Jose Gonzales, a writer and English professor, returned to Three Rivers Community College — where he had taught for nearly 25 years — to deliver the 2017 commencement address. His speech was built around a single, powerful distinction: the choice between the language of hate and the language of love. He noted that this line appears in two literary classics, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, lending it the weight of generations of wisdom. In a time when hate speech had become common speech and political campaigns were built on pillars of hate, Gonzales urged the graduates to run from that language and choose love instead.