Mortar boards or birds?
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Somewhere between Pomp and Circumstance and the president’s closing remarks, more than one commencement speaker this year mentioned artificial intelligence — and met a barrage of boos.
To be clear: I am not here to celebrate rudeness. Somewhere in those bleachers sat parents who drove through the night, grandparents dabbing their eyes, younger siblings squirming in rented chairs — all there to watch someone they love walk across a stage.
This was a complicated boo. Lurking in the graduates’ response was the paradox that Gen Z hasn’t had it with AI. In fact, they use it more than anyone.
For anyone who cares about education, the past few months have been a whiplash of AI editorials. The catastrophizing is familiar: AI is destroying the essential friction that leads to real learning. Widespread cheating must be stopped. Nobody reads anything long or hard anymore. Bring back proctored exams and ration the A’s.
On the other hand, no demographic uses AI more than Gen Z. It’s their productivity tool, their brainstorming partner, their 2 a.m. confessor. They know that AI fluency will be part of the price of admission to whatever job market awaits them. AI tools are showing up on resumes and job descriptions the way “proficiency in Microsoft Office” did a generation ago. Students who graduate without knowing how to work with these tools risk irrelevance.
Booing graduation speakers is a time-honored varsity sport — I say this as someone who went to college in the sixties — and so is existential dread about the future. I’ve experienced several waves of technology panic wash through higher education. In my era, parents worried about television (and rock and roll) eating our intellect. Then it was the calculator and cries to save the slide rule. Then came the internet, which would make the library a wasteland. Search engines would kill research skills. Wikipedia was the end of citation standards.
Each time, institutions responded by treating the technology as a discipline problem rather than an opportunity — an imperative! — to pursue knowledge creation and dissemination in new ways. Isolating instead of innovating.
We are doing it again. The honor code is updated while the curriculum and the classroom stay the same.
Consider will.i.am — yes, that will.i.am, the Black Eyed Peas frontman — who just completed his first semester as a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University. His course, “The Agentic Self,” teaches students to navigate AI and build their own agents, a kind of personal force multiplier for tackling real problems. No computer science prerequisite required. On the last day of class, students presented projects they’d built from scratch: one applied his agent to veterans’ services; another wrote a song tied to a healthcare journey, another to the needs of small business owners. will.i.am’s framing was blunt and useful: “You could use AI or AI could use you.”
The paradox is real but Gen Z doesn’t need us to resolve it. They’re already straddling both sides: using the tools, doubting the hype, making their own calculations. The booing at commencement wasn’t only about AI. It was also being lectured by people who presented a formulaic perspective on a complicated future that the class of 2026 is already navigating.
That paradox may be the most interesting thing happening in higher education right now, but most universities are playing around the margins.
What would it actually look like to learn from the generation already living in this? Start by asking them. Not in a focus group, not through a student satisfaction survey — in the classroom, in office hours, in the genuine spirit of inquiry that higher education is supposed to embody. Ask a student to show you how they use these tools, where they trust the output and where they don’t, what they’ve figured out through trial and error that, most likely, no professor has taught them. The answers will be instructive, sometimes humbling, and occasionally brilliant.
Commencement season may be over, but the era of AI is just beginning.
Full disclosure: I am also a Professor of Practice at ASU, though I’m pretty sure that neither my coding nor my singing skills were what got me there.