verghese and called him “Alan Garbers old buddy from Stanford,” gained more than 450 upvotes, the Harvard Crimson reported. Earlier, while teaching at the Stanford School of Medicine, Garber worked alongside Verghese for four years.
Sahil Kuchlous, a graduating student told the Crimson that he and his roommates had wanted a Commencement speaker from a non-academic field to provide a “different perspective” than the professors they regularly interact with. He said a pop culture figure “would be great…”
“When legal immigrants and others who are lawfully in this country worry about being wrongly detained and even deported, perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from an immigrant like me,” Verghese told the Harvard graduates.
He added that, “We were recruited here because American medical schools simply don’t graduate sufficient numbers of physicians to fill the country’s need…More than a quarter of the physicians in the country are foreign medical graduates, many of them ultimately settling in places that others might not find as desirable.
“A part of what makes America great, if I may use the phrase, is that it allows an immigrant like me to blossom here, just as generations of other immigrants and their children have flourished and contributed in every walk of life, working to keep America great.”
In 2007, Verghese joined Stanford University School of Medicine as a tenured professor. Earlier, he was a professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in El Paso, Texas, where he lived for the next 11 years.
From 1980 to 1983, he worked as an internal medicine resident in Johnson City, Tennessee. He then finished a two-year fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine. Like many other foreign medical graduates in the U.S., he found that only the less popular hospitals and communities would hire him.
Verghese returned to Johnson City as an assistant professor of medicine. There, contrary to national projections of the AIDS epidemic, he had to care for a large number of patients with HIV, surprising for a small rural town with a population of about 70,000.
His work in Tennessee taught him the difference between healing and curing, he notes on his website. “One can be healed even when there is no cure, by which I mean a coming to terms with the illness, finding some level of peace and acceptance in such a terrible setting; this is something a physician can, if they are lucky, help facilitate.”
Verghese began his medical training in Ethiopia. In 1974, after the emperor Haile Selassie was deposed, he joined his parents in the United States, working as an orderly, or nursing assistant, in a series of hospitals and nursing homes. He then earned his medical degree from Madras Medical College, India.
The second of three sons, Verghese was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His parents migrated from Kerala, India, to teach physics in schools. He spent his summer vacations in Kerala, visiting his grandparents. He grew up reading books, including The Secret Seven series by the British author Enid Blyton, which was also popular among students in English language schools in India. “Books were a gateway to a world more exciting than the one I lived in,” he told The New York Times.
In 1991, Verghese took time off from medicine to earn an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. While in El Paso, he finished his first book My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story, 1994. In the memoir, he described his medical experience, including as an orderly and dealing with AIDS patients. A film based on the book, My Own Country, was directed by Mira Nair for Showtime. Verghese’s second book, also a memoir, The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss, 1997, explored his friend and frequent tennis partner’s losing struggle with addiction.
In 2009, Verghese published Cutting for Stone, a novel that has sold more than two million copies. In 2023, he published The Covenant of Water, a story set in Kerala and another bestseller. “It is one of the best books I’ve read in my entire life. It’s epic. It’s transformative…It was unputdownable!,” wrote the actor and TV host Oprah Winfrey in OprahDaily.com. She also selected the book for her book club, 2023.
Though he is from a family of Syrian Christians, Verghese is a non-believer. Yet, during one of his trips to Kerala, he visited the Parumala Church in his father’s hometown of Mannar, Kerala. Saint Gregorios, the first saint of the Syrian Christian church who died in 1902, was buried there.
Christians and Hindus pray at the church seeking favors or visit to give thanks for favors received. “The rough spot I had gone through a year ago made me take a vow for all our sakes, but particularly for my youngest son, that I would visit the saint’s tomb,” Verghese wrote in 2012 in The New York Times. His third son is from his second marriage.
In his address to Harvard graduates, Verghese said that he is “someone who had at least one of his medical school classmates tortured and disappeared after being tortured (in Ethiopia under a military dictator)…someone who eventually completed his medical training in India just when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, after facing Supreme Court judgements that she didn’t care for, declared a national emergency and jailed thousands of students and all her opponents. When in time she called for an election, citizens…expressed their outrage by voting. She was ousted.”
Verghese said that he was inspired to become a doctor because he read W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. He urged the graduates to read fiction, paraphrasing Albert Camus, the French novelist and Nobel Prize winner: “fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives,”
“I know we will find our way back to displaying those attributes of America I admired from afar, (decency, generosity, and compassion, to its own citizens and to other nations). the America I have known and loved from over four decades of being here.”