As the class of 2024 sat in the ‘Shoe in May, there were dozens of commencement speakers they could have heard from, each one having been considered by the university’s Commencement Speaker Advisory Committee that year.

Michelle Obama, the 44th first lady of the United States and the first Black woman to serve in the role, was the committee’s first choice.

Lizzo, formally known as Melissa Viviane Jefferson and a singer-songwriter with almost 11 million monthly Spotify listeners, was the committee’s second preference.

LeBron James, the NBA all-time leading scorer and an open advocate for higher education who is also an Ohio native, was ranked No. 3 by the committee.

Other individuals on the committee’s list included Olympian Michael Phelps, comedian and talk-show host Trevor Noah and actor-producer Morgan Freeman.

Instead, university President Ted Carter Jr. selected Chris Pan — the social entrepreneur who encouraged graduates to consider investing in Bitcoin, performed two songs and a magic trick and openly admitted to writing drafts of his speech while high on the psychedelic drug ayahuasca. Pan did not appear at all on the committee’s list of recommended speakers for the 2023-24 year.

A Lantern data analysis of Ohio State commencement speakers from the past half-century reveals the average speaker is a white, male, non-Ohio State alum with a career in education.

Pan, on the other hand, is a non-white, male alum with a career in entrepreneurship. Clearly, he breaks the mold in more ways than one.

On that spring day, even before the commencement ceremony had come to a close, online controversy sparked. Then-graduates and their families, members of the Ohio State community, journalists and others took to social media to express dissatisfaction — and for some, blatant criticism — toward Pan’s speech.

“In hindsight, I probably would have gone with a more conventional approach,” Pan said. “But then again, if I would have done that, it probably would have been forgotten. So, that’s something that I guess is what it is. I’m still figuring it out, I’m still processing it myself.”

Among these layers of frustration, one question seemed most prevalent:

How was Pan chosen as the commencement speaker?

According to records obtained from the university, Pan received one public nomination in 2016 via Ohio State’s online nomination portal. Separate records of the advisory committee’s recommendation lists show Pan was under committee consideration for the 2019 summer and autumn commencement ceremonies.

The following year, Pan was considered a “brought forward” nominee — meaning he wasn’t on the original list of nominated candidates for that year but was added based on a previous year’s committee recommendation — for the 2020 summer and autumn ceremonies.

After the 2020-21 academic year, Pan’s name does not appear on any of the committee’s speaker recommendation forms.

And yet, Pan was selected as the 2024 spring commencement speaker, because even though his name did not appear on the committee’s list, Carter made the final call — a fact that former student committee member Abigail Berk said shows the body’s lack of overall authority.

Though it’s unclear whether Carter invited each committee-recommended speaker and they all declined or if Pan was truly his first choice, the university president — who has since presided over two additional commencement speakers in the form of Ohio State professor Angus Fletcher for the summer ceremony and Olympian Stephanie Hightower for the autumn ceremony — said he takes full accountability for the decision.

“I’ve owned this because it was my signature on the invitation to come speak,” Carter said in a Jan. 14 interview with The Lantern. “So, that’s first and foremost, and I don’t want to shy away from that. I made that decision final, ultimately, that he should be our commencement speaker. So, I say that because there are some people that thought his speech was interesting, there were some people that absolutely thought it was the worst ever — I’ve heard all of that, and I just want people to know that I’ve owned it.”

A long-held tradition at Ohio State, the commencement speech is intended to be delivered by someone “who can inspire graduates, their families, [university] faculty” and others, according to Ohio State’s Commencement Speaker Selection webpage.

David Meadvin, CEO of One Strategy Group — a corporate strategy firm that works with individuals on how to deliver effective commencement speeches — said despite college students hearing handfuls of speeches across their educational careers, commencement speeches stand apart from the rest.

“It’s a huge day,” Meadvin said. “It’s a day that really matters in people’s lives. It’s a day that you will remember for the rest of your life.”

The University Archives keeps both alphabetical and chronological lists of Ohio State’s commencement speakers, dating as far back as 1878. The Lantern’s analysis was done by reviewing the past 50 years of speakers, yielding a pool of 189 distinct speeches.

Of the past 50 years of Ohio State commencement speakers, nearly 83% have been male and just over 80% have been white.

Just under 30% of speakers have been from the educational field, and roughly 28% from the political field. Of the remaining 82 speakers, just over 14% have been entrepreneurs, just over 13% have been scientists, just over 7% have been journalists and just over 5% have been artists.

The Commencement Speaker Advisory Committee only considers individuals submitted via the Commencement Speaker Nomination form portal, which can be filled out at any time by anyone — including students, faculty, administrators or even committee members themselves — university spokesperson Chris Booker said in an email.

From this pool of nominees, Booker said the committee considers every single speaker submitted. He said each committee member submits their own individual ranking of the final contenders before the average scores across the entire committee are calculated. The committee then meets to discuss and rank the submissions as a group, he said.

Once the committee’s list of recommendations is finalized, university spokesperson Ben Johnson said in an email the list can also be considered by the committee when deciding speakers for the years to come.

In other words, once a person has been nominated, their name can remain in the candidate pool for multiple years, even without receiving any additional nominations.

