On May 16th, 2024, the English Department held its annual commencement ceremony, featuring speeches from students Alex Ullman, Bryce Wallace, and Isabella Sanford. We're delighted to bring you those speeches here from these three wonderful graduates of UC Berkeley English. For the keynote speech, delivered by Sara Guyer, Professor of English and Irving and Jean Stone Dean of Arts and Humanities, check out UC Berkeley's Arts and Humanities page.
Alex Ullman, PhD
Alex Ullman is a writer, educator, and musician living in the SF Bay Area. He holds a PhD in English from UC Berkeley, and will be a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry Program at Washington University in St. Louis from 2024-2026.
When I was asked to speak at graduation, my first response was to say: no, absolutely not. I think my resistance was mostly fear: fear of saying something puerile in front of so many incredible minds, fear of not meeting the political urgency of the moment. I asked my advisor, whom I adore, if I should do it and he said it was an honor, and that I should give it a shot. I asked my therapist, whom I also adore, who said beware of accepting honors: that usually means accepting unpaid labor. You can see why I like him. You can also see that I decided to do it.
But like everyone else here I was working on completing four thousand projects over the past week, so I put it off until the last minute. And then I did the very thing that every English major should not do when faced with a writing deadline and very little time.
I asked ChatGPT to write the graduation speech for me. I went to the website, linked my google account, dodged all the chances to upgrade to ChatGPT pro, and was greeted with the dialogue box at the bottom of the screen. Here is what I asked it to do in my graduation speech:
Please write a graduation speech that is no more than 6 minutes long. It will be delivered on Berkeley’s campus on May 16, 2024 in front of dozens of English majors and professors. Therefore, the language should be sophisticated but not pretentious. Do not use words like “explore,” “captivate,” “tapestry,” “leverage” or “embrace” because they are boring words and also they are part of the top ten most used AI words according to Google and they will give it away that I didn’t write the speech.
In the first part of the speech I should make clear that being a Berkeley graduate student in English has been foremost an education in aesthetics. Don’t get bogged down in explaining aesthetics. Make it clear that it doesn’t mean casting judgment on a work of art, or cultivating the taste of any reader, or that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. None of that. Instead, suggest that aesthetics is about attention. Perhaps do a short exercise with the audience to illustrate this point. Ask them to focus their senses on a particular object, let’s say, their eyes on the lectern, or their ears on the sound of my voice. And after they’ve focused them there, and without moving their eyes or their ears at all, ask them instead to slightly move their focus toward what’s on the periphery of their sight or hearing, the blurry or noisy stuff. Tell them that that’s their attention. That’s it. No need to tell the audience I stole this exercise from an article in The New Yorker last week. But make clear that this has been the core of my aesthetic education at Berkeley: learning how not to pay but to discover attention, and to focus that attention on what’s blurry and noisy and on the periphery of any object. Perhaps ChatGPT you can search through recent peer reviewed and copyrighted material to steal a less confusing exercise to make this point. If so, insert that instead.
But at this point in the speech I will probably need a quote by Jewish German critic Walter Benjamin, as every good graduate piece of writing has a quote by Walter Benjamin. But don’t use the one from the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that everyone uses, but maybe the one from My Berlin Childhood where he says he learned how to draw truths from works of literature by opening his wardrobe and thrusting his hand into a pair of socks turned inside-out. No need to make it explicitly clear that I’m suggesting the Berkeley English department is a giant sock drawer. It’s a metaphor and the audience will figure that out.
In the middle part of the speech, it should say that my graduate career was not only an aesthetic education but also a political education. A political education means that reading and writing are not just humanistic pursuits, but also work. I learned that value is measured by “socially necessary labor time,” but also that time spent laboring is not necessarily social. No need to dwell on the loneliness of working on a dissertation during the pandemic, but gesture toward it. Also remind listeners that being a Berkeley English grad student provides the opportunity to collectively join others in demanding better working conditions for all, and that rest is not the absence of work but a radical act of self-care. A political education also means learning to read the world as closely as we read a text. It means learning to decolonize one’s own senses, or facing how one’s own cultural identity and background has shaped one’s perceptions and desires. The work then becomes learning how to see, hear, taste, smell, and touch anew. This, for me, has meant exploring—wait, not exploring, avoid that word ChatGPT—but grappling with my Jewish identity. Here’s the moment in the speech where I may challenge some of the audience, so be direct in your language, dear computer. Express my wholehearted solidarity with those who occupied Sproul at the encampment, for they, and those they advocated for, are at the periphery of our attention now. Make clear my opposition to all forms of genocide, even ones committed by those who share an identity with me. Many Jews claim that that word genocide only has meaning in regard to the Holocaust, after which Polish-American lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944. But explain how my political education as an English PhD has taught me not to fetishize origins, to call not for the protection of the etymology of the term, but rather for the people that term is meant to protect. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed, so explain that my opposition to the current war and commitment to Palestinian liberation are anchored in my Jewish values of social justice, but also in the rigorous modes of textual and historical interpretation I learned at this still standing and vibrant university.
