DeFrantz brought her speech to a fiery conclusion by challenging the graduates to resist passive consumption of information. She pointed to the concentration of media ownership, the fact that journalists increasingly interview one another rather than seeking independent sources, and the relentless barrage of commercial claims masquerading as truth. Her challenge was rooted in her own experience standing up to power. In 1980, when the U.S. government decided to boycott the Moscow Olympics to protest Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, DeFrantz — who had spent four years training for a gold medal — took the government to court. She lost the legal battle but won something more important: the knowledge that athletes had taken a stand for their beliefs. That same spirit of refusing to be a puppet, she told the graduates, was what their education had prepared them for.