Yale Commencement Speech, 2014
President Salovey, members of the Yale Corporation, professors, parents, and above all, terrified, unready graduates,
As I look upon this crowd—with your narrow shoulders, your pimply foreheads, your dumb, bovine gazes—I almost pity you. You must have been overwhelmed when Yale opened its gates to you, for some inexplicable reason. Perhaps you were Australian, or a mediocre synchronized swimmer. Perhaps your mother was an especially talented applications-essayist. Whatever the case, you got here.
Oh, yes! Perhaps you were even stupider than most of your fellow students, but rich! God knows Yale loves its… legacies. And this place could certainly use a few million in parental kickbacks—Old Campus looks older than ever. Perhaps your future donations will let Yale hire someone to actually clean the frozen-yogurt containers and dew-drenched a capella flyers off of this downtrodden grass.
But I digress. Gifted with an opportunity denied to so many others… so many… I.. gah! You spent your four years here, perhaps five or six—nothing like “going abroad” to delay your entry into the real world, kicking and screaming! Fools!
You, valedictorian—yes, come here, girl—tell me how you filled your time between Comparative Literature and Astronomy 102. A sorority, perhaps? The Federalist Party? Reading to small children? Some desperate succession of activities, all meant to fill the hole in your soul that opened while you spent the best years of your life—high school, of course—earning that 4.0 that vaulted you in here over your more creative, more interesting, worthier peers.
Pleasant day, isn’t it? Spring is always lovely here if you ignore that festering sinkhole of a city outside your precious bubble. And I’m sure you were all a sight to see last week, your first week of freedom from your self-imposed slavery: throwing wobbly Frisbees, encouraging melanomas to form on your ghostly skin, fucking on the roof of Linsey-Chittendam…
Kyle, you thought that was a secret? I’ve spent a week adjusting my telescope at the Omni Hotel just to catch that view.
Anyway, had I come here, I’d have been in your position thirty-three years ago, after doing all the same shit you did these last four years. But I was not ch—did not choose to matriculate to this institution. Instead, I went to Princeton, then J.P. Morgan, then founded my own consulting firm so I could tell idiots from Yale what to do, then gave my fortune away to some third-world country whose best universities will soon eclipse this shell of a school. I hope you quiver under the patronage of your future Columba-donesia-stanian overlords. Good day.
And there are no diplomas. I stole them, ground them into paper-mâché and built this piñata. It’s filled with candy. No it isn’t. It’s filled with hate.
–A. Gertler