Nobel laureate to be Harvard speaker
Documented abuse in the Philippines
Maria Ressa, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and free speech advocate who faced multiple prison terms while documenting humanitarian abuses by the Philippine government, will be the 2024 Harvard commencement speaker on May 23, according to the university and the Nobel Foundation.
Ressa is a native of the Philippines who grew up in the United States. She returned to the Philippines for her master’s degree and then began covering Southeast Asia for CNN, where she worked for two decades. In 2012, she founded the online news site Rappler, where she gained international attention for documenting human rights abuses under former president Rodrigo Duterte, according to the Nobel Foundation and Harvard.
Along with Russian journalist Dmitry Andreyevich Muratov, Ressa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace,” according to the Noble Foundation.
In her speech accepting the peace prize, Ressa said that she faced up to 100 years in prison for her reporting on powerful figures in and out of government in the Philippines.
“I didn’t know if I was going to be here today,” she said. “Every day, I live with the real threat of spending the rest of my life in jail just because I’m a journalist. When I go home, I have no idea what the future holds, but it’s worth the risk.”
The most recent of Ressa’s three books is her 2022 autobiography titled “How to Stand Up to a Dictator.” In a book review in the Globe, David Shribman described the book as “memoir with a message, and we fail to heed it at our peril.”
Ressa is also the author of “Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia” and “From Bin Laden to Facebook.”
While a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard in 2021, Ressa was interviewed by Ada Petriczko, who was then the Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow at the International Women’s Media Foundation and a research fellow at MIT’s Center for International Studies.
In the interview, Ressa said that despite threats of prison and other acts of intimidation, she will always work in the Philippines.
“If I left, I would weaken those who are still standing up against the abuses of power. I would also leave my team, and that is out of the question,” Ressa said. “So to me, it’s like a highstakes game of chicken. You just keep going. You put one foot in front of the other. I know I’m on the right side of history. Leaving would make my life, my journalistic career, a lie. It took me a while to say it, but now I deeply believe it: Silence is complicity.”
Interim Harvard President Alan Garber praised her commitment to freedom of speech.
“For nearly 40 years, she has dedicated herself to truth — its pursuit, its advocacy, and its defense — no matter the repercussions,” he said in a statement.