‘It’s a Modern-Day Draft’: Why Stanford Students Walked Out on Sundar Pichai’s Commencement Speech

Many of us, including myself and Amanda, were not excited to go celebrate an education that we fundamentally believe to be in service of the liberated world that we want to see at some corporate buyout, [an] advertisement for the likes of Google or whoever Stanford had decided that was going to be.

Right. You held a separate event that happened at the same time as his speech and the commencement.

Jones: From there, graduates and their families and friends, people that we had worked with all across the university, came together and gathered in what was a beautiful ceremony to celebrate the conviction with which we want to use our educations, and celebrate what it means to have gone up against the dominant narrative and career pipelines at a university like Stanford.

I can't imagine a better way to have celebrated my graduation.

My next question was, I was just thinking: I dropped out of a master's degree program …

Campos: Nice.

… only a few credits shy. Nothing like what you’re talking about, but my dad was so mad at me. And it made me wonder as you were talking, what did your parents think?

Jones: When I told them I was walking out, at first they were a little bit like, “Oh, my God.” They were not super happy about it, because I graduated high school in 2020. I didn’t get a high school graduation. So they were like, “What about one ceremony? Like, we wanna celebrate you. We know you’ve worked hard for this.”

My parents are very supportive of the work I do, but even them as people who, you know, they’re like, “I wanna see your speech at the protest”—they're very supportive, but they were like, “Even though you’ve worked hard, you didn’t even get a high school graduation. What do you think?”

But after attending the People's Commencement, they were really blown away. They're gonna get me emotional, but they thanked me, and they were like, “Thank you for bringing us into this community that you’ve created, and we understand why this means so much to you, because this is more meaningful than anything that could’ve been told to us in some hot stadium by some CEO or whatever. This clearly means something to you. This means something to the world.” So yeah, I’m very lucky in that way.

You sound like you have good parents.

Jones: I do. I do. I love them.

How about you, Amanda?

Campos: I have my dad and my sibling. I have been an organizer for years, so I went to my dad and I said, “Hey, I’m gonna walk out. You will love the People's Commencement, and you will hear from Mahmoud Khalil, you’ll hear from Eva Jones, you'll hear from people, organizers, who have much better messages to tell than the Google CEO.”

I think the most memorable thing to me really was I have a younger sibling in high school, and for me, through my organizing, but really through my entire life, it’s been really important to me to be a good role model, but also someone that they can look up to. So for me it was just absolutely beautiful having them there.