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!)
Wheat & Tares 
Berkeley sounds like a fine school with fine people. BYU is mostly just committed to preserving and entrenching Mormonism. And reconciling secular knowledge with its traditional teachings. It has very cheap tuition though.
Attended at Northern Arizona University a couple of weeks ago. They acknowledged the Native American land and heritage in the area, which is common in Flagstaff since the largest reservation in the US is nearby and many Navajo live, work and go to school there.
Talked similarly about civility in discourse. The eye opener for me was that they had people who were the first to finish college in their family stand up, and it was close to half the group (this session had about 2k graduates). Also had the grads who are parents stand up and it was about a quarter of the group, also very cool. Overall it felt motivating, uplifting and inclusive to attend.
The stark difference with BYU and many other schools would be that the honorary doctorate was given to a teacher at a poor, rural school district in southern Arizona. The Teacher of the Year in the state. Quite a different vibe there than giving honorary degrees to people like Ron Rasband.
What a wonderful post that emphasizes how important real education is.
I had the privilege of attending a graduation ceremony at a local college. I was pleasantly surprised when the commencement speaker referred to Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote: “Whenever the vicious portion of the population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this government cannot last.”
Too many colleges and universities have been cowered and few would have allowed these wise words to be uttered.
I have attended college graduations of several universities in the last few years including BYU’s. And what stands out to me about BYU’s is it seemed like a session of General Conference. Maybe that’s because that’s what it looked and sounded like when an LDS General Authority was the main speaker. Opening with a prayer too. It’s a Church-owned school after all.
I always get a kick out of your track record for misspellings. I sometimes wonder if you are doing this intentionally. Right out of the gate in your opening paragraph you might want to take a second glance at your parenthetical comment . . . “he had lots of collage credit from high school” and consider the more traditional “college” spelling instead.
And like you, I have bumped into that autocorrect nuisance of “defiantly” on many an occasion.
Loved your post all the same!
“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.” What an odd assertion to make without looking into it!
Dallin Honor Hwang BS, Accounting (I assume you’ll have some flexibility in spelling given this is the US and who knows what was done when immigrating/coming here)
Crystal Susan Hwang, BS Information Systems
Hyunbi Hwang, BS Microbiology
Sandy Shan Huang, BS Exercise Science
BYU *might (I’m using AI to calculate) have had a graduating class of ~5783 across all undergrad disciplines.
UC Berkeley appears to have had approximately 5300 graduating across all undergrad disciplines.
So UC Berkeley absolutely has a larger proportion of Huang/Hwang surnames – but the way you phrased the original sentence above is quite disingenuous!
Now, I wish that speakers at BYU would have including warnings against authoritarianism as well – even in light of the usual focus on religion for all of them (from AI summaries, no way in Hades I would attend any BYU graduation ceremony), I think that authoritarianism is the largest threat to our religion full stop – way more than anything those “evil liberals” could come up with regarding abortion, same sex marriage, what-have-you.
I guess I find the overall tenor of this post in somewhat bad faith, in view of the failure to check anything before making such innuendo. And that there is of course room for improvement on all fronts. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive things.
Adam F, I don’t like the tome of *Your* post. I would rather bishop Bill post anything, even quickly written and with less preferred spelling or misspelling and unexamined assumptions that turn out to have some merit, than for Bishop Bill to feel pressure to fix his posts so they don’t get complaints. He has been too busy to post as often lately as he used to and I enjoy his posts. So, please do not promote unnecessary perfectionism among those few who are willing to write our original posts here.
I grew up with perfectionism and I am very sorry to see you are suffering from it. It is horrible to live with and worse to inflict of others.
It may be alright to tease Bishop Bill about spelling, but please ask him if he minds teasing about it. But please do not criticize our posters here. They are too few and far between and I for one do not want any of them discouraged. And I might add, that I have been invited to write guest posts here more than a few times and one of the reasons I won’t is that I am too vulnerable to the griping perfectionists of this world.
