Thank you so much, President Marcus-Newhall, both for that introduction and for having me here today. Many thanks as well to the Board of Trustees, the senior co-presidents, and of course, all of you, the Class of 2026, for allowing me to join you on this long-awaited day. It’s an honor to be here, and before I share a few words to congratulate you on this profound accomplishment, I want to acknowledge that we currently stand on unceded Tongva land.
I remember sitting exactly where you are today, all the way back in 2014. Well, mostly I remember being very, very hot, and also that I had scraped my car that morning when I went to get my hair done, and I felt really bad about it. So I was distracted, which made me nervous, which made me more distracted—was I feeling the weight of this day enough? Was I taking it all in, these last few hours of life as a Scripps student, surrounded by the people I loved most? Was I ready?
I certainly had no job lined up, and only the vague semblance of a plan – the dream of becoming a professional film and television writer, a career with no clear entry point or standard progression. I had rented a tiny apartment in Los Angeles with my now-wife and fellow Class of 2014 graduate, Emma Gavin, which we would later learn was cheap enough for us to afford because it was always approximately 120 degrees inside. Having spent the prior four years living in the old dorms, though, that was pretty familiar to me.
It felt a bit like we were stepping off the edge of a map, leaping into the great unknown. But we had two things going for us that’ve made all the difference in the world. We had a Scripps education, and we had our Scripps community. I remember being asked by a boss—after I had pitched an idea with arguably quite a lot of confidence for someone who was an assistant at the time—“Have you always been like this, or is this because you went to women’s college?” I proudly answered, “Both!”
And that’s true, partially because I’ve benefited my entire life from a Scripps education. My mother, Elizabeth McMorran Schetina, was a member of the graduating Class of 1983, so I was raised with the values Scripps had instilled in her—an unending commitment to lifelong learning, not for the sake of acing a test or getting a certain job, but simply for the sake of learning. The value of being curious and never, ever, assuming I knew more than someone else. When it was my turn to attend Scripps, I majored in English (on purpose) and minored in religious studies (on accident, I just kept signing up for classes because I found them so interesting). When people asked what exactly I intended to do with those degrees, I had no answer, but they’ve both been far more applicable to life than I could have imagined.
In my English classes, I learned the power and art of storytelling. Religious studies taught me to understand the different ways people have of organizing the world, and how to interrogate the weight of history and ritual on the present. I treasured the classes that gave me permission to see myself as a writer, especially Professor Novy’s Core I class Shakespeare and Hitchcock, where I first understood film as a text that could be read—thank you, Professor Novy. But the main thing I actually learned in the wide variety of courses I took—from Intro to Astronomy to Feminist Ethics—was the ability to think for myself. Not what to think, or the right way to go about thinking it, but how to do the laborious, often agonizing work of assessing that which I had thought to be true, seeing the holes and blind spots, and then having the courage to push myself further and form a new understanding. I learned to be uncomfortable, and that it was okay, and in fact necessary, to be uncomfortable. Discomfort creates the conditions that allow for growth.
The other thing I had going for me, as I faced my future on that hot day in 2014, was my community. Rebecca already spoke beautifully about the strength of the community you all have built in your four years here. I’m truly inspired by this class, especially the courageous way you’ve shown up for each other in organizing around the Motley closure. You have demonstrated a deep level of care not just for your peers, but for the world around you.
I already knew the power of the Scripps community before I arrived here. I used to come to reunions with my mom, trailing behind her and her friends as we walked through the rose garden, looking for their names on the Graffiti Wall. I was envious, eager for the day I would be a Scripps student. But I couldn’t have imagined the late-night study sessions I’d have with my friends in the browsing room, or the singular pleasure of meeting up every morning for breakfast before we went our separate ways to a day of classes. I didn’t know about blended drinks at the Motley, or Naked Brunch, or the powerful way I’d be changed by the organizations I joined, or, in the case of Scripps Advocates, had the honor of helping establish. And of course, the many, many people I would come to know here. As I mentioned, I met the woman who is now my wife on this campus, specifically in a hallway in Kimberley. Classic romantic meet-cute spot, I guess. I met the people who are, to this day, my best friends in Los Angeles. The realization that I could translate my passion for writing into a career in film and TV came not from a classroom or job counselor, but from one of my dear friends here, Aly Monroe. She’s also now a TV writer, and we remain each other’s biggest fans.
You are each other’s secret weapons. Hold each other, help each other, cheer for each other. These friendships will feel different when you’re not living in a one-mile radius of each other anymore, I won’t lie to you. You’ll have to be more intentional, and keep choosing to nourish the connections you built here. But you share a profound foundation. The days may look different, but that will never change.
