Honoring Lawrence Ferlinghetti at SF State's Commencement

This Friday (and Thursday too, actually) I got to watch my brother graduate from San Francisco State University. His degree is in English Education and I'm very proud of him, but, really, that's beside the point. The big commencement ceremony was held at AT&T Park on Friday evening and, being the shameless Giants fan that I am, I was mostly just excited to get to run around the park my baseball babes play at everyday. We (being my parents and I) arrived at 4 o'clock and made it through security to get inside where we were handed our programs. Of course I immediately started flipping through trying to find my brother's name in the long list of graduating students. However, I was very much distracted when only a few pages in I found this instead:

Hold on--Lawrence Ferlinghetti is gonna be here?? After giggling at the title of "literary lion" for a few moments, I started excitedly asking my dad if he thought Ferlinghetti would actually be there, because how awesome would that be? I would have the best blog post ever! We found our way to our seats, chatting about Ferlinghetti, and the other guest speakers, Gavin Newsom, and Annette Bening, and then got fully overwhelmed by the sheer amount of purple clad graduates entering the park (literally over an hour of two constant streams of people).
Unfortunately, Ferlinghetti couldn't make it, but I guess that's what happens when you're 96 years old and people ask you to sit in freezing cold ballparks for six hours. I did record the speech made about him and the video of him being given his honorary degree though, so I'll be including that below. (Which I'm pretty sure is against the incredibly long list of rules we were given about even thinking about stepping foot in AT&T Park.) Mostly, and this was the theme of the evening, they talk about how he embodies what SFSU stands for as a University: Diversity, Strength, and Subversion. Diversity was kind of the name of the name of the game that night. The honored students were all about giving back to the community, the speeches all focused a lot on how diverse San Francisco is as a city, and how the campus SFSU is something like the 13th most diverse campus in the world (fact check?). Gavin Newsom talked about how we don't just "tolerate our diversity, we celebrate it" (and I think that's a direct quote, but I wasn't writing anything down, so don't shoot me if I'm wrong). And Lawrence Ferlinghetti was celebrated for not only his poetry and his activism, but for his own diversity.

I thought this would be interesting for us all to see!
(If it isn't clear, San Francisco State honored Lawrence with an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts.)