JCS, did you really hear the same Lincoln quote at a recent graduation ceremony, that you have been repeating on almost every comment you make on W&T? Quite amazing!
I also love Bishop Bill’s posts, grammar and all!
Um, I didn’t criticize anyone’s grammar or spelling?! I called out the incorrect innuendo! Frankly I’m a bit surprised that I would receive a rebuke for calling out what is, essentially, a falsehood: the pretty clear implication from “Not sure if there was any Huangs graduating from BYU” – there is no merit in that assumption at all! Beyond that, I was acknowledging that if diversity is the goal, BYU has a ways to go – but that was not an admission that his “unexamined assumptions that turn out to have some merit.” Far from it – his assumption was blatantly wrong (and it took me all of ~3 minutes to search and sanity-verify that).
If this blog purports to criticize “leadership,” especially at times for what it believes are misleading statistics, then can it not take its own medicine? As just a recent example, see https://wheatandtares.org/2026/03/08/false-narratives/ where multiple narratives are classified as misleading or false because of how the statistics appear to have been manipulated. Per the logic of Anna, we shouldn’t expect such “perfectionism” from Elder Rasband for those statistics and instead should just be grateful for his comments – even if his assumptions were largely wrong but still “turn out to have some merit.”
Come on guys! Either be willing to see both sides of the coin or stop pretending!
Adam F, good catch. Although I thought for a moment it was satire, as the first name was “Dallin Hwang” I was looking for the second name to be Russel Wong, but when it wasn’t, realized these were real names! Even so, I’ll take the hit for not checking. As far as spelling goes, fire away! I’m quite the jokester in my family and at work, and have learned it I can’t take it, I shouldn’t dish it out. I know I’m a bad speller, and the homophone is my biggest downfall, followed closely by collage/college! I’m the stereotypical engineer that can’t spell.
I’m with Adam F regarding false assumptions about BYU. In the section I attended it was opened with a prayer, but the prayer was in Mandarin. Looking at names in the directory, BYU is doing a much better job than they are being accused of here. Utah is pretty vanilla, but much less so than in the past. BYU is a magnet for Hwangs, Kims, Lees and many other wonderful names from around the world. I enjoy seeing these.
Thanks, Bishop Bill. And FWIW, I believe everyone is somehow attributing Richard’s comment about spelling to me?
I feel the need to defend BYU’s honor a little bit here. I haven’t been there for a while, but I spent two years there as a student in the early 2000’s. The idea that “the very best way to learn is to talk with people that disagree with you” could never appear in a BYU commencement address just doesn’t comport with my experience. I’ve never been to a commencement there, but I heard people talk that way all the time when I was there. It’s a pretty anodyne statement. And frankly, plenty of famous universities have failed to live up to it at times. And the implication that BYU isn’t a racially diverse place just seems strange to me, having been there. I guess you can accuse it of not being religiously diverse. Fair enough. Most people there are Mormons.
There are things to be heard in some graduation speeches that might not be heard at BYU, but Reich’s challenge to interact with people with different opinions doesn’t seem to me impossible at BYU. No school has a monopoly on good, bland, or outright boring graduation speeches, BYU included. When I received a PhD from BYU, I was quite disappointed by the very long and poorly prepared speech by the very rich guy whose name is now attached to the engineering college. However, for a quite remarkable BYU graduation speech, I recommend Hugh Nibley’s 1983 talk “Leaders and Managers”.
https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/hugh-nibley/leaders-managers/
This is the speech in which Nibley famously speaks of wearing “the black robes of a false priesthood”. He speaks dismissively of BYU being a place where people don’t question things. He does a thoughtful analysis of the difference between a leader and manager. I don’t agree with 100% of his ideas, but I like that he gave a challenging and provocative speech. So yes, I think some things are possible at BYU. Or at least they were once.