Why Wozniak Got Cheered and Schmidt Got Booed

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Class of 2026 graduating and the workplace that they would be attempting to enter. I joked that every valedictorian and commencement speaker would inevitably make some comment about artificial intelligence. That wasn’t supposed to be a futurist prediction, just a mere quip.

Little did I know how real and how fast that would become a reality. And the curveball it would throw.

AI has become the unavoidable topic in boardrooms, classrooms, hospitals, law firms, marketing departments, and, apparently, football stadiums full of graduates in caps and gowns. It was only a matter of time before the commencement circuit caught up.

What I did not predict was the audience reaction.

A few days after my essay on the graduating class of 2026, I started receiving notifications from news outlets and seeing clips on social media. Headlines about commencement speakers being booed by graduates for talking about AI, technology, and the future of work.

At first, I assumed it was one isolated moment. A single speaker who misread the room. Then I saw another. And another. Some of the names were people I respect. So I clicked.

I wanted to know what they said.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed at the University of Arizona after comparing artificial intelligence to past technological revolutions, much like the computer or the smartphone before it. When the noise grew louder, he tried to acknowledge it directly. "I know what many of you are feeling. I can hear you. There is a fear" (NBC News, 2026). The boos continued.

Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Development Company, the real estate firm behind Lake Nona and other large-scale Florida developments, was booed at the University of Central Florida on May 8 after calling AI "the next industrial revolution." She stopped mid-speech and asked, "What happened?" When she pivoted to "only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives," the audience cheered (Orlando Weekly, 2026).

Scott Borchetta, the founder of Big Machine Records and the man who once signed Taylor Swift, was booed at Middle Tennessee State University. His response to the crowd was unmistakable. "Deal with it. Like I said, it's a tool…make it work for you." (Futurism, 2026). The boos got louder. He got double booed.

At Glendale Community College, an AI-powered name reader mispronounced or skipped graduates' names during the ceremony itself. The crowd booed the machine. The school later apologized (Business Insider, 2026). 

The last one resonated personally. Last year, I hosted an annual conference with a forward-looking, future-inspired set design. The stage was adorned with a starry-night backdrop and lightsaber-style lighting, which, when I walked in for the first time, I joked, it unintentionally looked like Star Wars. To continue the theme, we used an AI emcee and announcer who appeared as illuminated sound-wave projections mapped onto the backdrop. It worked beautifully…most of the time. We had run the AI recordings by humans in advance. But even with all that preparation, a human narrator still matters. Some moments are not meant to be automated.

Then there was Jonathan Haidt at NYU.

Haidt was not booed because he was an AI evangelist or because he was talking about opportunity amid the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence. Quite the opposite. He has spent years telling young people to put down their phones, telling parents to delay smartphones, and telling universities that the technology they handed to children is breaking them. He is the author of The Anxious Generation, which argues that phone-based childhood has reshaped young people's mental health, social development, and resilience. When NYU President Linda Mills welcomed him to the stage at Yankee Stadium on May 14, the booing began before he had spoken a single word. Allegedly, nearly three dozen students walked out (Washington Square News, 2026).

In other words, not every boo was about AI.

Some were about the speaker. Some were about what the speaker represented. Some were about technology. Some were about institutional decisions. Some were about fear. Some were about fatigue.

But all of them revealed something.

I want to be careful here. I am not arguing that booing should be prohibited. 

Students have the freedom to boo. They have the freedom to disagree. They have the freedom to express displeasure, just as commencement speakers have the freedom to share their ideas, predictions, and perspectives. Free speech does not belong only to the person holding the microphone.

But freedom and wisdom are separate. Freedom of speech does not mean that all speech is respectful.

Personally, I would have never dreamed of booing a commencement speaker or any speaker for that matter. Maybe that is my personal upbringing or my perspective as a professional speaker myself. Interestingly, the commencement speaker at my own undergraduate graduation had been involved in controversy himself around the time he took our stage. He was a national figure. Yet, no one was disrespectful to him, despite everything that surrounded him at the time. Some absolutely disagreed with the choice, but none of my fellow graduates or my friends and family in attendance disrupted the day.