I know just how hard you all worked to make it to this moment. I also know you’re ready for your next adventure. I think probably every commencement speaker for at least the past 30 years, or maybe just forever, has made a comment about how that year’s students are graduating into uncertain and unprecedented times, but… you certainly are graduating into uncertain and unprecedented times. I can’t promise what the next few years or even months will look like for you all. But I can tell you a little about what it’s been like out there for me as a Scripps graduate.
I am fortunate enough to be a storyteller by trade. It’s a great pleasure to do professionally what I used to do for fun in stolen time. A creative career is an interesting contradiction—you’re just as beholden to the machinations of capitalism and competition, even when the product you’re selling is your own artistic work, the result of blood, sweat, tears, and constantly delving into your own core wounds. No one will ever give you permission to do anything, nor will you ever feel ready to “be” a writer, or “be” a director. You simply have to wake up one day and do it. And when you’re rejected, or ignored, you wake up the next day and try it again. And trust me—you will be rejected. Like, a lot.
When I was first starting to write scripts, I kept this quotation from journalist Ira Glass on my laptop: “All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit… If you’re just starting out or you’re still in this phase… the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.”
Those words kept me going, and often still do when I’m doubting myself. Whether you’re in an artistic field or not, I urge you to keep doing and creating what you love, especially on the days when you doubt most your ability to do it well. The world will give you plenty of reasons not to believe in yourself. It’s up to you not to listen. Trust that you will get where you want to be.
I truly believe that storytelling, like all art, is a powerful tool for reorganizing the world. To be clear, this doesn’t mean I’m laboring under the delusion that a TV show about chefs in Chicago trying to save their fine dining establishment is changing the world. But I do believe storytelling has the capacity to change minds and hearts in a way that more direct, political approaches often cannot. Art can be a Trojan horse, an entertaining vessel secretly housing radical ideas. My commitment to organizing for social justice is inextricable from my love of storytelling. Both are exercises in collective humanity, an attempt to make people see others as equal partners in existence. Like organizing, writing requires two things of you: discomfort and empathy. A writer must live in perspectives and experiences that are not their own, and find the humanity inside them.
We exist in a time where empathy is increasingly devalued. Compassion is seen as weakness, sensitivity as a flaw. My work as an artist is to reject this, and to put on screen a world where empathy is prized above all else. Stories have the power to remind us of how deeply interconnected we are. To render experiences we have never had familiar, lives we have never lived as memory. Storytelling has the ability to create hope where previously there was none.
But storytelling can be weaponized. The powers that be will tell you stories about yourselves, about the world, about the way things have always been and therefore must always be. But you, with the strength of your Scripps education and community behind you, have the tools to resist those stories.
You do not have to believe that there isn’t enough for everyone—scarcity is a lie told to keep us from building coalitions. You do not have to believe that any human life is worth less than another. Reject dehumanization, whether it’s used to justify the deportation of your neighbors, or the genocide and occupation of the Palestinian people. You do not have to believe that the natural world is something to be exploited, or that the exploitation is so far gone already that fighting back is pointless. Choose to believe in the earth as something we can, and must, save.
And you do not have to accept the story being told by a few tech billionaires, the claim that generative AI is inevitable. You do not have to surrender to a technology that destroys our planet and perpetuates environmental racism. Like most industries, film and television are currently at an inflection point, balancing on an uncertain precipice as corporations imagine a world where human storytellers are replaced by automated ones. I reject this, not for the sake of my own employment, but for the sake of our collective humanity.
I encourage you all to join me in writing a different story, in your life and in your future jobs—one that sees friction as essential and humans as irreplaceable. Atrophying your mind in the name of convenience will never be worth it. You don’t need the algorithm to tell you which book to read or which movie to watch. Take the risk of reading something you may not like, or watching a movie that may not be all that good. In fact, if you’re going into a creative field, I can’t recommend enough consuming art you don’t always enjoy or agree with. You can learn a lot from watching a perfectly made film, but you’ll learn far more from watching one you don’t like and trying to understand why you don’t like it. Develop your own taste, your own perspective, reclaim your attention span. Not everything should be smooth and easy and automated. Embrace friction, because that’s where the sparks that make life interesting come from.
I hope you feel empowered by your time here to write your own stories. To decide for yourselves what is and isn’t true. Some intolerable stories have persisted too long, and hurt too many people. I believe you all have the power to disrupt those hegemonic narratives, and participate in the slow and painful, yet inevitable and essential work of writing a new world.
I leave you with one final request, in the form of a quotation from Toni Morrison, who I studied extensively here, and who has been a fundamental influence in my thinking and writing since I first encountered her work.
Morrison said, “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”
The doors of the world are open in front of you, class of 2026. Make sure you hold them open for others. Follow your heart, bet on yourselves, and bet on each other. Be kind. You will rise as a community, and the world needs you. Go out there and live in it.
Thank you, and truly, congratulations.