Last Saturday I attended the graduation at UC Berkley. My grandson was graduating with a double major in just 3 years. (he had lots of collage credit from high school. So I don’t have to keep bragging, look up the difference between a dual degree and a double major!)

The very first thing that caught my attention was that there was 36 students with a last name of Huang graduating from Berkley. Not sure if there was any Huangs graduating from BYU.

Next was the opening remarks from the Vice Chancellor, who opened by recognizing that UC Berkley sits on the land once occupied by the Ohlone tribe, and how the university has worked in conjunction with the tribe to preserve their heritage on the campus. I wonder if the Timpanogos people of the Ute tribe was mentioned at BYU commencement.

The speaker was Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor for Clinton, and Professor Emeritus at Berkley. He talked about the need for dialogue in political discourse, and said “the very best way to learn is to talk with people that disagree with you”. I’m positive these words have never been uttered at a BYU graduation. In fact the Church espouses the exact opposite (don’t listen to alternative voices, or podcasts!).

Lastly Reich talked about how the United Stated is moving towards authoritarianism, and gave the graduates a charge to fight it at every opportunity with peaceful dialogue.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that Berkley is probably the most liberal University in the whole United States. But they must be doing something right, they have 110 Nobel Prize laureates, second only to Harvard. BYU (Harvard of the West) has none.

How many of you attended a graduation this year? What was it like? Was there a speaker that made you think?

(fun fact, autocorrect tried to change my misspelling of the word “definitely” in the title to “defiantly”, which also would have worked for this post!)