It will now be time to draw the speech to a close. Because I may have gotten too Bar-Mitzvah-y over the past minute, attempt to bring the audience back by conveying the nostalgia I’ll feel for Berkeley after it’s no longer in my life. How I’ll miss sneaking up to the fourth floor of Wheeler to see if I can find a moderately clean bathroom; how the bathrooms have the best views in the whole building; how everything in the bathrooms seems to be made of marble. Do not dwell too long on the bathrooms. I will miss my carrel where all my books are. I will miss seeing Eric in the hallways when I go to get water. I will miss the green sauce in which I dunked slivers of pizza at group events. I will miss Eliot’s collaborative poetry readings. I will the miss the walks down to Beta Lounge. I already miss Lyn. But do not wax nostalgic too long, for you’ve learned that nostalgia is a dangerous aesthetic and political feeling. Remind everyone that a Berkeley English graduate education is most importantly about the relationships you’ve formed with peers, teachers, and students, for they have the capacity to live on and sustain you.
And also make sure that the speech does not use the words “resonate,” “dynamic,” “testament,” “delve,” and “elevate,” for AI has stolen those words from us too.
So I wrote all that into Chat GPT, and then clicked “enter” on my keyboard.
And this is what Chat GPT wrote:
Isabella Sanford, BA
Isabella Sanford was born in New York and moved to California at the age of seven. She grew up in Santa Barbara before relocating to Los Angeles at fifteen to study creative writing at the California School of the Arts. A 2024 UC Berkeley graduate with a B.A. in English, she distinguished herself with her senior thesis, “Dickinson’s Dashes: Decoding Silence,” which was nominated by her professor for the 2024 Wells Research Seminar Essay Prize. Currently, she is applying to graduate programs to further her education and obtain a master’s degree in English.
Like a true English major, I’m here to bring the mood down…
While today is a celebration of something gained, it is also a day to recognize something lost; to grieve the end of an era.
It’s normal to feel a sense of loss on this day. Without the cycle of classes to guide you or the finite goal of reaching this point, it may seem like life has lost all meaning, or perhaps that you have abandoned your purpose after you’ve spent four years reading 30 books every 3 months, just for one book to be on the final.
The world doesn’t help this notion. Society reinforces this belief that by attending prestigious schools or winning awards, then you mean something. We are taught that this is our peak, that many of the best artists have produced their masterpieces before the age of twenty-five. But we don’t yet have the full picture.
In theory, we should be equipped to deal with loss. Lost objects. Lost people. Everything ends. It all goes. Sometimes it gets ripped away. Before many of us started college in 2020 amidst a global pandemic, the losses were quantifiable; it was like taking attendance. What about prom? What about high school graduation? Would we miss out on the traditional college experience we had been promised? The focus shifted to what could’ve been, instead of finding meaning in what remained and appreciating the present in all its imperfections.
I would like to share an important moment that changed my perspective on the uncertainties of loss.
As freshman year approached, my family and I squeezed into my mom’s SUV for an eight-hour journey to tour the campus. Upon arrival, my mom wandered into a quaint boutique run by a mother and her daughter, a Berkeley alum. Engaging in conversation, the older shopkeeper revealed that despite a recent horrific life event she decided to pursue her dream of opening the shop.
My mom mentioned that our family had experienced something similar. As she began to tear up, the daughter ducked behind the counter to retrieve a set of chimes, finely tuned to three perfect harmonic intervals. With a gentle smile, she instructed my mom to hang them on her rearview mirror. She explained that whenever there was a bump in the road, the chimes would sound, serving as a reminder that everything unfolds in perfect harmony, exactly as it should.
Before starting Berkeley, my father abruptly disappeared, along with everything I called home. These losses colored my entire college experience. All of my achievements felt as if they were done out of spite, rather than a genuine desire to succeed. But when everything was said and done, I found myself questioning the point—why was I brought here? Why does any of this matter?
I don’t believe anyone who has suffered a significant loss would say they are entirely grateful for it, nor would I ever want to relive such an experience. However, I recognize that it was instrumental in shaping who I am today. What I learned during the past 4 years was how to survive loss – when it was hard, and I was alone, and didn’t have the answers, and wanted to give up, I kept going. Under completely impossible circumstances, I survived by focusing on what mattered and clinging to Emily Dickinson’s poetry and Shakespeare’s tragic plays. At times it feels like they were written just for me. Like when your favorite obscure, indie song comes on in the grocery store. When that happens, I know that I’m in the right place.
