This Cal graduation ‘anticlimactic’
Grads gather around campus same as always, until they don face masks
BERKELEY >> Saturday almost looked like a typical graduation day at Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus. Students donned caps, gowns and stoles over dresses, suits and ties. They struck an endless series of poses for photographers, be they professional or parental. They shared some final fun moments with roommates and friends as their time as college students wound down.
But then the graduates slipped their face masks back on between photo shoots and greeted their friends with air hugs. It was clear the celebratory norms members of the Class of 2020 dreamed of at the beginning of their senior year would not happen. Storefronts
on Telegraph Avenue were barricaded and Memorial Stadium, where commencement was supposed to take place, was closed and quiet.
“It just feels anticlimactic,” said Jenna Sylvia, who graduated with a degree in media studies and communications, as she took a break from snapping photos in front of the Campanile with roommates she has had since freshman year.
“These last two months were probably going to be the most exciting, happiest months of our lives,” said Mavis Warner, one of those roommates. “We were going to do a bunch of things; we were going to graduate with all of our friends.”
“I thought my hair was going to get done,” Sylvia said wryly.
Instead, because of the coronavirus pandemic, those plans are all off the table. The extended family members that were supposed to be in Berkeley cheering from the stands were staying home. The friends would spend much of their graduation day packing up their apartment.
UC Berkeley’s newly minted alumni are joining college and high school graduates everywhere in shifting their plans now that their in-person commencement ceremonies have been canceled or postponed.
On Friday evening, dozens of graduates, their loved ones and professors posed in front of webcams for a “group photo” to capture the Zoom-based commencement ceremony at the Mills College School of Education.
San Jose State is building commencement websites for each of its schools and departments, and will create slides recognizing each graduate. Members of the class of 2020 will be invited to do the traditional graduation walk across the stage at “a future live ceremony,” the university said.
Stanford University has said it will hold a virtual graduation ceremony next month.
As for Cal, its virtual commencement took place on a custom-built online campus: Blockley University, a project of more than 100 students and alumni who painstakingly recreated the UC Berkeley campus in the video game Minecraft.
Along with landmarks such as Memorial Stadium and Sproul Plaza, the campus includes smaller details Cal students will recognize, like the falcon chicks nesting atop the Campanile and the wheeled food delivery robots that normally zip around campus.
More than 10,000 viewers watched a livestream Saturday afternoon of a graduation ceremony inside Blockley’s version of Memorial Stadium, complete with speeches and a stage on the field full of Minecraft’s cubist renderings of campus officials.
Chancellor Carol Christ began her charge by welcoming the “remarkable and resilient graduating Class of 2020,” which had gathered in front of her as avatars.
“If you could transport yourself back in time just three months,” Christ said, “I do not think you could have imagined that you would celebrate this day at home; perhaps in your pajamas instead of your cap and gown, watching body avatars float across a computer screen.”
As they navigated through the pandemic, Christ called upon the graduates to cultivate “courage, ingenuity, patience, resilience, grace and gratitude.”
Back at the real Memorial Stadium, graduate John Rider said he felt “mostly happy and mostly relieved” as he posed for photos with his parents and sisters outside the stadium where he cheered on the Golden Bears. A typical Cal “slacker,” Rider has deferred admission to Harvard Law School so he can first get his master’s degree from the London School of Economics.
There was something fitting about this atypical graduation, Rider said. After all, much of Cal’s Class of 2020 arrived on campus during the tumultuous fall of 2016, and from there navigated violent campus protests, wildfires, smoke and power shutoffs, before ending with the coronavirus.
“This is the last little dose of Cal chaos,” Rider said.