Now that students at English universities are getting into an average debt of more than £45,000 each – I still recall, with horror, the news that one student had borrowed £189,700, or the equivalent of turning the heating on for a couple of weeks this winter – I wonder if they might start to expect more celebrity speakers at graduation ceremonies. You can see thousands of bands at Glastonbury for £280. It can’t cost that much to book the presenters of Loose Women, say, to do 30 minutes of life advice.
In the US, there is a long tradition of famous people delivering commencement speeches, from authors to politicians to tech bosses. My favourite is the director John Waters, who can always be relied on for the good stuff. “Parents, now it’s time to talk to you. God, these kids can be brats, can’t they? Entitled little bastards,” he told one crowd of students, in 2015; in 2020, he told virtual graduates to “travel beyond the valley of the humour-impaired and over the top of sexual anarchy to a coup d’etat of crackpot capitalism”.
