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#8 Stanford Men Vied For Glory. She Didn t. Guess Who Won?

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Something surprising just happened at Stanford Law School. In this year’s graduating class, eight men and one woman vied to be this year’s commencement speaker. Each male tried to position himself as the rightful leader of the class. The female candidate never did so. And yet, when the 180-person graduating class was done voting, she won.

How did Marta Belcher pull it off? The story of how she outwitted her rivals would make a lovely logic puzzle. See if you can figure it out, based on the following hints.

Belcher has a deep interest in the way ideas get shared, developed and protected. Most recently, she’s been an intern at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. which champions file sharing, open-source software and free speech online. She’s held summer jobs at Apple and the Ropes Gray law firm, related to intellectual property issues.

Stanford Law School graduation 2007 (Photo credit: Eric Chan via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Belcher likes to make people feel included, even if their personal situations are perilous. Since 2008, she has been a leader of No Worries Now. a group that organizes high-school proms for teens with life-threatening illnesses. During her undergraduate days at the University of California, Berkeley, she spent a year as the campus newspaper’s etiquette columnist.

Still stumped? Or is the penny starting to drop?

If you’re thinking that Belcher prevailed by letting all 180 graduating students help write the commencement speech, you’ve cracked the puzzle. When graduates convene June 13, they will be treated to what is likely one of the very first crowd-sourced graduation speeches.

Belcher will provide a few opening remarks. After that, a WikiSpeech will ensue. Different ideas and phrases from at least half the graduating class will be braided into a commencement speech that reflects a bit of everyone’s story.