Commencement Address: Ilana Glazer
Four Graduations and a Wedding, hosted by Brian Lehrer, presents an on-air commencement ceremony for those entering the arts!
Comedian, actress and Broad City star Ilana Glazer's message to the graduating class:
Your joy matters – in fact, it matters the most. Your joy is your freedom, and that is what marks progress.
The world is yours for the taking, and the system is yours for the changing. I cannot wait to see what y’all bring.
 The full transcript of Ilana Glazer's commencement address:
Good evening and congratulations to the graduating class of 2020. You did it! You got through college, and you stayed focused, and sane enough, in quarantine, to graduate during a global pandemic! Congratulations. You did it.
This moment – graduating from college – is about stepping into adulthood. There’s this dangerous, pervasive narrative around how your course of study in college needs to connect to the first steps you take after college. This narrative is a lie. I studied psychology in college and became a comedian – and you know what? It was the perfect education for me and my career path. After college, I was deciding between working in a psych lab or waitressing, and I chose waitressing. It helped me make money, so I could pursue my career, and while the connection between my higher education and career path couldn’t be summed up in a university brochure, you better believe I applied everything my psych studies to my comedy career – and to my waitressing work, too!
No matter what you studied, no matter the name of your major, or minor, or the title of the classes you took, they are relevant to the next thing you do. As you take your first steps into the world at large, finding your first job out of college, figuring out if you’ll live on your own or with your parents, as you navigate friendships outside of the college context: it’s all connected because you are the thread. There is no right or wrong, better or worse, next steps. What you do next is correct because it’s you, doing it.
Okay, that’s great and all, but what of COVID-times? Well... wow! Holy moly, and... one hundred expletives I can’t say here – wow! Graduating from your higher education and entering Adulthood, with a capital A, is stressful. But during COVID-19? That stress is different than the stress of any graduating class before you, and whatever consoling words the adults in your life share with you, they are inevitably filled with question marks.
So here’s one lesson Coronavirus is affording you, a truth that’s always been true, but this pandemic is shouting in your face, loud and clear: adults don’t actually have the answers. They don’t know more than you do, about what is going to happen next, how humanity on the planet will continue to unfold tomorrow. They don’t have answers that you don’t have – they’re making it up, one day at a time. And you can, too. In fact, you must, because that’s what it means to be an adult, to move through this world with agency: you locate the problem, pitch a solution, and try it. And you do the best you can.
So... what does that mean for you, my Class of 2020? You are the population most primed to educate yourselves and act. For the last four years, you’ve been reading, thinking critically about, reporting on, and debating the systems the world operates under.
What I want to impart on you this evening is the difference between the world and the system it operates under. The powers that be are just one system, one at attempt at organizing all the complexity in the world... and it's not doing so well. But it’s not the world. It’s just one system. And systems need updates.
You know how you update your phones and computers? Teams of people gather data from users about the glitches in the current operating system, and they create solutions. And that’s what the world needs from you now: a system update.
We need your ideas in order to improve. Collect your data and report on the glitches. As you move through this world, notice where the system helps humans or fails them. Use your practice of thinking critically, discussing with your community, and reporting, to process your data. Notice where the system helps you just be human or where it interrupts that natural flow.
Whether it’s a construction job, or a law internship, or a waitressing job, or the experience of calling your grandma once a week; whether it’s through dating someone or exploring your sexuality or your family history – whatever the vehicle – your thoughts and feelings add up to an important experience that can help update the system.
And it’s not just in working or productivity that your ideas are created – it’s in the downtime, the boredom; it's in the chilling, in the playing. It’s in the joy. Your joy matters. Your joy is your freedom, and that is what marks progress.
The more joy, for the more people, the more consistently – the more perfect the system is. So get that joy! Chase it, chase the love, the safety, the inspiration, the magical moments. Make the space to engage with these experiences authentically, and then share them – in whatever way you choose – with the world.
Remember: the world is the world. The power structures our world runs on is just one operating system that can be changed, improved and rebooted. And it’s going to be – no matter what, this extreme era of COVID-19 is going to change the way the world works. And your minds, experiences, and voices need to be a part of that. You have the freshest data, and the more you engage with your joy and reflect that back to the world, the better we'll all be for it.
The world is yours for the taking, and the system is yours for the changing. I cannot wait to see what y’all bring to it.
I literally love you. Be safe, be healthy, create and spread love, and congratulations on graduating in the craziest graduation time since graduating was invented.
See you out there, in the world.
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