The Room Told Him Everything He Needed to Know

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, 71, took the stage at the University of Arizona's commencement on Saturday, May 16. He never really got control of the room.

According to NBC News, the boos started before Schmidt even opened his mouth. They got louder when he mentioned AI. They never fully stopped.

The booing reflected two separate controversies. Most coverage has focused on only one of them.

The AI Angle — And Why Students Aren't Wrong to Be Angry

Schmidt told graduates, "You will help shape artificial intelligence." The crowd's response was immediate and loud, according to TechCrunch.

He pushed through it. "You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on."

That last line is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a guy whose generation built the rocket and handed the bill to everyone else.

To his credit, Schmidt acknowledged the anxiety directly. According to Business Insider, he said fears "that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create" were "rational."

But calling something rational and then telling people to get on the rocket ship anyway isn't a solution — it's a shrug with better branding.

Gallup polling backs up why students aren't in a listening mood. According to TechCrunch, only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it's a good time to find a job locally in recent polling — down from 75% in 2022. That is a catastrophic collapse in economic confidence in four years.

Not all of that is AI's fault. But AI is the face on the problem right now.

The Story Most Outlets Are Burying

Schmidt wasn't just getting booed for AI optimism. According to AOL News, multiple left-wing and feminist student groups distributed flyers at Saturday night's commencement detailing allegations made by Michelle Ritter, 32 — Schmidt's former girlfriend and business partner. Those groups urged students to turn their backs and boo when Schmidt appeared on stage.

Ritter filed a lawsuit in November alleging Schmidt "forcibly raped" her on a yacht off the coast of Mexico in 2021. She also alleged non-consensual sex during the 2023 Burning Man festival, and claimed Schmidt used a backdoor to Google's servers — built with company engineers — to surveil her electronic devices, according to AOL.

Schmidt denies all of it.

In March, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge sent the case to arbitration, according to AOL. Judge Michael Small ruled that a 2022 federal law intended to end forced arbitration of sexual assault claims didn't apply because Ritter had signed a financial settlement and arbitration agreement with Schmidt in December 2024.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Getting Wrong

Left-leaning outlets like The Verge are framing this almost entirely as a Silicon Valley tone-deafness story — billionaire cheers AI, students boo, lesson learned. That framing is real but incomplete.

The sexual assault allegations against Schmidt are serious, specific, and legally active. They were a direct cause of the protest inside that auditorium. Treating them as a footnote to an AI discourse story underestimates their role in what happened Saturday night.

At the same time, some coverage is leading with the assault allegations in ways that fold the AI reaction into the personal scandal, which also misses the point. These are two distinct and legitimate reasons students were angry. Both deserve straight reporting.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spoke at Carnegie Mellon's commencement recently and got zero audible pushback on AI, according to TechCrunch. Schmidt brought specific baggage into that stadium.

The UCF Incident Is Also Real and Separate

This isn't isolated to Schmidt. Last week, Gloria Caulfield — an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company — declared "the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution" at the University of Central Florida's commencement. The crowd booed her too, according to TechCrunch.

Caulfield had no sexual assault allegations. She just said AI out loud to a room full of people entering a brutal job market.

AI anxiety among young Americans is real and spreading — independent of who's delivering the message.

What This Means for Regular People

Two things are true at once. First: a generation entering the workforce has legitimate, data-backed reasons to be angry about AI eating entry-level jobs. Telling them to "get on the rocket ship" from a yacht in Davos is not a policy response.

Second: Schmidt showed up to give a speech at a major university while facing active rape allegations, and the university invited him anyway. University of Arizona spokesperson Mitch Zak told NBC News Schmidt was chosen for his "extraordinary leadership." Extraordinary leadership of what, exactly, and at whose expense — that's a question the university still hasn't answered.

Both things deserved boos. Both things got them.