The following is a list of 65 people who would have made better choices for commencement speaker than General Electric's Jeffrey Immelt. No offense to Mr. Immelt, but this is a Notre Dame graduation, not a lecture at Mendoza.
I didn't put any research into this list, so please, spare me the e-mails about how so-and-so is booked until 2009 or stopped speaking in public 15 years ago. I'm just trying to encourage the University to aim a little higher in choosing someone to send its seniors off into the world.
In no particular order:
1. Bono
2. Martin Sheen
3. Barack Obama
4. Bill Clinton
5. Dick Ebersol
6. Jon Stewart
7. Stephen Colbert
8. Bob Geldorf
9. Oprah
10. JK Rowling
11. Kofi Annan (Sure, he spoke here in 2000, but he owes us one)
12. Steven Spielberg
13. Steve Jobs
14. Bill Gates
15. Al Gore
16. Hillary Clinton
17. Nancy Pelosi
18. Angelina Jolie
19. Rudy Giuliani
20. Melinda Gates
21. Alan Greenspan
22. Madeleine Albright
23. Diane Sawyer
24. Brian Williams
25. Bob Woodward
26. Jerome Bettis
27. Jodie Foster
28. Meryl Streep
29. Tom Brokaw
30. George Lucas
31. Teresa Heinz-Kerry
32. Sister Helen Prejean
33. Samuel L. Jackson
34. Daniel Craig
35. Maya Angelou
36. Anna Quindlen
37. Maureen Dowd
38. Katie Couric
39. Archbishop Desmond Tutu
40. Sandra Day O'Connor
41. Ray Bradbury
42. Steve Carell
43. Kiefer Sutherland, in character
44. Elie Wiesel
45. Clint Eastwood
46. Bill Murray
47. Aaron Sorkin
48. Barbara Kingsolver
49. Elaine Chao
50. Judy Woodruff
51. Christopher Gardner
52. Christopher Walken
53. Dan Rather
54. Margaret Whitman (eBay CEO)
55. Patricia Russo (Lucent CEO)
56. Janet Robinson (NY Times CEO)
57. Anne Mulcahy (Xerox CEO)
58. Joyce Carol Oates
59. John McCain
60. Seamus Heaney
61. Ben Stein
62. Michael Douglas
63. Peyton Manning
64. Conan O'Brien
65. Regis Philbin
And the list goes on...
