Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak was expelled from the school where he just delivered his commencement speech—’be leaders, not followers’

Sunny Nagpaul
Sat, May 11, 2024

Dana Jacobs/Getty Images


Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak was in high school the first time he left his home state of California. He was boarding a flight to Boulder to check out the University of Colorado campus with some friends.

The electronics prodigy had designed his first computer at age 13, and by the time he applied to colleges, he was a candidate for several of the country’s top technology schools. But that first night in Boulder changed things for him. He saw snow for the first time and fell in love with the beauty and “freshness” of the school.

Wozniak recalled the one year he spent at the school, from 1968 to 1969, in his Thursday commencement speech to the University of Colorado Boulder’s class of 2024. He described going to his first concert (Simon and Garfunkel), and showing his fellow Apple cofounder Steve Jobs his favorite Bob Dylan records. Still, when “I look at my yearbook from that year,” he told students, it “shows a lot of soldiers on this campus with assault rifles during the Vietnam War protests.”

In his speech, Wozniak affirmed the importance of intellectual freedom through his own experiences as one of the country’s most influential leaders of electronic innovation, citing the institutional and bureaucratic pushback on his own technological creations, and the military presence that had taken over the campus. Today, as more than 80 college encampments across the country protest the U.S.’s financial support of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, Wozniak’s perspective comes at a time many are calling to protect academic freedom.

After Wozniak visited Boulder for the first time, he said in the speech, “I told my parents I would only apply to this one school, none of the others.” They told him they only had enough money to afford one year of out-of-state tuition at the school, but told him to follow his heart. That freedom he experienced, he said, became invaluable advice to him.

“My parents let me follow my heart,” he said, “So I was careful to be that way with my own children; their choice is the most important.”

It wasn’t always smooth sailing, though. Institutional pushback was prevalent in the computer labs he studied at.

“Instead of being praised here for some really good scientific programs I wrote, with the one huge massive computer down in the basement, I was demeaned because I ran my class five times over budget,” he said. “I didn’t realize it boiled down to money and bureaucracy and that kind of stuff.”

To be fair, Wozniak was expelled from the school after his first year for hacking into the school’s network and sending prank messages. Still, he faced resistance even while developing innovative computer programs “at a time when there were no books on the subject,” he said.

He made a decision: “I knew computers by heart. I decided I wanted a computer of my own that I could decide what to do with it.”

The goal for that computer, he said, was to “help other human beings do more with their lives than they could do without a computer, and not to rely on million-dollar mainframes that companies and universities could afford.”

That dream was soon realized. In 1976, Wozniak built out the first versions of Apple’s personal computers, and the following year, the company released the Apple II, one of the earliest personal computers available to the general public, which was met with huge commercial success. In 1985, Wozniak left his role at Apple to find an engineering role that didn’t also involve running a fast-growing business, selling much of his Apple stock upon his departure, according to Business Insider.

Since then, Wozniak has leaned into the country’s education system, spending eight years teaching fifth grade. He presented the graduating class with some advice he has collected from all of that experience: “You grow up in education to be leaders, not followers. Think for yourself and decide what’s right and wrong.”

Today, as the country faces some of the biggest student protests since those that emerged during the Vietnam War, his words of advice have taken on deeper meaning. According to a tally by the Associated Press, since April 18 there have been at least 38 incidents of arrests made at campus protests across the country, with more than 1,600 people arrested at 30 schools.

College campuses have been engulfed by student dissent following the brutal Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Southern Israel, which killed over 1,200 people, and Israel’s response, a catastrophic military campaign which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, now entering its seventh month. Along with demands for divestment and financial transparency, protesting students also aim to show solidarity with millions of Palestinian civilians facing calamitous levels of disaster, including famine, disease outbreaks, and a children’s crisis, in which at least a thousand children have lost limbs and over 19,000 children have been orphaned because of indiscriminate bombing in the war.

At Columbia University, for example, over 200 people were arrested in two police raids that occurred on April 18 and April 30, the latter of which, coincidentally, is the same day 700 students were arrested for protesting the divisive Vietnam War and Columbia’s expansion into Harlem more than 50 years ago.

Archon Fung, a professor of political science at Harvard, told Fortune there are important parallels between the protests, especially in terms of how university administrations respond to acts of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience “has an important place in democracy,” Fung said, adding, “civil disobedience is, by definition, breaking the rules.”

For college students who will soon leave the walls of their campus to become the next generation of leaders, bosses, and entrepreneurs, Wozniak offers a modern twist on some old-school advice: “you all have AI–actual intelligence.”

“Pay your own success forward,” he implored students, “and keep teaching and mentoring others.”