Commencement, Law Schools

On-Campus With Elie: Wiki Commencement

A pretty innovative approach to commencement speaking at a top law school.

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Ed. note: This will be my weekly, non-Redline column for Above the Law. The way I see it, law school applications might be down 37% since 2010, but that just means there are still 40,000 people who need me.

It’s a little early to start worrying about commencement speakers. Thinking about commencement before first semester finals is a little bit like advertising Christmas before Thanksgiving. But, whatever, you can’t stop the shining.

At some law schools, students are allowed to vote for their student speakers at graduation. In general, I think the voting is millennial bullcrap. Student graduation speakers should be determined by transcript. Then they get to stand up there and say, “I’m the king of the world,” while everybody else sweats out their hangovers and we’re done. Who the hell is listening at law school commencement? All people want is for Mommy and Daddy to finally be proud of them, then have a nice dinner before getting back to bar study.

Anyway, a group of students at one top law school is trying to generate support for the most millennial “commencement speaker” you can imagine. Instead of an actual person, these students want to use a class-wide Wiki to be their commencement speech.

That’s… brilliant. No really. And it should actually shut the oldies up about the alleged “all-eyes-on-me” aspect of this generation…

As you might have expected, Wiki-Commencement is coming out of a California law school. You’d get your ass kicked for suggesting something like this in the upper Midwest. A Stanford Law student thinks that everybody should get to play when it comes to writing the commencement speech.

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It’s actually a pretty nice idea. Try to ignore the Stanford-ness of the school-wide email:

Let’s write the first-ever WikiSpeech together:

Does anyone else feel like there is just too much pure talent in our class to have just one of us write the student commencement address? After all, if there is one thing our Stanford legal education has imparted, it’s how to make a killer GoogleDoc. Over the past few weeks, I have had countless conversations with classmates who have had awesome ideas that have helped solidify a plan for how a WikiSpeech written by all of us collaboratively would work.

God. I know I told you to ignore it, but Jesus, talking about how much “pure talent” is on your campus should be a punchable offense.

But that aside, what we have here is a number of students who don’t want commencement to turn into a glorified selfie, and are instead trying to leverage the collective power of the age we live in:

Why wouldn’t a speech written by an individual be better?

Two words: collective intelligence. I think there is a romanticized notion of an author locking herself away in a room (preferably in Paris) and extracting a masterpiece from within the essence of her being, and I think that trope is so embedded in our culture that group writing sounds preposterous. But there is an altogether different kind of genius that comes from crowds – and it’s not just about manpower. It turns out that people are smarter together. James Suroweiki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, explains collective intelligence here: http://bit.ly/WisdomOfCrowdsExcerpt. My favorite example is that if you ask everyone in a large group to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, the average of all of the guesses will be closer to the real number than almost every single individual’s guess. Likewise, I think that together, we can write a speech that will outperform what any single individual could do.

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Look, to the extent that the student graduation speaker means anything, that speaker is supposed to represent the class. On that scale, the traditional methods of choosing graduation speakers fail to produce anybody who can speak for everybody. The person with the best grades is not representative of the law school experience of most students. In fact, the student with the best grades probably experienced the law school in the least possible way.

And the elected student is also flawed. If everybody likes you, you’re not having a representative law school experience either.

Now, when you remember the fact that none of this actually matters anyway, why not do a commencement Wiki? It’s a cool little idea. I bet Berkeley Law is sad that they didn’t think of it first.

Today is the last day of voting for Stanford Law students. Vote Wiki-Commencement. What could possibly go wrong?

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