DePauw University President Brian Casey announced via email at 10 a.m. on Monday that Kal Penn would be the commencement speaker for this year’s graduating class.
Penn is well known both for his acting career and his foray into politics. He has starred in well-known television shows such as House, 24 and How I Met Your Mother.
Then, in 2009, he joined the Obama administration as an a associate director in the White House Office of Public Engagement, working on issues such as financial aid for college students and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” military policy.
According to Betsy Demmings, the executive assistant to the president, both she and Casey have known that Penn would be this year’s speaker since the fall semester.
“We’ve held it really close,” she said, recognizing the fact that often speakers of this caliber will back out well before the time to speak arrives.
Talks concerning potential speaking candidates began early in the fall. The group consisted of Casey, Demmings, DePauw Student Government senior senators Logan Cash, Jazmin Harper-Davis, Clark Edwards, Peter Stuart and Aashray Patel, as well as student body president senior Walker Chance and vice president senior Olivia Flores.
The group began their discussions with a general brainstorming session of potential speakers.
“It’s funny because I’ve done this for 15 years, and I always hear the same names: Oprah, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Bill Cosby, Ellen DeGeneres. All these names always go out, and understandably, because everybody wants the ‘wow’ factor,” Demmings said.
However, Demmings said that Casey often tries to steer student committees away from the household-name speakers. She referenced President Obama’s commencement address at the University of Notre Dame in 2009 as one example of why it’s often better to opt for speakers who don’t generate quite as much national attention.
“What happens is when you get a situation like that, it didn’t become ‘the Class of 2014 Commencement’ it became ‘Barack Obama Day,'” Demmings explained.
At the end of what Demmings believes was only about three meeting sessions, Kal Penn was both Casey’s and the senior committee’s first choice for the commencement address speaker. According to an email from Chance, Yoyo Ma was also a suggested speaker, but was unavail able.
Since all the student committee members had been kept in the dark about Penn’s initial acceptance back in the fall, they were alerted to whether or not their first choice, Penn, would be speaking along with the rest of the student body in Casey’s Monday morning email.
“I was in a meeting […] and I said ‘oh, hold on, I just got an email from President Casey,'” Flores said. “When I saw it said Kal Penn, I literally put my laptop on the ground and jumped up and down screaming. It was a really happy moment for me.”
It seems that the majority of the senior class agrees.
“Trust me, when [the students] are not excited, we know about that,” Demmings said. “We get all kinds of emails saying, ‘this is lame,’ and we haven’t gotten any of that-not even from faculty.”
Flores said that while most feedback she has heard has been positive, there has also been some push back.
“The only criticism I’ve heard is in relation to the character he played in [“Harold and Kumar”] and that he played kind of a pothead,” Demmings said.
Flores added that she personally only knew of Penn from his other roles and his political work, but recognized that other students may be drawing their opinion of him from “Harold and Kumar.”
“I guess the pushback is that we’re coming from this reputation as a party school and this could be perpetuating that image,” Flores said
However, Patel and Chance, along with what they believe to be most of their peers, are happy about the choice.
“If you’ve seen him speak, a) he’s hilarious, and b) I think he’s done a lot of good work,” Patel said.
Chance cited his speech at the University of California, Los Angeles.
His public speaking skills, however, are not the only reason Patel, for one, is looking forward to Penn’s address.
“His story is just so cool: He was born in New Jersey to immigrant parents, as an Indian American, and came to UCLA to do acting and was offered these stereotypical race roles, and managed to break out of them and is doing public service now,” Patel said. “It’s really inspirational.”
Chance also has his personal reasons for looking forward to Penn’s address.
“As someone who has changed his future career plans in the past year […] I am excited and energized to hear from Kal Penn,” he said.
Patel also believes that Penn is a good representation of who this year’s seniors are.
“Most speeches end up being the same, but what I’m hoping for is for him to really relate to the younger people,” Patel said. “Last year’s speaker, [Elisa Villanueva Beard,] had achieved a lot, but this year has a different vibe, just as each class has a different vibe.”