I can remember several crowd chants that made headlines, including a presidential insult mistaken for cheering on some guy named Brandon. So, I wanted to dig into the background behind booing a bit. 

Booing itself is ancient. Roman audiences shouted down playwrights they did not like. Elizabethan crowds clapped, hissed, and threw fruit at the stage (Folger Shakespeare Library, 2018). Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, the ballet now considered one of the most important works of the twentieth century, was booed so loudly at its Paris premiere in 1913 that the dancers reportedly could not hear the orchestra. Gustav Mahler, the legendary Austrian composer whose symphonies still anchor concert halls today, reportedly sent two musicians into the audience in 1899 to remove the loudest hecklers from one of his own performances (HowlRound, 2018). For most of theatrical history, audiences were noisy participants, not silent spectators.

This all changed in 1876, when a German composer named Richard Wagner opened a new opera house in Bavaria and enforced silence and darkness during performances. He dimmed the auditorium, hid the orchestra in a recessed pit beneath the stage, and demanded full attention from the audience (Bayreuth Festival, 2025). Britain's Theatres Regulation Act of 1843 had already curbed the catcalling that defined Georgian theater (The Spectator, 2022). By the late nineteenth century, the polite, attentive audience we now consider standard was largely a Victorian invention.

So booing is not new. What is newer is where and how frequently it is happening.

Booing at sports events is expected. Booing at political rallies is common. Booing at the opera is, in some traditions, almost ceremonial (which I did not know until researching this). But commencement is different.

Commencement is not a comedy club. It is not a town hall. It is not a sporting event. It is not the comment section.

Commencement is a ritual, a rite of passage, a celebration.

It is the moment when years of work, late nights, family sacrifice, anxiety, and aspiration are gathered into one ceremony. It is not just about the person speaking. It is about the graduate walking. The parent crying. The grandparent watching. The faculty member remembering. The sibling wondering if college might one day be for them.

Booing at commencement feels different because it breaks more than a speech.

It breaks the ritual.

The Class of 2026 entered college the same semester that ChatGPT became a household name. They graduate into a world where the technology many of them were warned not to use in school is now being presented as the tool they must master to remain employable. For years, students were told AI was cheating. Now they are being told AI is opportunity.

That is a lot of whiplash.

The data behind their unease is real. A Pew Research Center survey found that half of U.S. adults feel more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, while just 10% feel more excited than concerned (Pew Research Center, 2025). A 2026 Gallup study found that employed Gen Zers are more than three times as likely to say the risks of AI in the workforce outweigh the benefits, 48% to 15%. Excitement about AI among Gen Z dropped 14 percentage points in a single year. Anger rose nine points (Gallup, 2026).

The job market itself has been volatile. The National Association of Colleges and Employers initially projected just a 1.6% increase in hiring for the Class of 2026, calling the market uncertain. By April, that projection had been revised upward to 5.6% (NACE, 2026). The market improved on paper. The mood did not.

Not every speaker who talked about AI was booed.

At Grand Valley State University, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak received cheers when he reframed the conversation entirely. "You all have AI," he told the graduates. "Actual intelligence" (RealClearPolitics, 2026). He went on to describe his entire career as one long attempt to imitate the brain, then noted that engineers had already figured out how to make one. "Takes nine months."

The audience laughed. They cheered.

He was not denying technological change. He was simply centering the human being before the machine. He reminded graduates that their minds, their creativity, and their judgment still mattered.

That is not just better messaging. It is better leadership.

There is a difference between saying, "AI is coming, deal with it," and saying, "You are entering a changed world, and your humanity still matters." 

The Class of 2026 was not allergic to the future. They were allergic to being told the future had already been decided for them.

The lesson here is not to avoid difficult topics. We should not stop talking about AI because students may not like it. We should not stop inviting challenging voices because someone may object. We should not build commencement ceremonies, or any ceremonies, out of bubble wrap and caution signs. 

A few weeks ago, I joked that every commencement speaker would mention AI. I was right.

But I missed the more important prediction. The future would not just be spoken from the stage, it would answer back from the seats.