Today I attended Harvard Commencement from my company’s laptop, tuning in to the latter half of the livestream after a couple morning meetings. After four years, I’m graduating with a Master’s in Creative Writing & Literature from Harvard Extension School. It was my decision not to attend the ceremony in Cambridge. It wasn’t an easy decision.
In the livestream, I tried to spot any fellow classmates, most of whom I’ve only ever met through a laptop screen like this one. My whole academic life at Harvard, with the exception of a one week on-campus residency, has been online.
An all-virtual master’s program was not my plan when I’d formally applied in March 2020, the very week my job sent us all home for two weeks while we waited for this Coronavirus thing to settle down.
Prior to the shutdown, I was in Cambridge often. I had already met with a professor at Gato Rojo to discuss my writing and the program. I had visions of classrooms and workshops and on-campus connections that, once getting accepted, never materialized.
I considered dropping out multiple times. Though I lived just a 15 minute bus ride away from the Harvard campus, I didn’t go back there for two years, when I finally decided I should probably go get my student ID.
I waited a long time before I even told my family that I was going for my master’s at Harvard, in part, because it didn’t feel real. And not in the dreamy “I can’t believe it!” kind of way, but the existential “am I really living my life through a laptop now?” kind of way.
As I paused Commencement to grab a cup of yogurt in the kitchen, I thought, well, this feels like an appropriate conclusion to the past four years, anyway.
Thunderclouds loomed outside my apartment window in Northampton while I watched the red-robed deans of Harvard’s various schools get up to the podium and decree each student body graduated.
By the time they got to the Extension School, there was confusion on stage and a pause in the events. Off-screen, people were shouting. The deans looked to each other and to the president in his ridiculously oversized and ornate wood chair for guidance.
“To celebrate anything, purely celebrate, in May 2024 feels out of touch with what’s happening in the world.”
“Let them walk! Let them walk!” the off-screen chants continued as the Dean of my school invited me to stand. The camera didn’t move to show the students cheer and accept their laurels. Because at that moment, as I would later read in the news, hundreds of students and faculty marched out in protest of the 13 Harvard students denied graduation due to their involvement in the pro-Palestine campus encampment.
This too, I thought, feels appropriate for Commencement. To celebrate anything, purely celebrate, in May 2024 feels out of touch with what’s happening in the world. Genocide, war, division, disaster—the crises are all-crushing if one plugs into the news even just for one day.
After the walkouts, the principal speaker address was from Maria Ressa, a Nobel prize winning journalist and free press advocate.
“The fascists are coming,” Ressa said at one point in her speech, which had been openly critical of Harvard Corporation and alum Mark Zuckerberg. She delivered warnings about disinformation on social media, the looming threat of AI and its danger to democracy.
The usual graduation platitudes and motivational messages about hard work and hope for the future were nearly absent.
Once again—this felt so fitting. When I graduated with my bachelor’s in Communication and IT in 2012, I was left with a similar feeling of overall dread about what was to come.
My undergrad thesis had been about the exact themes that Ressa was addressing in her speech. In 2012 my argument had been that in information warfare, those who do not have access to digital literacy skills are most likely to become the victims. Mass digital media technologies like Facebook (now Meta) are built to uphold pre-existing systems of power that serve a white, male, and financially privileged few.
At that time, I had some hope that wider public access to digital literacy and coding skills could help change the course of the future. But that hasn’t happened, and now we live in a world even more starkly divided by misinformation and people operating under completely different sets of “facts” fueled by algorithms they have no visibility into or control over. And that’s not even considering what’s coming soon now with the AI revolution.
Ressa’s speech reminded me that my last stint in higher ed had also concluded with more stress and disillusionment than pomp and circumstance. I hadn’t even wanted a graduation party, but had obliged to please my family.
“This too shall pass, and so shall you,” my undergrad thesis advisor had attempted to placate me at the time. I felt he didn’t get it. I didn’t care so much about a grade as I did about how academia failed to prepare me for the real world. It gave me big ideas, exposed all these problems with technology and media, and then left me with tens of thousands and dollars in debt and nothing to do but go get a job in the capitalist machine whose cogs were now terribly exposed.
Yeah, congrats, grad.
“Welcome to the battlefield!” Ressa concluded her speech, in a call for graduates to put their education to use against fascism. One more song (I had no idea Harvard Commencement would involve so much singing), some shouting and cane taps from the top-hatted sheriff, and the livestream ended.
No confetti or caps tossed in the air here. Just an empty yogurt cup and a return to the workday with an increased sense of unease.
“I can’t help that I’m graduating with similar feelings of disillusionment and dread, for all the reasons that were reflected back at me during Commencement.”
Graduation this time around feels different in part because my education is in something for my true passion—creative writing—rather than for the practicality of procuring a paycheck that could sustain me. Those practical paychecks have made it so I’m not graduating in debt this round, either, which is an honest relief.
However, I can’t help that I’m graduating with similar feelings of disillusionment and dread, for all the reasons that were reflected back at me during Commencement.
It feels like an awful thing to admit that a part of me wonders why I should even bother with continuing to put my creative writing degree to use. It feels frivolous and futile to write fiction in the face of a future that looks so bleak to me right now.
In Ressa’s speech, she gave three points of advice for facing this future and the crises of the present.
Point one: Choose your best self. My best self isn’t one that dwells in despair for very long. My best self is hopeful, curious, compassionate, and a bit silly, even when it’s hard. These are the qualities that I associate with my creative life and writing. They can provide inroads for finding my creative spark and purpose again.
Her second point was about turning crisis into opportunity. My four years at Harvard were not what I thought they were going to be because 2020-2024 were marred by crises ranging from global to personal. If I continue to focus on what went wrong and what could have been, I’m at risk of missing opportunities for what could go right—now and in the future.
Ressa’s third piece of advice is perhaps the hardest one for me—and that is to be vulnerable. I don’t really like it when people with privilege go around touting the virtue of vulnerability when they themselves aren’t part of the most vulnerable populations they’re speaking to (hello Brené Brown).
I’m not as vulnerable as a I could be because I don’t feel like I can afford to be. I’ve used that as an excuse to avoid being vulnerable for a long time now.
“It sounds so typical—the writer coming to some conclusion that the blockages on the page reflect blockages within themselves that they must confront. But that’s where I’m at right now as I graduate with my creative writing degree.”
More than once during my time in the master’s program, I received feedback in workshop about readers craving more depth from my stories. I’d hear that I’m a strong writer, but there’s sometimes like a shield that gets in the way of a piece really resonating on an emotional level. It’s been the hardest feedback to grapple with because I know it connects back to some greater resistance to vulnerability in myself.
It sounds so typical—the writer coming to some conclusion that the blockages on the page reflect blockages within themselves that they must confront. But that’s where I’m at right now as I graduate with my creative writing degree.
I feel like the cumulative effects of the past four years have put me in a freeze state when it comes to my creative life and writing. Unfreezing is going to take more curiosity, compassion, and—dare I say it—vulnerability on my part.
So, it’s out of academia and into the battlefield again for me. Is the pen still mightier than the sword? Let’s find out.