After producing the finalized list, Booker said it is sent to the Office of the President — at this point, the committee is uninvolved in the process.

“While the committee is charged with developing a recommended slate of potential speakers, the Office of the President makes the final decision to match potential speakers with spring, summer or autumn commencement based on a variety of factors, including speaker availability,” Booker said.

When asked how much sway the committee has on the final speaker, Berk, the 2023 committee’s Undergraduate Student Government representative, said “none.”

“I might be a bit jaded, [but] I don’t know that the committee really has any weight unless the president doesn’t have any other ideas,” said Berk, also a 2023 Ohio State graduate in biomedical science.

For example, Berk said she personally speculates Patrick Gelsinger, then-CEO of technology company Intel, was selected as the 2022 spring commencement speaker by then-university President Kristina M. Johnson due to his $100 million investment in partnerships with educational institutions like Ohio State.

“I don’t know if that was ever suggested, but like, it was pretty clear, ‘Hey, you gave us a really big donation, now you get to speak at commencement,’” Berk said.

University spokesperson Ben Johnson denied this correlation.

“Patrick Gelsinger was an exciting choice because it had recently been announced that Intel would be building in central Ohio, but there was no quid pro quo related to a gift or anything of that nature,” Ben Johnson said.

Though it’s unclear whether Gelsinger was under committee consideration prior to 2019, his name does not appear on any committee recommendation records from 2019-22.

In this spirit, Berk said the president has no requirement to reach out to the nominees on the committee’s list.

“There was no back and forth communication of, ‘Hey, we’re thinking of doing this person, they were [or] were not on your list, here [are] our reasons why,’” Berk said. “We send out suggestions and that’s it.”

Though Berk said she thinks the committee is effective in theory, the way it currently functions feels “performative.”

“I was quite frustrated to find out that our suggestions really were purely suggestions because I don’t think I was really super aware of that before we started, and maybe even throughout deliberations,” Berk said.

Berk said these frustrations are only amplified by the amount of time and effort committee members put into drafting their recommendation list.

“We really sat there and deliberated and took it very, very seriously,” Berk said. “So, it was a little frustrating when it really is just a suggestion, and it kind of feels like we wasted some time going through all this when it’s not really taken super seriously by the president’s office.”

Though Berk had graduated by the time Pan spoke at the 2024 commencement ceremony, she said she was still surprised to learn about Pan’s speech.

“You hear other schools are getting these major celebrities to speak, and Ohio State’s a huge school, so I always kind of wondered why that wasn’t happening with us in the past couple years,” Berk said.

Meadvin said with thousands of commencements delivered every year, “there aren’t enough really big names to go around.” And when you’re not a “big name,” Meadvin said it can be hard to stand out.

“We hear about the handful of major celebrities who give commencement speeches every year — you know, there will be five or six commencement speeches that are really remarkable each year, and typically, they’re delivered by a major elected official or a major celebrity,” Meadvin said. “Sometimes, they’re known for being controversial, sometimes — occasionally — they’re known for being insightful; often, they’re just known for being delivered by someone interesting.”

For many, an upsetting component of Pan’s speech was his endorsement of Bitcoin, especially since Carter sits on the Board of Directors for Bitcoin miner TeraWulf, Inc. Though online critics speculated a connection between Carter’s cryptocurrency affiliation and Pan’s speaker selection, Pan repeatedly rejected any sort of correlation.

In fact, Pan said he didn’t even anticipate mentioning Bitcoin when he first received his speaker invitation letter from the president’s office March 8, 2024.

“The first time I ever publicly ever shared anything about Bitcoin — I looked on my Instagram — was on March 2,” Pan said. “So, I highly doubt that in the course of a week, somebody noticed an Instagram story — by the way, this is not a post, this was like an Instagram story — [and] they figured out that I would mention Bitcoin.”

Carter has maintained he “had no idea” about Pan’s Bitcoin affiliation and said he personally owns no Bitcoin. He also said most university presidents, such as former Ohio State President Kristina M. Johnson, serve on company boards, which doesn’t pose an issue unless it’s in conflict with the ongoings of the university.

As of Jan. 14, Carter said he has officially selected a speaker for this year’s spring commencement ceremony. When asked whether this timeline was typical — considering Pan’s selection wasn’t publicly announced until April 2024 — Carter said the timing of his presidential tenure officially beginning at the start of last year may have played a role.

“I do think it had something to do with my timing for showing up, that they wanted to make sure that I got in the seat, got comfortable,” Carter said. “We were talking about that within the first couple weeks of me being here, I had a lot of questions about the same process that you’re asking about.”

Regardless of this factor, Carter said it can be generally challenging to solidify commencement speakers.

“It’s really hard to land these speakers,” Carter said. “We don’t pay our speakers; most really top-flight universities do, so that can sometimes limit you. When you’re trying to get the right, best speakers, the further out you can do that planning, the better, and sometimes you can lock them in early.”

 

Meadvin said one of his biggest pieces of advice to commencement speakers is to “make it about the graduates,” not about the speakers themselves.

