CNN host and journalist Fareed Zakaria spoke at Duke's commencement May 13, and delivered an almost identical speech at Harvard University's commencement May 24.
"Those are students from two very similar institutions graduating within two weeks of each other," he said in the Boston Globe June 8. "I don’t see how I could have come up with two completely different speeches without giving one group a second-rate talk. I’d rather come up with the same important message I think they need to hear."
In both speeches, Zakaria spoke about missing his own college graduation, discussed cell phones and referenced American humorist Art Buchanwald, according to a June 8 release by The Huffington Post.
"You don’t need an ethics course to know what you shouldn’t do," he said in both addresses.
Zakaria's speeches also shared parallels with those he gave at Johns Hopkins University in 2011, Brown University in 2009 and Yale University in 2007, according to The Boston Globe release.
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