Speaking today feels like one of those moments.
Graduates– loss is inevitable. Endings are necessary for growth. Remember: it’s ok not to get the dream job right away, to lose things you can’t replace— everything is happening exactly as should. The bumps in the road may come. Maybe they won’t. I hope you will drive right over them and keep going. I’ll be excited to read all about them in your future best-selling novels.
You’re here for a reason, and Berkeley has prepared you well for….whatever job will take us (you can find a copy of my resume by the front door).
I hope you know how honored I am to share this day with you. Thank you to my mother, my brother, the best little sister I could ask for, and the teachers who believed in me throughout this
Thank you Berkeley and here’s to the class of 2024!
Bryce Wallace, BA
Bryce Wallace is a transfer student who graduated with degrees in English and Linguistics. He was the recipient of the English Department Citation as well as a finalist for the University Medal. He will be attending Yale in the fall to pursue a PhD in English Literature.
It's an honor to be here with you all.
Before I begin, I’d like to express that though I plan to speak about this moment we are celebrating, I believe it is important to note that many young people, both domestically and abroad, are not afforded the opportunity to experience such moments. And so I hope that in this privileged moment of celebration, we are able to humble ourselves enough to see that what students are protesting during this time is, at the very least, worthy of our attention—and that our moment is not diminished, but enriched by protest and the opportunity to think beyond our present moment.
With that being said, I’d like to start by saying a brief thank you to those who have supported my growth during this period of my life….To my family, friends, and mentors…without your individual sacrifices and confidence in me, I have no idea where, or who, I would be….I am little more than what you have all poured into me, and I am so grateful that I may one day have the privilege of showing you all my gratitude through my actions in the future.
To my fellow graduates…I hope this moment feels as monumental as it is incomprehensible. With the world now before us, how can we properly comprehend and reflect upon our experiences as undergraduates at Berkeley? How can this multitude of encounters and challenges, of contradictory emotions and thoughts congeal into a singularity for us to reasonably analyze? We all know what it took to get here. But despite our appetites for analysis, do we know it well enough to make it a cohesive whole which can be uttered to ourselves now, in this brief moment of reflection? A moment that is likely so saturated with significance and pre-stalgic anticipation of what it may mean as recollection that we might remember it as a moment in the literal sense, as an instantaneous blur of impressions. A moment which, in its monumental but fleeting nature, may become something beyond the limits of our language, something so enigmatic that the disproportionate relationship between its brevity and significance reaches critical mass, and can only exist in our minds as outside of time and perfectly unlanguagable.
As scholars of literature, we are in the business of illuminating such moments as we experience them in literary works, with our words, of course, being our primary tools. Yet, it seems that the language of our discourse often falls short of fully capturing the magnitude and complexity of our experiences precisely when we articulate them—as if there are aspects of experience (both in life and in aesthetic works) that exist in perfect excess of whatever words we use to describe them. Though we are trained to see elaboration and clarification as effective means through which we will reach our goals of definitive understanding, expanded vocabularies and rhetorical flourishes, no matter how gratifying, only get us so far in describing the complexities of our existence and the opaque truths of our peripheral intuitions.
And so, we continually turn to our favorite works of literature, as they seem to speak in a language other than our own—-a language of, yet outside of our own, that by flouting the maxims of our comprehension, is able to to speak into existence that very excess of experience which is lost between the words of our own discursive language.
We quote passages, point to and summarize significant moments…we unfurl some of the infinite possibilities that our literary experiences provide, and we hope, that by some transition of power from art to ourselves, by some vicarious aesthetic inheritance, we may exceed the limitations of everyday discourse and learn how art speaks forth its unfathomable truths so that we may gain fluency in the language of experience and therefore come closer to understanding what the universe might mean when it speaks to us in its beauty and murmurs.
As literary scholars, we have the privilege of witnessing and providing a platform for this language of art, a bridge between our language and what lies necessarily outside of it. Our work as literary scholars, our humble submission to this paradoxical language that sprawls infinitely and unintelligibly before us, provides pause so that what art speaks may have its life beyond the walls of individual minds and experiences… It goes without saying that in a divided world, our work is of the utmost importance.
Perhaps if one day our own language somehow assumes the lack of parameters necessary to allow what mystifies us a chance at semantic life, and we learn to speak like art—in unfathomable tongues that paradoxically articulate the uncertain beauty of our world…then we, as literary scholars, will be robbed of our favorite task, and art, along with our own work, will become obsolete…
…But that day has not come, nor will it ever, and so we, Berkeley English class of 2024, along with the many generations of literary scholars after us, remain that bridge—between the language we know and the arresting language of the unknown. Thank you, and congratulations.