“That was really where [Pan] went wrong,” Meadvin said. “No one, I think, came away from that speech feeling like he said anything that was valuable to them — he just talked a lot about himself.”

In addition to a rough 10-minute time limit, Pan said the committee gave him a few guidelines when it came to drafting his speech, particularly when it came to the music.

Pan said though the committee “thought a more traditional experience would be better,” he insisted upon having music because of a past event he had been part of at the Mershon Auditorium in 2018 with incoming freshmen, which Pan said went well.

“I thought it would be really special,” Pan said. “Especially for many of the students who maybe didn’t have a high school graduation, I thought, ‘Hey, this could be really special, to have some music.’”

Pan said he, as opposed to the university, takes full responsibility for “wanting to do something different.”

“Part of my thinking at the time was to really have an impact, sometimes you have to do something a little different,” Pan said. “In hindsight, I don’t know if I would have done it the way I did, but in the moment, I thought, ‘Hey, it worked before, maybe it’ll work again.’ But I think it’s very different [for] incoming freshmen versus outgoing [at] graduation, so that was something I learned myself: Just because something worked in one setting or one situation doesn’t mean it’s going to necessarily work in a different situation.”

To this point, Meadvin said commencement speeches are “one of the few speeches left in society that are meant to be somewhat formal,” and attendees find importance in that tradition.

“I think that commencement speeches need to be respectful of the moment and the institution and within that box,” Meadvin said. “I think there’s room for creativity, but I think that a lot of people reacted the way they did to [Pan’s speech] because it felt not only off-key but sort of disrespectful.”

Beyond preliminary guidelines, Pan said the speech-writing process was largely hands-off. He said he had to submit the speech roughly a week before the ceremony so it could be entered into the closed-captioning system, but the content itself received no university input.

Nevertheless, Pan said he felt supported by the university, but acknowledged that the time between his invitation to speak and the ceremony itself was “pretty chaotic.”

“My point was, ‘Hey, let me share some new ideas,’ and of course, with new ideas, some people like it, some people don’t,” Pan said. “And maybe a commencement speech wasn’t the right place to necessarily be so contrarian, but I tried, and I hope folks don’t take any ill intent from this by any means because everything I said, I genuinely believe in.”

Meadvin said it’s extremely difficult for a commencement speaker to be remembered in a positive light if they’re not a “big name.” In this sense, he said Pan achieved his goal of being remembered — but not in the way he likely desired.

“I think if people don’t know who you are, the bar or the threshold to clear to be memorable is higher,” Meadvin said. “It can be done, but you’ve really got to come with something pretty extraordinary. Now, Chris [Pan] did become memorable; he wasn’t a name that probably most people at OSU knew coming in, and now they do know his name — not for the right reasons.”

Berk said she thinks it’s more important for graduates to remember feeling pride and excitement on their graduation day, as opposed to a particularly memorable speech.

“I do find it to be slightly selfish to want to be memorable, perhaps at the expense of the graduates’ feelings,” Berk said. “I’m sure that that’s not what he meant for it to be at all, but I do think that the point of commencement is supposed to be to celebrate the people graduating.”

Meadvin said though he can’t speak for Pan, he believes “his heart was in the right place.”

“I get it, the desire to stand out and to not do the expected thing — that’s the right approach and it comes from a good place,” Meadvin said. “He wanted to be memorable, he wanted to be inspiring. He wanted not to be boring or average. I just think that the execution took that in the wrong direction.”

Even so, Meadvin said he suspects a certain portion of the backlash to Pan’s speech is due to “the culture we’re in, where everyone is sort of very quick to criticize.”

“From what I’ve read about [Pan’s] speech, it was certainly unusual,” Meadvin said. “It’s not a speech I would advise, but it wasn’t the worst and it wasn’t the most politically controversial.”

Ultimately, Pan said he apologizes to those who were upset by his speech but also appreciates feedback from those who liked it.

“I just hope folks keep an open mind and practice some forgiveness if they were upset,” Pan said. “Also, just keep an open mind that maybe it wasn’t necessarily what they expected, but maybe there was something we can all [learn from]. I’ve certainly been reflecting, and I’ve certainly been processing and learning from it as well myself.”

Looking forward, Carter said he thinks the Ohio State community will be excited about the spring 2025 speaker.

“We’ve been a little bit more thoughtful about who we’ve asked to come and speak, and you’ve seen that in our last two commencements,” Carter said. “I think the speaker that we’re going to have this spring is going to be highly celebrated, people are going to be very excited about who we’re bringing here.”

The University Archives possesses scanned copies of most commencement speeches, which were reviewed for this analysis to determine the general subject matter of each speech. Assuming all speeches touch on “life issues” in some capacity, only speeches that focused entirely on “life issues” — and not one of the other categories — were labeled as such.

A speech that falls into the “life issues” category largely consists of either advice or a call to action from the speaker to the graduating class. The “NA” speech subject category refers to speeches that were not publicly available on the university’s webpage for analysis.

Note that former Ohio Sen. John H. Glenn and former university President E. Gordon Gee each delivered commencement speeches twice in the past 50 years. They were each counted twice in the analysis, meaning there were 187 distinct speakers, but 189 in total.